My good friend Ste got married on the weekend of 13th/14th August. Ste is a Nottinghamian and we and our mutual friends P and H shared the same local pubs for a good few years before I moved away. Not to be confused with an Old Nottinghamian-- we did not go to the same school and in fact the "long term drinking associate" relationship pretty much covers it. I drove up from Winchester straight after work on the Friday night, bringing with me a 1TiB hard disk drive containing all my worldly possessions in electronic form. I have another near-identical drive which I keep permanently at my parents' house as an offsite backup. I only have three hundred gibibytes of stuff but at 1MiB per second that equals 300,000 seconds to perform a full synchronisation operation, or three and a half days, which meant I didn't have time to complete much of the transfer before going home on the Sunday. Still, the important personal stuff was moved in plenty of time.

Ste, P, H and some other less frequently-seen associates, Dave and Rich, all seemed to be in robust health although Ste was naturally stressed, arising from having the bulk of his wife-to-be's family staying in his house. He himself, an outdoorsy hill-walking type, had pitched a tent in the back garden. The local pub where we eventually met, the Longbow, had apparently gone through a fistful of owners since I last arrived. Despite this, it's still an almost intolerable drinking atmosphere. This is a pub whose front room is full of (1) old men (and us, old-for-our-age jaded twenty-somethings) and (2) flat-screen televisions showing appalling day-glo pop music videos on a really worryingly short loop. I can't even concentrate with that kind of stuff flashing and making noise in my peripheral vision. There are two back rooms, one of them had a disco going on. In time we escaped to the other, which was almost completely empty (and silent, once I found the off-switch for the A/V projector) and contained a pool table, a dart board and a single dart.

P, H, Dave, H's brother (also called Dave) and I rendezvoused at H's house the following morning for a fried breakfast and to get changed before toddling down to the church. I've never been inside St. Mary's before despite walking past it a million times on the way to and from town. It's not as big inside as it looks. The bride wore blue and looked wonderful although we didn't exchange one word on the day. (Is white out of fashion? Also, do weddings have fashion? Isn't a wedding the one time you want a "classic" look?) The priest claimed God had invented marriage, a social construct which I thought pretty much predated the wheel, let alone organised religion. One of Ste's kids, who is now old enough to rush around, rushed around, with a lady pursuing her helplessly. Confetti was flung ("Not on the lawn, please!" - I think St. Mary's has a lot of weddings), bells were rung. Only knowing a few people, most of whom had been invited to the reception ("drinking buddy", reasonably, didn't rank high enough), I hung around for a while after the ceremony, and then walked home for lunch, intending to rejoin the festivities for the evening celebrations. I was given a lift out that evening by Tom and Carly. Carly is pregnant and frets about her whale-like appearance, failing to understand the enormous difference in proportions and appearance between a woman who has a baby under construction and one who is merely overweight. Conveniently, Carly was driving. A pregnant lady with a Civic is always a valued asset at social functions.

Carly and Tom are engaged (the engagement long precedes the pregnancy and the marriage will probably not happen for a long while afterwards). Rich, meanwhile, has got married since I last saw him-- to a lady whom I hadn't previously met or heard of, named Carlie. When P told me this on the phone I was very surprised indeed.

The rest can be guessed, a lot of booze and buffet were hoovered up. There had been plans to watch The A-Team at the cinema on the Sunday but they fell through-- there was no good time for all of us that day, besides which it wasn't getting great reviews. My car didn't break down on the way home, which is notable as this was the first major road journey for me since I got stranded in Witney a few months ago.

It was a good couple of days. The Nottinghamians are a good bunch of people. Even if we are collectively growing dangerously mature and stable.