Another Quiet Day

Commitment Part One

For some reason I am not the sort of person who has had many chances to frequent weddings.

The number of ceremonies of that kind that I've witnessed can be counted on the fingers on one hand.

The first that pops into mind would be the wedding where my Dad married his second and current wife.

(It always sounds so dodgy when it's put it like that.)

That was a classic. The sort of wedding you'd imagine going to if your only exposure to the wedding phenomenon had been through American movies.

Held in a smallish but romantic church in the countryside. A whole crowd of people attending. Her daughter (my step-sister, obviously) topping the whole thing off with superb rendition of Nat King Cole's Smile and the newly married couple get carted off in some sort of classic fancy car.

(I don't know anything about cars in case you hadn't noticed.)

The second wedding I remember would be that of my aunt's. I remember it being a bit grand as well, but with my lousy memory for events I can't really say anything else about it.

That's it. Most of the people in my family tend to just do a quiet thing at the licensing office. If they bother at all, that is.

Of course the joke has been bandied about that the country's economy wouldn't be able to survive the immense revenue drain if the people in my family demanded a grand wedding do every time they get the urge for marriage.

(Third time lucky seems to be the trend for a lot of them.)

So when it comes to that grand old traditional wedding thing I have no clue as to what counts as normal.

Good thing really, because otherwise I'd probably have been really weirded out by the commitment ceremony that my friends Viva and Markus had the other day.

The original plan had been for them to get married for real and have a big marriage do, but for various reasons the real thing got postponed to next year.

But they hit upon the idea of having a commitment ceremony.

You can think of it as a sort of a down-payment towards a wedding.

It all started at one o'clock in the afternoon on a Saturday. Everybody was told to gather at a small curry restaurant for a vegetarian lunch.

The poor place ended up being packed full.

Friends of their from all over the place. People they know. People I know. People I know now but didn't then.

Viva came in her patchwork fabric dress (I'm sure there is a more appropriate fashion jargon term for it, but oh, well) and Markus in his orange and brown checkered trousers.

Kids---flower girls---running around the place like footballers on ephedrine.

And the high-priest of something or the other (friend of theirs who had offered to organise the ritual/ceremony) arrived with a priest's collar made out of cardboard.

"I spent all morning looking for it but couldn't find it, so I cut a new one out of cardboard with a bread-knife."

The crowd of guests all seemed high-spirited and jovial. Even the one-eyed guy who sat on my table.

He spent most of the dinner describing how he'd poked his eye out accidentally with a sword a couple of weeks earlier but despite all that had a permanent grin bolted onto his face throughout the whole event.

It was mad, insane, brilliant, entertaining and more than a little bit strange.

A bloody good start, that is.

Baldur Bjarnason – 14/7/06