Lunch (like Brideshead) Revisited

Yesterday was the first full day with my sister, mom, and step-dad over at our place. Sunday was pretty nearly a full day since they got into the airport around 6:30 in the morning, but yesterday involved all sorts of fun and family and fittings.

Once we'd had breakfast and got on our way, sardined into the Clio, we were up in Oxford for a few hours of punting before lunch and then a drive down to East Hagbourne to introduce the parents. If you've never been punting before, it's loads of fun...especially if A) you're not the one pushing the punt, or B) you actually know what you're supposed to do when pushing the punt.

Sebastian took the first and longest turn manoeuvring us along the river. Needless to say, when we turned around and I took my own turn, it was nowhere as easy as he'd made it look. I weaved back and forth like a very slow drunk driver...or in this case a very slow drunken gondolier. The family all took it in their turns to laugh at me as I crashed our punt into tree after tree. Of course, Mom's laughter stopped when it was her turn. Everyone else's laughter was soon to increase.

There was a pub - the Victoria Arms - that had a small mooring so people could tie up their punts and come to have a drink or something to eat. We decided we'd give the place a try since it was so conveniently on our way back. Mom steered us quite well to within reach of the bank and Sebastian tiptoed his way to the back of the punt to help her get off so he could wrangle the punt around into a good position to tie it up. This was a bad idea.

Mom got one foot on the bank, when - like a scene from every slapstick comedy - the punt began drifting away from the bank. The shouts raised in crescendo as Mom slid down into a very impressive, but nonetheless, very unnatural split. Sebastian, feet in the punt, grabbed at the bank and attempted to pull us closer to avoid the inevitable. It was to no avail. He was stretched out, parallel to the water's surface, when Momma fell in. I scrambled to pull the punt back to the bank to get Sebastian in so that we could grab hold and pull Mom back into the punt. Dripping wet, but otherwise unscathed, we got the two of them on the bank and removed ourselves from our ponderous transport.

The pub was a miss, so after drinks and a trip to the ladies' room to wring all the water we could out of Mom's jeans, it was off to Nando's for lunch before scarpering off to East Hagbourne, some relaxing drinks in the garden, and bridesmaids' dress fittings. We put Mom's clothes through the tumble dryer and were off to visit Elaine, worker of miracles, sewer of dresses.

By this point, I must admit, my recent propensity to migraines and increased motion sickness had been getting the best of me. Nevertheless, and despite my high tolerance for both pain and medication, it was a grave mistake to accept the oxycotin from my step-dad. Sitting in Elaine's sewing room in Wallingford the only phrase I could think of to describe myself was out of Dumas: "[her] head vacillating like some tipsy satyr from a Rubens." I apparently - to keep up the literary idiom - grew pale apace, and looked like I'd need a fainting couch, in true Victorian fashion, at any minute. For the rest of Victoria's fitting, and part of Rachel and Felicity's I gave incongruously coherent opinions and observations from my ailing supine position on one of the dress shop's couches.

It was the car drive back to my in-laws' that was murder. By the time we'd pulled into the drive, I was hovering over the precipice of having to watch my lunch in rewind, and it wasn't a pleasant feeling. Thankfully for the neighbours, their bushes were spared, and - false alarm over - I lay on the couch while the rest of the family made introductions and entertaining conversation in the garden. After dinner, we got to listen to my brother-in-law Robin sing the piece we're planning to have him do at the wedding - Offenbach's Barcarole. It was absolutely beautiful and we got the best example ever of a captive audience when Gunnar asked him to sing "Some Enchanted Evening" from South Pacific. He smiled such a big smile, and occasionally mouthed along with the lyrics, his hand conducting Robin along goodnaturedly the whole time. It was such a good time having the whole family packed into the living room to listen to Robin sing and generally discuss the wedding and get to know each other.

The evening, however, came to a sickened conclusion when, after the hour-and-a-half car journey home, my stomach finally decided to stop playing chicken and viciously remind me what I'd eaten that day by displaying it all over our second parking spot. Yummy.

Nevertheless, orangey Portuguese food vomit aside, the day was perfectly lovely and just what I wanted to kick off the week leading to my wedding.

Daisy Petals and Destruction

Ikea: I love it...I love it not...I love it...I love it not...

This is a difficult dilemma to solve. Having put together, by my count, 9 pieces of furniture over the past week (excluding the 5 lamps that were assembled) I'm pretty much done. Ikea and I are on break time. We're currently seeing other people; taking some "me" time; re-evaluating our relationship, etc. 9 pieces of furniture and 3 lamps...that averages more than 1 piece of furniture per day. And some of them were pretty freaking big pieces of furniture. Witness yesterday:

Our final piece of furniture arrived in the morning; inspiringly on-time. Having just had the carpets cleaned, it was a hopeful start to a very busy day. We'd like the place to feel liveable before my parents get here tomorrow and it seemed perfectly well to be something we could achieve. Simple, we thought, just put together the dresser and then everything can be put away.

Putting together that dresser was *not* simple. Anyone who has ever built ikea furniture knows that, thanks to their universal appeal and general good sense, the instructions come without words. Just pictures. Occasionally misleading/confusing pictures with very tiny details that, if misread, could mean the difference between nailing the backing of your 8-drawer dresser onto the *front* of the frame rather than the *back*; leaving you perplexed for an hour as to why the drawers won't slide in on the tracks. Just a minor problem.

Speaking of nailing on that stupid particleboard backing, I'd like to take the time right now to thank Ikea for the lovely tiny nails they send to assemble their furniture with. I do love the challenge of sorting through all the tiny deformed scraps of metal to get nails I can actually use: it's like a treasure hunt. And when the nails bend as I attempt to hammer them in without doing painful and irreparable damage to my fingers, I do, in fact, smile to myself and remember that whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger...and whoever doesn't kill you will maim you viciously for hours spent smashing fingers to drive bent nails and more hours spent using forks to remove those nails because we don't have a real hammer.

At that moment at 10:30 last night, after 6 hours of on-and-off work assembling that chest of drawers, there was nothing more soul-destroying than the prospect of removing all those tiny nails with the cheap bendy forks from our kitchen. Never mind the annoyance that now, thanks to my inability to use my super powers of microscopic vision, there would be a series of tiny holes in the front face of the dresser. At that point I just wanted to rip the back off the dresser and hammer it into violent yet satisfying oblivion. I was at the stage where I would have spent money we don't have to never have to assemble my own furniture again.

Like the wonderfully overused historical cliché of the Great Retreat from Russia in 1812, there was many a disheartening pitfall along the way. (Other than that there was very little that building furniture in Hampshire has in common with marching across eastern Europe. Except, perhaps, the amount of frustrating swearing involved.) There was the fight with the back of the wide Billy bookcase that resulted in about 5 splinters and a missing chunk from my ring finger. There was using a bicycle spanner to hammer nails into the Hemnes dresser, resulting in a knuckle that is now a lovely shade of plum. Though perhaps what I am most grateful to put behind, like those Napoleonic legionaries, is the bone-deep fatigue after days of physical and mental anguish lifting and hefting and hammering and screwing and swearing at a half-ton of Swedish-manufactured wood, laminate, and particleboard. Not to mention the lovely dumb-show instructions with their inaccurate representations of the 8 types of screws and 4 types of dowels contained in the impossible-to-rip-open plastic baggies.

Sweden: if you're going to sell your conveniently inexpensive build-it-yourself furniture to the whole world, at least have the decency to engage in some imperialistic territorial expansion first. then, you can add words to your directions, and we'll all already speak Swedish. Thanks.

Solitary Confinement

I'm currently trying to think of every prison movie I've seen where someone gets sent into solitary confinement and then goes off the deep end. Why? Because I currently spend 97% of my day by myself. Aside from seeing Sebastian over breakfast this morning as he dropped his stuff off and dashed off for work, the most stimulating conversation I had was with the guy at the bank who helped me change my address in their records. Listening him aspirate the letter H whenever he repeated our postcode back to me was (aside from a dip back into season 2 of Grey's Anatomy) the entertainment highlight of my day. Think Eliza Dolittle in My Fair Lady "In 'artford, 'ereford, and 'ampshire 'urricanes 'ardly hever 'appen."

So I clean and go for runs and run errands and watch movies to distract myself from the fact that this place is quite empty. The music gets turned up extra loud just to make it feel fuller. I know it's not a huge place, but it's a lot of space to have all to myself! Two bedrooms, two bathrooms, seven chairs to sit in at the table, the whole couch to take up. It feels like there ought to be three more people in here. I've become too used to dorm rooms and flats where I live with enough other people that when we all leave it must look like the old clowns-in-a-Volkwagen routine.

All things considered, it's not much to complain about. I have a huge apartment, that - for the time being - is all mine, and in a few weeks, I'll only share with my visiting parents and sister, and then, just with my husband. I can walk around the village and figure out where everything is, or I can go get lost in town with the car. None of these things replace having company, though. I'm becoming one of those people who will stop and have a 20-minute conversation with the milkman just because no one else comes around. To point out: yes, there is a milkman who comes down our street; no, I've never spoken to him; yes, most people who do this are older people who are passed over by life and have to start collecting stray cats to fill the void.

As a tangent from my pathetic loneliness and a public service announcement, I urge everyone with a wooden dining room table to consider just how filthy the surface you're eating off of actually is. I just cleaned and polished our newly acquired table today. I scraped enough dirt and dust from between the planks that I very nearly revisited the apple pie I'd just eaten.

So my latest attempt to feel like I still have a connection to the outside world? A 5-day free trial at the gym down the street. (Yup, I'm a cheapskate.) If I like it enough, I'll join. Then at least I can form one of those 7-word-exchange relationships with the people behind the counter.

Me: Hi.

Gym girl: Hi. Have a good workout!

Me: Thanks!

Hey; it's something.

I'll only worry when I start getting like the first wife in Jane Eyre. Crazy and all alone in the attic...

23...22...21...

How is it that even when you want something, when you anticipate it with great joy and even the clichéd bated breath, how is it that it still doesn't seem real? That it perhaps seems even less real than it did a whole 6 months ago when it was finally, officially your future?

Part of my mind still refuses to accept the fact that I'll be married by the end of this month. In just 3 weeks and 2 days, to be precise. It's not that my mind somehow denies or capitulates the veracity of the statement "I'm getting married", but something about the reality of it is still larger-than-life; still too much to wrap my mind around. I don't suppose I'm waiting for a Eureka moment of feeling old enough, or grown-up enough, or some other sort of enough. I don't feel unprepared or unsure or unready for it (that may be the hubris talking...), but I do feel as if it's a surreal state of affairs. Me, I, myself, B.E.H. - no one else - I'm getting married. Tying the knot, jumping the broom, taking the plunge. More metaphors were needed for that to really pull off, but I don't have many to hand.

Yes, people my age get married. Yes, people I know and grew up with are already married. I think of Krystle and Ashley for starters; and then I remember Coco and Jeff and Jennifer and Elisabeth and Somelea and the list goes on. It's not unnatural - it's perfectly normal and commonplace in the best of ways. And I certainly wouldn't put it off - on the contrary, I'm probably indecently impatient sometimes. It means getting to see my parents and my sister; getting to wear the dress; getting to furnish and live in the new apartment; getting to spend the rest of forever with the man who has become my best friend. It - being married...getting married - means all sorts of great things. Great things that I sort of want RIGHT NOW. I can be patient, despite my apparent desire to "alter time, speed up the harvest" and so on and so forth. (There will be no teleporting off this terma firma...I'm not Luke Skywalker.)

There's just an immensity to it as well, you know? Yes; it's natural and logical and desirable to spend the rest of my life with Sebastian. To get introduced as his wife, or tell people, "oh, this is my husband." Totally doesn't seem weird. But yet, in spite of the normality of seeing each other every night, getting to live in the same house, sleep in the same bed, go for runs together in the morning, and do the shopping together on the weekends, there's still something awesome (in the real sense of the term) and incomprehensible about it. We'll be married. I love that there's something that makes it such a big deal to me; that the big deal-ness of it is so evident.

It's a covenant - a promise - a commitment. This is why I loathe self-written vows that talk about how much you love your soon-to-be spouse: we can tell how much you love him: enough to marry him. Get on with it. And a covenant is a lovely Biblical word full of the appropriate gravitas to convey a lifetime of putting the other person first; honouring, cherishing, loving, and all the rest. Am I waxing too eloquent here? I could be, but then I think calling the self-evident importance of marriage "big deal-ness" sort of cancels that out. Summary? I'm excited, and even though I still can't wrap my mind around the whole of what it means to be married, I think that's a good thing, and it ought to keep me humble enough (with only the occasional joking self-indulgent flattery that is my wont) to really appreciate both Sebastian and our marriage for quite a while. I shouldn't want to take either of them for granted.