This weekend was a very special weekend. Phil’s sister Roz – my sister-in-law – was getting married! Phil travelled downon Wednesday night to help set up. I stayed in Colchester for a couple of nights and then headed down on Friday morning.
I will spare you most of the details but suffice it to say that Friday was mostly spent preparing the barn for the wedding reception. I set up and tested the PA system I bought a while back, and that was working beautifully (more on that later).
In the evening we (as in me, Phil, Phil’s parents, and Roz) went to dinner with Matt’s parents and family, which was a really nice evening! Then on Saturday morning it was all go. I gave Phil and Roz a lift to the hairdresser to have their hair done fairly early morning, and after that headed back to the flat to prepare. Phil and I headed off mid-morning to the church (the wedding was at noon). Phil was playing Roz up the aisle on piano – Handel’s Largo from Xerxes (which is the same piece of music that we had 🙂 She did a really good job, although was shaking like a leaf afterwards!
The service itself was lovely – Darius, who was leading the service, did a really good job and had a very nice manner. Matt did once make a mistake in his vows, saying ‘lawfully wedded husband’ rather than ‘wife’, which caused much amusement! But it went without a hitch. Phil and I were playing piano and clarinet together during the signing of the register, which seemed go down fairly well too. We just played a couple of nice arrangements of hymns I have.
Then, after the service, it was time for the reception. That, again, was a really lovely time – lots of catching up with friends and family we haven’t seen in a while! I’m getting to know some of Phil’s family better now so it was good to see them again. The meal was a BBQ, unusual for a wedding but absolutely perfect! Delicious food provided by the caterers (Total Hospitality, I think). Then, we had the disco. I was DJing, and I think it went down well. There weren’t many people on the dancefloor for the first hour or so – mainly because the weather outside was so nice I think people wanted to stay outside! But once it turned to dusk people came inside and the dancefloor filled up pretty quickly.
I have to say on the subject of the PA system… it was more than up to the task. It managed to fill the dancefloor without even breaking a sweat (or whatever the sound system equivalent is). I had the gain on the amplifier turned up to about half-way, and the volume control on the mixer set to about half way, and that was pretty darn loud. So I was happy!
So. Let me quickly wrap up the rest of the weekend. After Matt and Roz had left, we cleared up the barn and finally got back to bed around 1AM. On Sunday morning we drove back to Phil’s parents’ to have lunch, and then headed back home. That wasn’t the end of the weekend, though! When we got back in, we had just enough time to dump our stuff before heading out to Anne-Marie and Sarah’s. Long story short – they had been moving house all weekend, and they needed to get all of their stuff out of the old house and generally clean it up by the end of the day. Most stuff was done, but it still took the four of us until about 10:30PM to clean up and pack everything into the car (over several trips). Anyway, it was a pretty stressful time for all of us but they are eventually settled into their new house! I went round this evening to set up the TV (more on that some other time, perhaps, for reasons which will become apparently should I ever decide to write about it…) and the house was looking much more like a home and less like a dumping zone for bags of stuff.
Right, that’s pretty much it for the time being. That was our weekend! Many congratulations to Matt and Roz, and also best wishes to A-M and Sarah for the new house 🙂
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