I had quite a good run of updating this journal with interesting material (at least, it was to me) last week, but recently I've either been too stressed or too busy to write anything coherent. We've been staying in New York since Thursday for the wedding of a family friend of Whitney's, and as any sort of organization gets exponentially harder depending on the number of people that you're going around with, things have been... a little mad. And loud, mostly.

After getting to our rather nice hotel suite (the others wouldn't have given it that description, but I think all hotels are rather nice because my reference hotels are the ones where I was put in a basement in London) we fell asleep almost instantly. Then got up far too soon, met up with Whitney's family in their (slightly smaller!) room*, and spent an enthralling day wandering around the close heat of New York. And if America is a strange and frightening place in general, New York seems to be a concentration of both of those features. The first thing that you notice when you arrive there is the people - not just that there are so many of them, but that absolutely no members of the enormous crowd will make any effort to move aside for anyone else at all and movement through the subway and streets becomes an exercise in bouncing off each other in a sort of Brownian motion arrangement. It's only on average that you're ever heading in any particular direction. And I also find it incredibly claustrophobic because of the sheer height of most of it - you won't get any sun unless it's directly overhead, and I only ever felt we were really outside when we reached a wider street where we weren't completely in the shadow of the overhead buildings.

The wedding was only the second I'd been to since my own wedding, and was an experience in itself. For reasons best known to people who aren't me, the accommodation had been arranged in the state of New York but the actual wedding was taking place in New Jersey - apparently because there are no suitable hotels that are actually nearer. So we were transported to our destination by my most loathed of all forms of transport, a bus. It started off badly by ingeniously going to the Marriott hotel in the wrong town at first, but after that as buses go it wasn't the worst. It wasn't a Megabus.

The actual event took place in the grounds of an extremely drapey beige building designed specifically as a wedding venue, with chairs with sheets over them that looked like they were dressed up as ghosts for Halloween. We all slowly cooked in our seats around a drapey archway while the ceremony was read out in contest with an extremely loud nearby lawnmower. I didn't hear any of it, instead listening to Whitney and her mother compare wedding details to our own.

After the couple had left the gardens to the tune of Vivaldi's "Spring" played on a synthesizer bought in the early 80s from Strong Bad, we moved down to the building for drinks and ors deo horse doovers ordurves appetizers. Generous as it was, the only problem with the meal is that we were expected to eat far too much (or, from my point of view, far too much three times over) - even though it was spread over the rest of the afternoon, having an appetizer buffet followed by a salad course, sorbet pallet-cleanser, main course, dessert and wedding cake meant that the cleaners were probably picking bits of people that had popped out of the chandeliers for ages afterwards. Whitney and I were sat next to (and I assure you this is not prejudice against his race in general - I am only forced to call him this through my experience with him and that I can't spell his awfully long Middle Eastern name) Annoying Iranian Man, who kept on making comments about the Scots and how I didn't look or sound like Sean Connery. Whitney's brothers were disappointed that it didn't end with a duel on the dancefloor.

The band were a definite highlight, though. The mulleted keyboard player was the most enthusiastic I've ever encountered, and after introducing the wedding party like a daytime quiz show host he was able to play his parts with one hand while leaning around to talk to someone over his shoulder half the time. There were three singers who took it in turns, and the standout one was a bald man in glasses who started off with a rather dull rendition of Unchained Melody before suddenly turning into Michael Kiske at the end and hitting notes at least one octave higher than any human vocal apparatus was meant to reach. The fact that he tragically looked exactly like Adrian Edmondson didn't diminish this at all.

After getting back I declared a work emergency and did the things that had come up while I was away on Thursday and Friday, while some other people went out to a local bar (the father of the bride only under some duress from Whitney's dad). After venturing out myself for ten minutes, avoiding McDonalds and finding a fairly harmless corner pizza place for dinner, they came back and I fell asleep almost instantly while Whitney watched one of her Real Life Hyper Death Slasher Mystery programmes (I can't remember the exact title).

Some other things might have happened, but honestly, who cares. At least, as much as I've grown to dislike any sort of travel over the last couple of years, the majority of the journey there and back was quite comfortable. Feeling generous to ourselves, we had gone for business class train tickets, which don't get you into that different a carriage from the plebs, but the seats are a little wider and you have more legroom. And free non-alcoholic drinks. I'd been hoping for wireless internet, as well, but they're just starting to experiment with that on trains here and it wasn't on ours. Instead I searched on my person for alternative entertainment, but I only found a Machspeed motherboard manual that I'd forgotten to take out of my jacket. I read it anyway.

The whole experience has been so exhausting that our bedtime has come all the way back to 11pm, and we couldn't face the T after coming back so we just fell asleep in a taxi. Excuse me while I collapse into bed.