let our love be a flame, not an ember
Weddings, alas, force me to the conclusion that I'm basically anti-social. Or, at least, social only in a very specific sense which means that a social obligation outside my preferred zones of interaction causes me to growl like a bear. I'm horribly crap, four times out of five, at interacting with strangers. (The fifth time, particularly when assisted by booze, I am graciously articulate. Go figure.) My bear-like impulses have to war more or less continually with the fact that weddings are also celebrations, hopeful brandishings of emotional flags, the locus of frequently bloody good food, and the only space these days where I get to dance. They also more often than not feature people I seriously care about, and whose happiness I will celebrate even if all the socialising kills me.
In the complicated marital Venn diagram "WEDDING" sits in a tiny, non-Euclidian-angled space where various circles overlap - not just Family, Friends of Bride and Friends of Groom, but Other Friends Of Bride Not Necessarily Compatible With First Set, Other Friends Of Groom ditto, Family We Don't Actually Like, Strange Partners Of Friends, Religious Beliefs, Excluded Religious Beliefs, Societal Expectations, Odd Clothing Fetishes, Too Much Alcohol, A Faint Stab At Self-Expression By The Bridal Couple, and Totally Weird Great-Aunt Maude in the Kooky Hat. (Our family had Great-Aunt Audrey, known as the Dragon Lady for her habit of turning up at weddings in a bright red dress adorned with sequinned Chinese dragons). Weddings simultaneously delight the not inconsiderable people-watching part of me, and scare the hell out of me in the demands they make that I interact pleasantly with all these people who are themselves not entirely at ease with all aspects of this wedding.
All that being said, Mike and Nikki's wedding was lovely. The setting was beautiful, the food was excellent, the DJ played a respectable amount of cheesy 80s hits among the more poundy 90s techno, my buggered knee actually permitted me to dance carefully for shortish spurts, and the other guests were either pleasant, interesting or both. (A new pleasure I've discovered: watching obviously long-term couples on the dance floor, the routines they've worked out, their clear and enviable fit. I'll swear I saw one couple doing a spirited cha-cha to the Proclaimers, which I would have thought wasn't technically possible). Probably the only serious problems with the weekend were the trip there in Friday afternoon rush hour and the first part of the trip back, mostly because of (a) Somerset West, and (b) fires.
I pause for a moment to excoriate the name of Somerset West. Somewhere in the heart of its complacent little settlement squats a city council of more than usually rampant self-satisfaction who is responsible for the fact that the two-lane freeway through one edge of the town is broken by four or five sets of traffic lights. Not just that, but the phases are set to favour the good citizens of Somerset West who wish to toddle across the freeway, not the long strings of distance travellers who wish to speed down this major artery out of Cape Town. This means that one can spend up to twenty minutes, in rush hour, inching forward towards a traffic light which stops sixty or seventy cars for minutes at a time while not a single car crosses in front of you. I cannot sit in Somerset West traffic for more than about thirty seconds without beginning to fantasise wistfully about overpasses. But of course Somerset West couldn't accept overpasses - they might sully for an instant the glorious self-importance with which its citizens hold up the N2. Just to make this point even clearer, they're currently doing roadworks - not overpass construction, but road-resurfacing which requires that vast tracts of the road must be closed, cutting traffic down to one lane in each direction. It took me slightly over an hour to go through Somerset West on Friday. I confidently expect that my concentrated malevolence will have caused up to five of the city council to have dropped dead in their tracks.
As if that wasn't enough, the Hottentots Holland mountains are on fire (you can see the plumes of smoke here). The fire has burned for a while - the initial outbreak last week was apparently contained, but it started up again and burned throughout the weekend. When I drove home on Sunday morning I came down through Sir Lowry's pass into a thick, dirty yellow fug of smoke which cut visibility down to a few dozen metres, and prevailed all the way into Cape Town. The owner of the B&B informed us that the firefighters had taken on about 300 extra staff to contain the blaze, and paid them off and dismissed them when it was out. Two hours later the fire had started up again, at numerous points, with the assistance of bottles of petrol with candle stubs in them, presumably necessitating the re-hiring of the jobless. There will be nothing left alive up there, after a week of burning. Sometimes I am forced to conclude that my basic elements of anti-sociability are because there is every reason to simply hate people.