Weon

For those of you that have read any of this site before, you may know or know of Pete. If you aren't sure who he is, these are his hairy nipples. He's a decent chap and I consider myself fortunate to call him my friend (despite his love of golf). As I mentioned ages ago, he got engaged to the lovely Helen. Well, time has passed and this weekend they became Mr and Mrs Jones.

The dress code wasn't quite as crazy as the last wedding Anne and I attended in Scottish Land but with it being held at the Queen's Hotel in the 'Nam, there were certain standards which meant I had to dust off my suit for the second time in twelve months!

The ceremony, being a civil affair, was short and sweet despite the attempt to pad it out by having some second-rate twit do a reading. It also still seems odd to me to be at a wedding with no singing. Anyway, I digress. It was an excellent ceremony with equal measures of laughter and solemnity (most of which was in the right places). It was topped off by Mr and Mrs Jones leaving the room to the strains of Especially For You by Kylie and Jason.

Then the drinking began. The champagne flowed and we made the most of it. Raj, who hadn't eaten for all of 1.5 hours, started on his infamous liquid diet. Oh, I finally met the mysterious Louise who is actually not mysterious at all, just a lovely girl!

Raj is actually standing on several boxes in that photo - it was the only way we could get him in the same frame as Pete's forehead.

It was good to meet up with the chaps from Pete's stag weekend again (I just realised I never wrote about that - probably a good thing). It turned out that a lot of us were sat on the same table and so a good time was had by all. The wedding stationery was all designed by the guys that Pete works with and had a Love Hearts theme. One of the funniest things about this was the fact that many of the placecards used people's nicknames rather than their actual names. Raj, for some reason, has attracted many, many nicknames over the time we have known him and they were all on the one card, making it about a foot long. I also had the rather amusing situation of the girl I was sat next to (not my wife) asking me how she should pronounce my name.

After the cutting of the cake came the speeches. Highlights included Helen's Dad coining the phrase "I'm not losing a daughter, I'm gaining a helpdesk", Pete's rather risqué comments about his father-in-law's two-by-four and Boz telling us of some of Mr Jones' university exploits. All the proceedings were overseen by the toastmaster for the day, Howard Jones (for those that can't remember, his big breakthough was New Song - no, I don't remember it either). Helen's Uncle John/Pete was so drunk that he slept through the lot but was a source of great amusment to all, especially when he didn't even notice that the table he was napping on had collapsed.

The evening saw many more friends arrive and there was much dancing and drinking. In fact, I danced so much (and so badly) that I ached the next day. I had a couple of lovely chats with people I hadn't seen for a while and spent a bit of time avoiding Tiggs' flailing arms on the dancefloor.

It was a great day and Pete and Helen looked so happy all day. At the risk of getting all warm and slushy, they really do go well together. I'm sure they are having a lovely time right now, sunning themselves in the Maldives.

For more pics, check out the gallery.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 13th, 2006 at 4:44 pm and is filed under Friends/Family. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.