2006-09-13
The wedding was fine –Emma looked beautiful and very much in love. The groom and best man speeches were funny, and my brother in law Richard was suitably emotional in describing his pride in his daughter and got through it without seeming too nervous. Unfortunately it rained at the time when the photos could have been taken in the churchyard. While people ran for their cars and put umbrellas up in the porchway we were trapped inside the church for a while waiting to get out. One of the local ladies came by (attending to flowers or something – certainly not one of the bell-ringers). We asked how old the church is (the village seems to be all Tudor, houses built around 1580).‘Oh – well of course it had to be partially rebuilt after the fire’
‘When was the fire?’ – thinking she mean something during the war perhaps.
‘1470. There are some parts left from before then: twelfth century…’
Which just goes to show something that happened 536 years ago is still spoken of recent in that part of the country.
Of course, not really knowing the happy couple we didn’t really know very many people at the reception. I encountered a few friends of my sister Amanda who I haven’t seen for a long time, and then there was Richard’s odd sister and family. The children who I think of as being three and five turned out to be eighteen and twenty so time flies doesn’t it?
We’d hired a people carrier seven seater for the weekend. It felt like driving a bus to me. He five of us plus my ageing parents crammed ourselves and luggage in and drove around the countryside. It was quite fun to drive except for the automatic gearbox which had me reached for an invisible handbrake and gear stick all the time, and pushing a clutch in that turned out to be the footbrake causing an emergency stop type manoeuvre every few yards out of Gatwick’s car park.
We stayed with Michael and Kate. He didn’t seem too bad and we talked about the depression and the therapy he’s been going through. He had finally resolved that he was going to get some help from drugs from his doctor and went on the Monday after we left. The dosage seems ridiculously low to start with but when I spoke to Kate on Sunday this week she said he’d had five good days in a row and they hoped he has turned the corner.
It’s probably not unusual but he seems to be fixating on sleep as the problem (maybe not surprising given that he has a new baby in the house). I remember wit Lynne there was a series of things she latched onto as possible solutions – ‘I’ll be alright if…’ violin, piano, car. In the end that episode ended when she was pregnant, as though the shift in hormones had had a beneficial effect. Michael seems terrified of the idea of not being able to sleep and inevitably that just makes it harder for him to drop off. The more he worries about not sleeping the less likely he is to do so.
Unfortunately on Sunday morning before we left for Amanda’s house for a family get-together the smoke detector in Michael’s house started sounding. We stopped it, it went again. And so on for a couple of hours, by the end of which he’d worked himself up into a state about having to solve the problem. Eventually it seemed to be cured but he never relaxed before we left and you could see he was going to be facing a fretful night.
Every time I go back to Kent part of me thinks I belong there. It’s warmer, it’s greener, the accents are ones I can almost relate to. But the traffic is appalling, the roads are too narrow, the summer is too humid, and let’s face it I would hate working in London.