Marriages

Well, as you possibly expected, we didn’t crash and we got home safely. I was glad we went. The bride’s mum and I have been friends since she came to my school in 1960 – which seems a fairly long time ago, even to me. We were best friends all through school and university, and then she went south to teacher training college in London, to be with her then fiancé, later (though not for long) husband. She then remarried. The wedding was of the daughter of the second marriage.

It was a slightly unusual wedding. Both the bride and the groom are born-again Christians, so there was a lot of amplified guitar playing and much waving of hands in the air. The young couple were very pleased with each other, which was sweet. Their minister-type-person isn’t actually allowed to marry people, so they were married in a civil ceremony the day before and this service was really a blessing, I suppose, though it was conducted like a marriage. Or sort of. The minister chap – oh dear, how to write this without sounding really unkind? – was perhaps more of an enthusiast than an intellectual. His thoughts weren’t always expressed entirely grammatically. For example, they did the bit about vowing to love each other “till death do us part”, and he was later trying to refer to this. He said that they had “promised to love each other till…” and then you could see him trying to work it out – and then he plumped for “… till death do they part”. Hmm. Not quite.

My husband and I aren’t always perfect either, and spent quite a lot of Saturday getting lost in the wilds of the Somerset or Gloucestershire countryside. We hired a car at the airport and decided that we just had time before the wedding to drive to our Bed and Breakfast, which for some unaccountable reason we had booked from the list supplied in the wedding invitation even though it was in the middle of nowhere. Our actual reasoning had been that it wasn’t far from the reception venue. The trouble was that it was really quite a long way from the church. We got slightly lost on the way from the airport to the B and B, which meant that we were then a bit pressed for time. And Husband wasn’t taking the situation all that calmly.

The next part of the journey featured quite a lot of one-car-width country lanes with hardly any passing places and with high hedges on either side so that you had no idea where you were – except that it certainly didn’t look in reality like it looked on the map. At one point I persuaded my beloved that we should stop at a cottage and ask directions, and that helped till we got stuck going up a hill behind a tractor pulling a trailer full of stones which fell gently off the back and bounced down the road towards us.

Still, we made it to the church with quarter of an hour to spare and we’re still married.

Since then it’s been a rather frantic week with hardly any blog-reading time. We spent Sunday seeing the sights of Bristol and didn’t get home till late. Then on Mondays I have a full six hours teaching, followed this week by a meeting at the church in the evening. I teach till 9 pm on Tuesdays and then last night I took Daughter 1 to the supermarket. Tonight has featured a visit to my parents and now I must do some preparation for my “girlies” class tomorrow: 23 rather raucous school leavers who think they want to work with children. They are on the whole the 23 people you would least want to leave your children with, and I get them from 12.15 to 1.15 on a Friday, a time when their natural disinclination to do English is exacerbated by their need for their lunch. And I'm a bit the same. Still, the thing to do is to keep them busy with reasonably simple, but fairly time-consuming tasks. A couple of hours of preparation this evening ought to produce about an hour’s worth of things for them to do. Or fifty minutes’-worth, anyway.

Not saying there will necessarily be much educational value in it, but you can’t have everything.