This weekend we took a trip up to Newcastle upon Tyne. Andy's cousin Neil (the only unmarried Helsby left in our family) finally married his longtime girlfriend Susie.
The wedding was a civil ceremony. Prior to this, I had never been to one. It was really different. First of all, there was just something hugely missing (i.e. God!! but they don't believe in God, so He would still have been missing even if mentioned in the ceremony!) and secondly, the ceremony only lasted about 15 minutes!!
It was really nice, and very quick! They seemed happy-- Neil especially. Susie I think was maybe a bit stressed, but she loosened up later on.
I had a wonderful time entertaining the lovely little girl who sat in front of us during the ceremony (and also before-- Susie was a wee bit late!). Her name was Grace, and she was so cute. At one point she dropped one of her sandals (which had velcro straps-- both a good idea and a bad one, a good one because they would be easy to put on and teach her how to put her own shoes on, but a bad one in that I'm sure it didn't take her long at all to learn how to take them off!!) anyhow-- she dropped her sandal and I picked it up. She then spent the next half hour or so handing me her shoes one at a time around the side and top of her chair, and then asking for them back. Then I got an introduction to her dollie ("See?") and her teddy bear "See? Teddy!") and her pink bear purse ("See? Bag!"). She had wonderful Shirley Temple curls which she had obviously inherited from her Mummy. I'll try and upload the pic Andy took when he gets the pics on the PC.
The wedding "breakfast" was really nice-- though nothing like any breakfast I've ever had! We had a normal delicious chicken dinner with veg, started by a really nice fresh summer fruit plate (would have loved to share that with Basil!!) and followed by a really nice apple flan dessert. (p.s. what's up with Gwenyth Paltrow naming her daughter Apple????)
The speeches were pretty interesting, especially the Father of the Bride's one-- he told a long joke/story about being in the RAF service for his 2 years' national service and about "chuff" numbers-- which is individual to each soldier-- it's the result of dividing the number of days you've served by the number of days you have left to serve. i.e. if you have only been there 1 day, and you have 730 (or 731 with a leap year!) your chuff number would be 0.0013698630136986301
and if you had served 365 days, then your chuff number would be 1, and if you were on your last day, your chuff number would be 730 divided by 0, which is infinity-- so you were infinitely chuffed!
The absolutely heartbreaking fact about this joke/story is that I laughed my buns off at the punchline, and when I retold it to my mother on the phone today (and taking into consideration that a joke is never as funny as when you hear it the first time when you are trying to retell it to someone else!) she didn't get it.
Not at all.
And for a good minute and a half I didn't know why.
And then it hit me.
She doesn't know what chuffed means.
Ah!
So even after explaining what chuffed means, it wasn't funny to her.
:(
So either I'm really English now, or just really horrible at re-telling a joke!
(to be continued)
Posted by kristen at June 6, 2004 9:11 PM