dolorosa_12 | Dancing in the forest's heart

There was no customary Sunday Dreamwidth post from me this week, but thankfully that was for a very fun and delightful reason: I spent a good chunk of the weekend away in rural Suffolk, celebrating a wedding. The occasion was the marriage of

lowercasename, one of my oldest and dearest friends, to his (now) wife

hazlett92. I've known him for nearly 20 years, since he was a gangly teenager and I was a miserable twentysomething, and we both formed part of the weird, wonderful and precious community of a Philip Pullman fan forum message board. I've talked in the past about how (due to the utter indiscretion with which everyone on that forum treated their personally identifying information) we realised that not only were we the only two Australians there, but that we also lived around the corner from each other, had attended/were attending all the same schools, and were friends with various overlapping sets of siblings of different ages. I migrated to the UK for my studies, he did the same several years later, and both of us ended up finding love and choosing to build our lives here.

The wedding itself was lovely: tucked away in a former priory at the heart of a forest; other than the sound of conversation and music, the place was full of silent stillness, peaceful and serene. Both bride and groom have loads of creative and talented friends, which resulted in excellent speeches (both as part of the ceremony, and over the reception dinner), and poetry, music and singing as part of the evening's entertainment (including a hilarious dual recital by

lowercasename and his best person about their experiences attempting to cook in their share house kitchen when they were undergrads in Canberra), and the whole day just felt filled with love and sunshine (both literal and metaphorical).

Sadly, due to the timing of the event (a Sunday after school holidays had ended),

bethanwy_ and I were the only representatives of our group of Pullman forum friends, but we made up for it in sheer enthusiastic celebration: she, Matthias and I were the only people who danced without pause for the entire duration of the band's performance (over three hours), a feat which was praised by the bride, the groom, the groom's mother, and the band itself. (My attitude towards dancing at weddings: where else will you find such a perfect compilation of cheesy and danceable music, and, most importantly, spending the night dancing means you do not have to spend the night making awkward small talk with strangers, which is a win-win situation all around.)

The whole thing was simply wonderful, and I feel saturated in love, light, and the calm, green, stillness of trees.