
I can't help but feel I'm getting on a bit when friends' weddings start to become a normal part of life. In fact, the number of people on my Facebook list who I knew in school and are now having children is quite shocking. This weekend, it was the wedding of one of Whitney's work friends, and despite being one of the most irrelevant people to attend, I was the driver for the journey of 60 miles or so up to New Hampshire. The wedding was held in the Anselm College Abbey church, or something like that, which was quite magnificent, but its walls couldn't keep the oppressive humidity and heat of the day out, and it was stifling in there. Fortunately, the happy couple had had the foresight to provide little orders of service in the form of substantial card booklets - during each pause in the service, the ambient noise of the entire congregation flapping them in their faces in unison came to the surface like the Rolf Harris Wobbleboard Orchestra. Despite having spent years of Sundays in the Church of Scotland, I had never had more of a feeling that I hadn't read the instructions before doing something - the orders of service also came in slightly handy for knowing that whatever was happening at the front was called, for example, the Sacrament of the Eucharist - a title that you can only get away with if you're in the church or Symphony X. But it didn't really explain what was happening beyond that - and on seeing a reading from Tobit mentioned I had to ask who on earth he was, because his book was apparently only in the Bible: Director's Cut. I really had no idea how different services in different segments of the church were to the ones that I grew up with - there were meant to be places where the congregation responded to the minister, but I couldn't make anything out of the sort of mumbling drone. I thought that I'd found something familiar when the Lord's Prayer came up, but the last line I knew of was left off. And there was a psalm quite early on where the soloist spread her arms in an effort to encourage the congregation to sing with her, but being too Catholic and miserable, nobody did. Mostly I kept myself amused by staring at the ceiling and noting the quite obvious Triforce placed in the centre of the roof above the altar (though you can't quite see the required connections between the panes in that photo above) - eventually it finished and everybody stumbled outside to the reception, food, and air conditioning. On the drive back, everything was going very well and we were making good time, right up until we were nearly home and I missed our freeway exit (and concensus is that I was to blame very little - the exit we were taking had absolutely no light on it at all and you can't even see where you're meant to be turning off until you're right on top of it). Having only Google Maps directions, once you stray from the path you're pretty much lost, and I took the next exit instead, confident that I could just follow the signs back to the freeway and make another attempt, or join up with where we had meant to be very quickly. A couple of minutes later, we were in the middle of the Blair Witch Project. I said before my visit to Virginia that I hadn't seen any rural parts of America, but they're out there and they leap on you very suddenly. Instead of the built up area that I was expecting, we found ourselves on a lonely road around a reservoir, getting thinner and thinner with the woods gradually closing in, and it eventually became a one-way path that dumped us out in absolutely nowhere. This is another difference in countries that I was quick to bemoan - in Scotland, even in the most desolate and lonely places, there will be road signs at each junction telling you where the nearest civilization is. Here, by comparison, the road signs are microscopic and unhelpfully only tell you you're on Old Mill Road. Eventually we found ourselves in a place called Lincoln, and after parking at the station I got out to find some living souls to point us in the right direction. I quickly found an open cafe, where a very nice and very French man went and got his sat-nav out to give us directions back to a main road and signs of life. After a tiny bit more guesswork, we finally recognized the supermarket down the road from our house, and there was much rejoicing, thanking Christ and everybody else involved with the creation of the Bible (even Tobit). Since our own wedding, Whitney has had a compulsion to compare every other one we attend to our own, always fearing that somebody else's is going to be better. This was never in any danger of that. Most people barely even survived it. 2010-07-25 09:35:00 10 comments |