More couple friends
A very long time ago, when I first started off this journal, it was meant to be a way of staying in touch with friends at university, and so people I knew in real life were regularly mentioned in it. Our group developed a sort of strange passive way of not quite talking to each other through them, talking into a void about events and names in the full knowledge that they would be read and commented on by everyone mentioned, and I never felt weird doing that at the time - but I do now, because people from my real life seem no longer to be its primary audience. Nevertheless - congratulations, Paul and Bryn, for finally getting officially married!
Paul was my academic father in university (a concept which I might get around to explaining to people at a later date) and was one of the first people that I was introduced to as a new arrival. By my second year, we were both firmly part of the Internet crowd, which made us as vastly popular and attractive as you can imagine - and it meant that our group tended to meet the American students that came over for a year abroad first, as they went on to the university's message board to preview the madness that they were entering. Some relationships came and went, but there was always something special about these two, and we used to say that for all his talk of "stupid Americans", he would end up marrying one and living there some day. (No, I haven't overlooked the hypocrisy of this coming from me.)
We were up in Maine for the weekend, then, a journey of a few hours that must actually have been the longest drive that I've ever undertaken - drive that long in Britain and you fall off the edge of the country. The venue for the wedding was a cluster of secluded lakeside cabins owned by the bride's family, and as Maine is happy being all but completely cut off from phone lines and the rest of the world, it was a weekend to slow down and forget about working on anything, instead spending time with a lot of guitars around campfires and watching people dive into the freezing water. After the ceremony on the water's edge, there was a ceilidh, as all good weddings should feature - combining Scottish dances, which the Scots knew and helped the Americans with, and American dances, which nobody knew at all. It was held in the most newly built of the cabins, which I think impressed everyone concerned by remaining standing at the end of the night.
When not at the cabins, we stayed in a bed and breakfast a couple of miles around the lake, which was staffed and lived in almost entirely by ghosts. We met the woman who ran it once when she happened to be passing by when we arrived, and then had breakfast with some other people the morning we went away, but otherwise I get the impression that we could have just turned up on the day, found a room that wasn't taken and just slept there for a couple of nights without anybody noticing. Indeed, there was a frustratingly unoccupied room right across from us with a king-size bed instead of the titchy one that we'd been squeezed into, and we had a technically shared bathroom that was really just our personal bathroom with the door inconveniently on the wrong side, pointed out into the corridor instead of into our room.
During the morning and afternoon when we weren't otherwise doing anything, we went on what must have been my most American day out ever, first by finding and playing on - something I have never used as a compliment before - a properly shabby mini golf course, which had no windmills but made up for it with the abundance of castles and dinosaurs. Though the paint was peeling a bit and the water features had packed in some years earlier, it was an elaborate course of ramps and hills, much like the design of the German mini golf courses but without the sheer bloody-mindedness of them. After that, we found one of those boat-like diners that were mass produced in the fifties and were just dumped off lorries to set themselves up all over the country - in fact, by coincidence, that and the other two places we found for lunch had all been featured on one of the programmes that Whitney watches, where some sort of hedgehog-man goes around talking about underrated little roadside type places. Also, as you can see from the photograph, Portland has the least informative road signs ever.
I have eight mosquito bites, four of which are on my head, one of which of those is somewhere in the folds of my ear. It's strange that I always feel it such a relief to get back to work after daring to go anywhere else.