So what else can I tell you about the wedding itself?
Well… both my sister and her newly acquired husband are fairly unconventional people. I mean, not in the sense of having extra limbs or anything, but in the sense of having a healthy taste for personal expressions that go slightly against the norm. Just little things, like having the church brightly festooned with balloons instead of flowers, or producing an order of service that had more in common with a Broadway show programme than a church bulletin, or carrying bouquets decorated with motifs ranging from horseshoes to daleks.
One convention that my sister was absolutely determined to eschew was the cliché of arriving late to the wedding. She was absolutely insistent that the wedding would start on time, and her well documented ability to get not only her own, but everyone else’s acts together when it was needed left us in no doubt that she could do it.
The groom and his associates were all in kilts. I really don’t know what would possess a Scotsman, let alone four Australians, to wear a kilt. But they did. Apparently my sister went to a great deal of effort to clandestinely arrange for the groom’s kilt to be made of the tartan appropriate to his clan, which had previously been declared unavailable. That was pretty cool. But they were still four guys in skirts.
When the bridesmaids arrived, twenty minutes late (didn’t matter too much, I just kept playing increasingly obscure variations on the Theme from Voyager), they were all dressed differently, with a dress style and colour that suited them, but each with the same kind of shawly scarfey thing made of … lamb’s wool? I don’t know. It was fluffy looking.
The bride wore a white dress.
There were the usual prayers and a sermon from the relatively young minister, who was new at doing weddings and appeared to be several times more nervous than the bride and groom. There was a reading from John's gospel, and then a bit from the writings of C.S. Lewis, all about what real love looks like. That was actually pretty awesome.
I don’t know much about Battlestar Galactica. That means I can’t really tell you why ending the congregational affirmation of the vows with a resounding “and so say we all” was awesome. But I’m assured it was, and I’m prepared to take the bridal party’s word for it just this once.
The primary objective accomplished, we adjourned to my aunt and uncle’s house, where we posed for a quadrillion photographs with every combination of family, extended family, distant relations and… who the hell is that guy? Fortunately being only in the family and not the wedding party itself, we were soon released to return home for a breather while the official party took off to take a quadrillion more photos at various spots around Adelaide which, while boring and snooty, is quite pretty in places.
The reception was at a … actually I don’t know what it was. It’s called Utopia. I think it’s a winery, or some sort of society gathering point in the foothills. It was a drinks and finger food affair, with a few very low key speeches, before the groom had some nice mulled wine and a pretty girl gave him a hat made out of a tree.
And before we knew it, they were off into the night, in a vintage car bound for a flight to New Zealand, leaving at least one party guest thinking to himself
“Holy crap my sister is married.”
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