One for the Ages, Part I: The Run-Up

Sorry for being so remiss in my writing. I promise, it hasn’t been for lack of thought or lack of material, but rather the presence of too much—too much to do, too many places to be, too many jobs and too few hours. All that sort of thing.

But first things first: The Wedding.

Oh yes. Articles intended.

For many reasons, CB’s wedding is THE Wedding. Mostly because she named me as a bridesmaid. Also mostly because she’s a wonderful, lovely friend. And mostly for the fact that this was, bar none, the most labor intensive bridesmaid-stint I’ve ever completed, for no other reason than The Cake. But I scamper ahead…

CB got married to her Pirate on a gloriously sunny day in Bristol. All joking aside, the weather really was lovely (about damn time, Britain!) and the whole thing was sunshine and flowers and free wine and happiness. The day before? Not so much. But it could have been a lot worse. And let me go on record as saying I’d do it all again, in a heartbeat.

And with all that as a disclaimer…

I caught the train down to Bristol on the Wednesday morning, leaving my warm, warm bed for the cold, cold train station at 5:30 am, and dropped CB a text to let her know I was finally underway just after 6. I’d picked up my dress from the seamstress just the evening before, as there had been some last-minute pinning and tucking. Assuming she had her phone turned off, LIKE ALL NORMAL PEOPLE, I settled down and pillowed my head on my arms from Aberdeen to Burgh of Edin. I there changed trains for Birmingham, settling in for the longer leg of the journey with my needlework and picnic bag accessible.

I was working on a little piece of craft-mastery of my own design, though the inspiration is well documented on the internet. What was Miss Melville sewing so painstakingly, you ask? I’ll tell you later. What matters now is that I was seated next to an older woman named Evelyn, and despite my moment’s trepidation on her arrival due to her heavy scowl and less-than-bemused air, she turned out to been overwhelmingly chatty. So much so, in fact, that she talked ALL THE WAY to Birmingham. She told me about her family, that she was turning 77 the same month her granddaughter was turning 7 (an endless source of amusement for the granddaughter), that her father had been abusive and her mother emotionally distant, her grandmother manipulative but loving, and a dizzying number of aunts, uncles, cousins, great -grand relations and obscure pets. Needless to say, she was lovely. We helped each other find our next train, as she was bound for Exeter and I for Bristol Temple Meads, and said our goodbyes on the platform as we boarded different coaches.*

The final leg of the journey was standing room only and dearly uncomfortable. Let’s just be clear when I say that I was quite happy to roll into Bristol, take out £100 for upcoming expenses and drop myself into the nearest taxi. I know it doesn’t compare to scrubbing down an apartment kitchen, but the trip was its own form of special.

All told, I arrived at my reserved Bed and Breakfast relatively unharmed and unharried. The place itself was positively LOVELY. Quaint, charming, well-staffed, warm, clean, comfortable—all in all, all for which one might ask. I called CB to let her know that I had arrived and where would she like me to be/what would she like me to do/what should I be doing? Her response was somewhere between a laugh, a grunt and a frustrated howl. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who’d been asking such things. As it was, I watched a few episodes of Top Gear (Oh, Dave channel, how do I love thee…) and waited to be instructed about dinner arrangements.

Showered, napped, spot-ironed and with a pint down in the pub, I began questioning the busing schedules of Bristol. Roughly one on the hour, the barmaid told me. Turns out, they’re about as predictable as the ones here in the ‘Deen. I eventually caught one, laid down a ridiculous amount of money for a day ticket and tripped the light fantastic into town, where I met the whole maiden CB family.

Well, ‘met’ is a bit of a misnomer. I’ve met them all before, being great friends with CB’s mom and referring to her as my boss for more years than I like to remember. CB’s brother, his wife, the Aunt, the parentals… a lovely family. A lovely pub. Good food, fast talk, CB making entirely inappropriate comments about my chest, and I realized in a flash that all things with this wedding were really going to be just fine, so I ordered a stoli and tonic, crushed my lime and smiled. Good times.**

The next day saw me up and moving about with good speed, trying to get to the Chaplaincy to help bake a cake. No, I’m sorry—to help bake THE CAKE. The Cake to end all Cakes. The truly important, dear god don’t ruin this for everyone cake. Yeah, that one: the Wedding Cake.

CB had decided a while back that she was going to bake her own wedding cake. Well, g’donnah as the Aussies say, and I didn’t think a whole lot more about it until that morning. Good thing CB had, as she had all the ingredients, the recipes, the pans and pots and measuring cups aplenty. After stumbling about the top of Park Road for a bit (I’m useless with directions, sorry, CB!) another charming and nigh-on disgustingly perky bridesmaid, CW, met me and guided me into the dark heart of the University of Bristol. Somewhere between the gleaming Ivory Tower which is the Wills Building and eventually stumbling on the Chaplaincy, CW and I bonded. All things good. Once in the kitchen, I unloaded the requisite bottle of red wine from my purse and met the delightful Family Wally: Mama Wally (MW), Papy Wally (PW) and Beta Wally (BW). As CB had previously told me that MW is the only person other than myself within the circle of her acquaintance who listens voluntarily to sea chanties, I figured we'd get along just fine. In that, I was right. :) BW is actually a godzilla in a blonde, curly wig. He's utterly adorable and occasionally rampages. This mostly made for good entertainment as PW attempted to reign him in while we four womenfolk busied ourselves in the kitchen. I made a ribbon bouquet, complete with stem, out of the ribbons from the bridal shower, and all was happy and hectic but controlled.

By the time we had to break camp to leave for the rehearsal, the bottom tier and top tiers were finished baking. All the carrot (ALL THE CARROT) had been grated, lemons zested, and all that really remained was to bake the rest and frost. No problem. CW and I trucked it on back to her apartment to collect CB's dress, the delightful creation of satin and organza and embroidery which had been the subject of so many evening conversations. Once we finally got in the taxi, dress across laps, I noticed I had smudges of frosting all down my front and no time to do anything about it. So much for the yellow dress I'd purchased for the occasion, time left no time for such considerations! Dropping the dress off with the vastly capable door staff of the hotel, we hot-footed it over to the church, which was conveniently located just across the street.

At this point, I thought things would calm down and the overwhelmingly brisk pace of the day would be checked. Not so much. Apparently, they'd double-booked the church, and we had something like 15 minutes to go over the practical "You stand here, you walk over here," bits of the service. So far as I could tell, our job was to walk in ("Slowly!" hissed the mother of the bride, "You've got to make sure you leave six paces/enough space/you're going too fast/smaller steps!/feet together/don't rush!"), sit in the front pew, and then walk out. Awesome, I can handle that.

Post-rehearsal, I had a brief chat with the father of the groom, who is a lovely man with an accent which I can only describe as the one I would pull should I want to mock the ultra-posh Brits of yesteryear. But it's his actual accent. And I couldn't laugh, because that would have been terribly rude. Oh yesquiteratherhmmmm. All in all, I think I pulled it off.

As a small sidenote, apparently the rehearsal dinner isn't a tradition over here. Convenient for the parents of the groom, but less than conducive for getting we happy few fed and back to the kitchens. As it was, the parents of the bride fed me yet again at a lovely restaurant right on the waterfront where I had cheese and leafy things before legging it out of there and into a taxi to meet up with CB, who had rushed out even earlier to get back to the cake.

When we eventually got there, all things were relatively as they should have been, with the small exception of a party of observant Islamic men who had also booked the kitchen to cook for Ramadan. I feel this part of the story is best captured by CB herself: "when I got back there were 3 Muslim blokes there cooking a feast for Ramadan for about 50 people. I wasn't able to get in the door. They said they would be gone in 10 minutes. An hour later they were still there so I just started working around them as best I could.They finally left but the place was a mess. I was able to work around the mess, but when they came back to clean up it really go hairy. I needed the sink to keep washing mixing bowls and utensils as i changed back and forth between carrot and lemon cake and frosting, but they were using the sink. That killed another 45 minutes of valuable time.Then at one point one of them TURNED OFF THE OVENS!. Thank GOD the Cake noticed and we turned them straight back on so there was no damage done. If she hadn't seen that happen 2 tiers of my cake would have been ruined.And then finally one of the batches of frosting didn't turn out. For some reason it was complete soup. It wasn't usable. So we weren't able to get the whole cake frosted that night."

Confession time: I was the one who made the cream cheese frosting-flavored soup. It was me. I nearly destroyed ALL. The thing of it is, I didn't do a DAMN thing differently between the two batches. The first one set up, the second one didn't. Maybe it was that the kitchen was too hot from all the other cooking. Maybe the cream cheese was softer. Maybe the refrigerator was warmer due to being opened so much. I DON'T KNOW. All I know is that the frosting did. not. work. I felt awful. CB assured me that it would be okay, that we'd get duncan heines frosting from painsbury's in the morning and all would be well, but after going to such lengths to make this cake from scratch, I felt terrible about compromising the integrity of the homemade cake.

In the end, we got the remaining cakes baked, the first layer frosted completely, the bottom layer assembled, and CW's boyfriend to our location (more difficult than it sounds). The poor chap had worked a full day up in York and then taken the train down for a few hours to Bristol. He as tired, road weary (or track-weary, rather?) and hungry. Still toting his luggage, he shows up to help us transport the cake, as we were a woman down. We'd sent MW and the rest of the Family to the bed and breakfast-- same one I was booked into, actually-- to get some much needed rest. The little tyke didn't know what time it was supposed to be, and his parents weren't much better. The merciful thing to do was to let them shower and sleep, but it left us a lap short to transport the boxes of cake via cab to the hotel where the reception would be held and where CB was staying. Enter CW's boyfriend, who from here on out will be referred to as Captain Cake. Once we'd cleaned out the kitchen and loaded all the boxes with their precious cargo, the real fun began.

We lined the boxes up on a low rock partition along the driveway to await the taxi driver. Captain kept trying to talk to CW about the day, how he was feeling, answering the questions she casually flung at him, but after asking she'd scuttle away to check for the cab or check on CB, leaving him with a mouthful of words which would trail off in a Walter Mitty-esque sense of resignation. Something about this struck me as absolutely hilarious, a fault I can only chalk up to exhaustion and overwrought nerves. The bit of road which led to the chaplaincy is a squidgy, and in the age that it took the cabbie to find us, we milled about and generally lied about how tired we were. CW went to pick up one of the boxes of cake to move it closer to the curb, and as I stood talking to CB, she screamed. Actually screamed. Oh god, I thought, please don't have dropped the cake. Then she screamed something about slugs. Oh NO. You see, my dear reader, it's been a very wet summer here in Britain, and there are slugs EVERYWHERE. And not the little slugs that nibble cabbage in a garden. These are big, slimey fuckers to leave visible trails all over the sidewalks. And all I could think was that one had managed to squirm its way into the box and onto the cake. The mental image of the little frosted tier over which we had labored so lovingly absolutely covered in giant, olive drab slugs glistening in the street light filled my mind. Ogodohgod, NO!

As it was, CW had gone to pick up the box and put her hand on a slug quite safely on the exterior of the box. She even had the good sense not to drop the box. She's a winner, that CW. However, she did cause me a small bout of cardiac arrest.

Once we FINALLY got into the taxi, we three girls in the back with boxes of cake and Captain in the front with the bowl of soup-frosting on his knees, we let out a collective breath and asked the cabbie to drive very, very carefully. As we went along, we quickly realized that we in the back were fine, but Captain was in serious danger of slopping the sugary sludge over the edge of the bowl and all over his lap. "I feel like I'm in the third leg of some sort of perverse triathlon," he said quietly, inducing a fit of near-hysterical giggles from the back seat. Once at the hotel, CB oversaw the unloading of the cab and put CW and Captain back into it and packed them off to CW's flat while I went to find a trolley to transport the various boxes to the commercial refrigerator in the kitchens where the hotel had has we could store it all overnight. With a vague prayer to nebulous powers that the sustained cold of the fridge would bring my soup-creation to frosting-firmness, I followed like a pup at CB's heels. We both realized at roughly the same time that the buses had finished running for the night and I was effectively stuck in Bristol unless I wanted to shell out for a taxi. Ugh. CB offered quite gallantly to just curl up next to her in the enormous yes-it's-a-honeymoon-suite-but-we-want-a-bed-so-big-we-don't-actually-have-to-touch-while-we-sleep bed, but after watching her print off the readings for the next day, I soberly considered my options and figured that it would be cheaper in the long run to take a nighttime taxi rather than wake up in town and have to fight my way back to the Inn to gather my bridesmaid dress and assorted necessities. CW and I had worked out a shopping list with nibbly-bits for the lunch the next day, useful things like band-aids and Tylenol, and the ever-necessary hair drier. Leaving all this for the night, I said goodnight for the last time to Miss CB and caught a cab.

And this is where, for me, the whole thing went pear shaped.

When the cab rolled up to the Inn, all was dark. No lights in windows, no busy downstairs pub-- nothing. Not only was the front door locked, but it was also chained and padlocked. So, on a scale of locked, it was very locked. I knocked and knocked, I tapped at windows, and shouted hello in the hopes of raising a reply, all to no avail. The cabbie, bless him, hadn't immediately driven off, and asked if I needed help. Did I have the number for the inn? Maybe I could call and someone would answer who could then come down and let me in. No, I didn't have the number. So he called his dispatch and had them track it down for me-- amazingly kind, eh? In the meanwhile, I went around back and shook the gate. Deadbolted. DAMN. Whyohwhyohwhy. It was 1:30 in the morning, I had soupy frosting in my hair, I smelled noticeably of carrots, and my friend was getting married in less than 14 hours. I went around the front again and in desperation POUNDED at the front door. By that time, the cabbie had been waiting well over 15 minutes, but had a number for me to call. I pulled out my mobile and dialed.

Only to be met by the robotic voice of a woman telling me I didn't have enough credit on my phone to complete the call. [*Mentally drops to her knees and wails wordlessly*]

"There's nothing for it," my patient cabbie sighed, "I'll take you back to the Hotel if you'd like?" For the moment, it looked like my only option. But I didn't want to wake up CB who had surely FINALLY gone to bed for some desperately needed sleep. I didn't want to bother her the NIGHT BEFORE HER WEDDING. I wanted to be competent and adult and get into the bed reserved for me, dammit! I sighed and said I'd try the back gate just one more time. Shoving my hands in my pockets in the cold, my knuckles already bruising from pounding on the door, I felt the ribbon I had stashed there, the one I hadn't looped into the bouquet. "Could I...?" I leaned all my weight against the gate, buying a few millimeters and enough to loop the ribbon through the gap, hook it onto the nub and pull it up, springing the gate. Success! Once inside the yard, I started trying the doors. The downstairs was definitely locked, complete with a yale lock. The upstairs door, however, adjacent to the iron rose trellis, had just a regular lock, and an older one at that. Right, time to put the skills to the test... I rattled the door with all my furious, mentally-exhausted might and then YANKED it open. The bolt sprung free and I was IN! I left the door open and went back to inform the cabbie, who wished me a good sleep, and I locked the gate back behind me. A good night indeed. I don't think my head hit the pillow before I switched off.

For what happened when my eyes opened again, stay tuned.




*There is something so strange about train conversations. I know the film-loving few among us can cite numerous cinematic examples of what I’m describing, but parts of it sadden me. Evelyn at several points marveled about how she was telling me all of these unpleasant but true things about people had loved, her parents and their parents, but never told her own children, much less her grandchildren who are mostly my age. I told her, in my honest opinion as a grandchild whose grandmother withheld all manner of information until it was far too late, that they would want to know. It’s far too important to just tell a stranger on a train. I hope she does, and I hope her grandkids have the decency and the sense to stop and listen.
**Good times made even better by the drinks tab being picked up by CB’s Aunt, who is a Sister (not in the “Help a sister out!” sense, but rather the “I’m sorry, Sister, I have no idea how that rosary wound up there” sense) which effectively means that the Catholic Church bought my booze. I repeat, GOOD TIMES.