Meanderings: July 6, 2000

Thursday,
July 6, 2000

What I did on my Spring Break.

Heh. I made the papers again.

Well, okay, no, I wasn't the main story. But I was in two of the pictures, so that's all right.

Remember back in May when I said I was officiating at the pagan wedding of my friends Anna and Andy? Well, it turned out that Anna had had a long, detailed chat with a reporter for the Croydon Advertiser some months before, and said reporter had promised to send a photographer to the wedding for an article.

And by God, the photographer showed up. He spent a couple of hours snapping pictures and quaffing honey mead with the rest of the guests, and the results, along with a very nice story, was published a week later in the Advertiser. Anna just sent me a copy of the full-page article, titled "THOUST MAY KISSETH THE BRIDE, ROBIN!" Apart from the writer's apparent unfamiliarity with grammar rules for using the old-fashioned second person singular, it's a nice piece about how Anna and Andy decided to skip a conventional marriage ceremony for a "pagan medieval ceremony conducted by a priestess deep in the woods."

Cor, I'm a priestess. Fancy that.

The article goes on to describe the woodland ceremony and how the happy couple managed to "gently badger" more than half the guests to discard their wedding suits and don less conventional wedding outfits, including flower fairies, a Merlin getup and an appropriately dastardly Blackadder (worn by Anna's boss, who kept calling her up ask how he would be able to go to the toilet in tights). Lyndon, as the official wedding photographer, stalked around in his Dread Pirate Roberts outfit while I wore the garb and circlet you see in the pictures (Dianic garb courtesy of Evans and some creative needlework).

What you don't see are my decidedly unmedieval Doc Martens under the gown. Hey, getting to the wedding grove meant going through a field, climbing a small hill, tromping along an extremely muddy forest road and crossing another field -- I wasn't about to wear velvet slippers. The Practical Priestess says: anachronisms are good when they help you stand up throughout the day.

And now the happy couple are coming over here for a visit next weekend. Just in time, too -- we finally got all the wedding pictures developed, and I'm putting them into some custom-decorated albums as our present. If we ever decide to go with a blessing for our 10th anniversary, I think I'd like to do something like this -- of course, talking Pestilence (aka the Rev. Richard Reade, close family friend and the only vicar I know who preaches from Pink Floyd lyrics) into a pair of tights may be something of a challenge.

TOP