the wedding, part two

See here for part one.

Wednesday, September 1st

It is the wedding day! I wake about seven, the light in my room is pale and milky. I worry that outside it will be pouring with rain. But when I pull back the curtains, bright, golden sunshine spills in. The sky is blue. It is perfect!!

I do some yoga. I have breakfast with my parents, who then walk up the road to the florists to get the flowers which will make up my bouquet, bridesmaids bouquets and buttonholes later. I bounce around. “I’m getting married to Tom today!” I keep saying. Phone keeps beeping with texts and emails, I read every one – they make me smile and wish there was some magical way of getting all these special people over to London.

Hair and makeup starts.

While the whole beautifying process has been going on, Dad has, proudly, been on the 360 bus to Wholefoods Kensington and brought back a spread for lunch – fresh fruit, smoked salmon, ciabatta breads, avocado hummous. There is champagne, and coffee. Everyone makes sure I eat something! Although I try to eat daintily (very unlike me, I always get something on myself!) to avoid ruining the makeup! Mum helps me put on my earrings – pear drops from Mimco that she and Dad bought for me. They are beautiful and I love them!

Then it's time to get dressed! Mum helps me. I put on my dress first, and then step into the petticoat that I had made – with six days to go! I step into my shoes. Mum makes a few adjustments to the cleavage. She opens the doors and I walk out!

Tah dah!

Kristy has made my bouquet from about a dozen of the roses. We tie it together with ribbon Mum and I bought from Liberty, and a ribbon from the bouquet from my friend’s wedding in Italy that I caught last year. Doubly lucky for the girl who catches it today!

We pose for photographs in our courtyard, amongst my scraggly pot plants and the washing! I ring my sisters on Skype, each one in turn, and talk to them for a few minutes. There are a few tears. The only thing I would change about the day would have been to have the three of them there. It just wasn’t the same without them.

My sister Claire showing me her bump, which became my nephew Oliver three weeks later!! :)

But Sheena snapped away, with me oblivious, and I’m happy that I have a picture with each of my sisters on my wedding day (although they were all about to go to bed – one had the flu too!)

Then we locked up the house and went across the street to my hairdresser again for the final finishing touches. We added two roses to my hair, and finished with some shine spray. Then it was time to go!

We walked down the road towards the tube station, thinking we’d just hail two cabs, as there were six of us. Originally I’d thought we’d just grab the Number 2 bus to Marylebone, but my family thought that was a silly idea!! We had been standing on that curb for no more than 5 seconds, when a cab came around the corner. Not just any London cab. A MAXI cab, that had enough room for all of us in it! You never see maxi taxis ready to hail, just like that! It was as if it had been waiting for us.

And so we travelled along in the mid afternoon sunshine through central London, laughing, chatting, and with me feeling a bit nervous but more happy and excited than nervous, I’d say! Sheena snapped photos, I was looking around at parts of London I don’t normally see during the day, and then before I knew it we were through Marble Arch and on Baker Street heading up towards the Town Hall! We stopped at a traffic light and looked to the left. There was the Hall, and there was my groom outside!!

I was very happy now!!

The taxi pulled up outside. I got out of the cab last, and there was Tom on the pavement, waiting. I will never forget the way he looked at me.

Kristy fixed Tom’s buttonhole, and his best man Ed’s, and then we all went inside together.

All the guests, including the bridal party and our parents, went into the Blue Marriage Room where the ceremony was going to take place, and Tom and I went into a little interview room on our own where we waited for the registrar. We just held hands and talked softly and laughed and Tom made jokes about wanting to kiss me but he knew he shouldn’t just yet!

We waited for quite a while and were both starting to get a bit nervous, wondering whether there had been some kind of glitch and we weren’t going to be able to get married after all! I was starting to panic there had been some problem with my paperwork (even though I’d sorted all that out months prior – the things the brain does to you when you’re nervous!) but then the registrar burst into the room, full of laughs and smiles, and interviewed us briefly to make sure we weren’t still married to other people or under any kind of duress!

We had to state our names, ages, addresses, father’s names and father’s occupations – this all goes on the marriage certificate, handwritten by the registrar with a beautiful fountain pen. It did feel like we were in another age. The main reason we chose Marylebone Town Hall to be married in was because Paul and Linda McCartney were married there, and we are huge Beatles fans and loved the connection. Finally, we were given the go ahead to come in to the marriage room and begin. We stood outside, one hand clutching my bouquet, the other clutching Tom’s.

We walked into the room, and my eyes swam as I looked around, I barely registered who was there, and everyone clapped as we came in together. The room was beautiful, full of fresh flowers (including, my bridesmaids noticed, kangaroo paw, which I thought was a gorgeous touch). The ceremony began. My left leg started trembling and wouldn’t stop!

The ceremony was very brief. We started with a welcome and a few declarations Tom and I had to make publicly, the “I will’s” and then our wonderful friend Ivy read a passage from the novel Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières:

Love is a temporary madness.

It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides.

And when it subsides you have to make a decision.

You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together

that it is inconceivable that you should ever part.

Because this is what love is.

Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement,

it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion.

That is just being in love which any of us can convince ourselves we are.

Love itself is what is left over

when being in love has burned away,

and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.

Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground,

and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches

we found that we were one tree and not two.

She read it so beautifully.

Then the moment had come for us to say the vows we had come up with ourselves! Gulp!

I went first. I had been writing my vows, or a version of them, for months, a la Kel Knight – “idea for wedding vow” had been a draft document on my computer for ages. But the night before the wedding, alone in our bed, with all the things I wanted to say swirling in my head, everything became clear and I reached for a pen and paper and just wrote a few lines, which I ended up saying almost word for word.

There was so much I wanted to say. How do you tell the person who made you believe in love again how much they mean to you? The person you want to give all of yourself to, because you know your heart and your secrets and the dark parts that you don’t like, are safe with them? How do you tell them that they make you want to be a better person, to live life so fully and to only do good with yourself, as that is what they do? In the end, all I could really say to him, as I choked out the words, was that before I met him, I had no idea what love was.

Apparently, everyone was crying during my little speech! For myself, I struggled to keep my tears in, and the only way they wouldn’t fall was by squeezing his hands and looking deep into his eyes, never straying from them, watching his face soften, and break into a grin when I made a joke, feeling his hands grip mine harder as my voice wavered slightly, and watching his eyes brim with tears as I spoke the last few words.

“How am I going to follow that?!” were Tom’s first words when it was his turn!

I don’t remember a lot of what Tom said. Everything was a happy, joyful blur. Then we had to say another funny vow that sounded like it was out of a Jane Austen novel (you aren’t legally married until you say it!) and then we exchanged the rings, which slipped on easily, as if they had always been there.

“Congratulations, you are now husband and wife!” said the registrar. This is the look on our faces when she said that:

And then we were married!

We signed the registry, with David Bowie’s “The Wedding Song” playing in the background. My Dad got my attention at some point and pointed to the back row. Sitting there, grinning back at me, were my uncle and aunt from Canberra who had flown over as a surprise! I was gobsmacked!

Finally we were presented with the marriage certificate. “In this country,” said the registrar with a smile, “the certificate is given to the woman.” And so I held it, in my hot little hand. I felt it was fitting. Being handed that envelope was the moment where I thought, this really is a new start.

And then we had lots of hugs and congratulations from our friends and family who were gathered there – we had maybe 20 people there, tops. It was all we wanted.

Eventually we came outside and were showered with confetti, posed for pictures in the sun, and all the buses and cars and taxis that passed the Town Hall hooted their horns at us as they passed and yelled “congratulations!” from their wound down windows. Once we’d had enough of pictures, we hailed a cab which drove us the 15 minutes up the road into North London to our reception.

I have only been to perhaps one wedding where the food blew me away, and you all know how much I like my food(!), so it was important that the food at our wedding was delicious, plentiful and stuff we liked. The Hill had an extensive vegetarian canape menu, so we ordered enough of everything, plus bowls of handcut chunky chips with homemade salsas and dips, and bountiful cheese platters with fruit and bread and crackers. The canapes were artichoke and roast tomato crostini, quesadillas with homemade guacamole, haloumi and felafel skewers with a spicy mayonnaise, and brie and mushroom pastries. Everyone raved about the food, it was absolutely stunning.

We had bellinis and Australian sparkling wine to greet everyone on arrival, and then there were a selection of white wine, red wine, various soft drinks and beer to get everyone through the evening. I really enjoyed the white wine. Tom and I had a few sneaky G&T’s as well!

We had some wonderful speeches, my Dad made everyone laugh with his particular brand of Aussie humour. There was a very moving moment when he read a speech that my sister Liz had written, that she would have read herself had she been able to be there.

A little while later we cut the cake and fed pieces to each other, and managed to get around the party to talk to everyone – it never seemed long enough, and because it was a Wednesday night most people weren’t making it a late one. I threw my bouquet, and my friend Kat caught it!!

Finally we hopped into a cab to take us to Mayfair for the night.

Then, it was just us.

So, that was our wedding day. Perfect in every way, and an absolute joy from beginning to end. But you know what? Being married to your best friend is even better :)

Lots of love, Mrs S xoxo

All pictures in this post, except the last one (self portrait) are by our brilliant photographer Sheena.