It was a good day, in the end, and I’m glad it’s over now. Even with only a week or so of fussing around, it still got quite stressful – I simply cannot understand why people have long engagements and women talk about arranging their weddings as if it was an opportunity to broker world peace, or holiday in Paris for a month.
There were many temptations to expand the programme – talk of new dresses and hats and celebrants and music and flowers and so on. But we managed to quash almost all of them.
We did get a cake. A friend made us a very impressive chocolate layer cake – made with no less than one and a half blocks of Whittaker’s Dark Ghana and a whole lot more love than Eve’s Pantry could have mustered up. Unfortunately we never got a chance to serve the cake to our guests on the day - there were some logistical challenges!
The earliest in time I could get a booking for the ceremony at the Registry Office was 2:30 pm. Which meant that we had 3 hours to fill between the end of the ceremony at 3, and the dinner reservation at 6. The wedding party consisted of:
· Bride and Groom (30 somethings)
· Grooms Parents (late 70s)
· Mother of the Bride (50)
· Teenage Goons (14, x2)
The Groom’s Fathe is not all that mobile - he uses a walker - which ruled out any demanding physical activities. Mother of the Bride has no sense of direction and doesn't know Auckland roads, but was required to drive... And the Teenage Goons were professionally bored, but surprisingly well-behaved and helpful - we put them in charge of cameras. Which, pretty much everybody’s camera batteries had run out by the time we got to the ceremony (see earlier reference re Naughty MoB – did we really need to take 500 photos of everyone waiting to be called into the ceremony room, or video footage of us all getting into the lift?), so we really put them in charge of cell phones.
We decided that we would take everyone up to the top of North Head for a picnic of champagne and wedding cake, and some photos with guns and tunnels. Of course, our optimism got the better of us, and the weather was really not that conducive to a picnic. Plus, even though we drove up as far as we could, it was still going to be too much of an off-road walk for Martin’s parents to get to the gun emplacements. We did all pile out and get some photos at the top of the hill, though.
The registry office is truly not the world’s most romantic wedding venue – though there were some things about it that I really liked. Like, the picture of the Queen on the wall in the ceremony room. And the charming young woman who was our allocated celebrant. And the fact that it was all over in about 10 minutes.
We went for dinner at a Japanese restaurant in Ponsonby called Soto. It was expensive, but beautiful food. I don’t have any pictures of their food, but they have images on the website which if you click through you will get the idea:
Gene who is on a somewhat restricted diet because of his stroke medication worked methodically and determinedly through a crayfish, and I ordered a massive pile of sashimi which was wonderful.
And then finally all that was left to do was to try and get everybody home. It didn’t quite go without a hitch – I confidently drove mother and the boys to the WRONG hotel. Then Mum accidentally backed into a pole and put a little ding in the bumper of her new car (not serious, hardly noticeable). And at 3 am I got a txt from the security guard at Selwyn Retirement Village telling me that she had found my wallet in the carpark. I hadn’t even realised I’d dropped it... But no harm done!
So – as I mentioned earlier – it was a good day, and I’m glad it’s over!
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