- I was a total mess the night before. We went out to the pub when we arrived in the North East and could barely string two words together. That’s when friends come in very handy indeed. Normal. Silly. Calm.
- I nearly cried on five different occasions during the day: once through nerves (before), and the other four times through sheer overwhelming happiness.
- I spent the the last two hours before my wedding buying lego for a nine year old. This meant I had to hurry getting ready.
- My curling iron ran out of gas just before it was needed. This meant I had straight hair. No-one noticed.
- We pulled up to the registry office in a Brown Ale cab. This was not planned.
- We walked into the registry room together, hand in hand, to Holly Cole’s cover of Tom Waits’ I Want You. Walking in and seeing all the people we love there, smiling and happy for us, and knowing that we were doing something really fucking brilliant and totally, utterly right, was just the most fantastic moment of my life so far.
- No-one sniggered at my full name. This was a surprise.
- I have absolutely no recollection of anyone else being in the room when we actually made our vows - though I’m reliably informed that there were at least forty there, plus the registrar.
- I carried gorgeously-fragranced cream and red fresias, picked out from the flower market that morning. That’s how laid back we were about the flowers.
- I wore a vintage black beaded dress, with a red wrap during the ceremony, and a black velvet coat with a red corsage in between venues.
- Old: the ribbon holding my flowers was from my brother’s wedding ceremony order-of-service
- New: wrap (and other clothes)
- Borrowed: red beaded handbag, from the lovely L
- Blue: antique blue brooch from my lovely sister, to fasten the wrap.
- It rained. Fourteen people told me it was good luck. I think they thought I was worried. I really wasn’t.
- My face ached from smiling so much, and I developed new wrinkles from grinning.
- We had photos taken by the swing bridge, with a backdrop of the Tyne and Millennium bridges. Bridges were a bit of a theme running through - the place where we had the drinks reception was next to one of the bridges, the place we had dinner was next to another, and holds the original engineer’s photographs from the building of the Tyne bridge as a permanent collection. The place where we went for drinks and further carousing was next to another bridge. Plus, bridges connect people, and that’s what we were doing - making connections in a city of bridges. People commented on the appropriateness of it, and my mum wrote us a special poem.
- Dinner was divine. Wine glasses the size of a baby’s head, and carrot cake to die for.
- For a wedding without any official speeches planned, we had a lot of speeches (though none of them official, and all very relaxed). I counted at least a dozen.
- About halfway through the evening, I suddenly got very tired. All that adrenalin.
- Later, in the pub, I didn’t want it to end.
- We wandered back to the hotel from the Quayside after midnight, hand in hand and still in our posh togs, while Newcastle celebrated around us. It was only when we got back to the hotel room that I noticed that my feet were killing me. Up until that point, I had been floating.
- The morning after, I woke up laughing. Actually giggling. I’d been dreaming about the wedding, and I laughed out loud, waking Paul (and myself) up.
- We lay around for ages, hungover and happy, going “do you remember…?” and “that bit where….” and “did you see…?” and playing it over, detail by detail in our collective memory. Then we had a massive breakfast of grease and pastries with our family.
- The morning after, on the way to our minimoon, sitting in the car while P dashed into the supermarket to get something, I put on the CD of Holly Cole singing I Want You and bawled my eyes out.
- We spent a wonderfully relaxing few days in North Yorkshire, exploring hidden dales in our new little red car.
- Coming back to our little London flat and being married is somehow weirder than being married somewhere we’d never been before.
- Being married is cool.
- I wish I could do it all again. It was fantastic. Beyond words and expectations.
- Tomorrow (Friday) I turn thirty, and we get to celebrate a bit more.
