Jamie and Natsuko's Wedding

Saturday was Jamie and Natusuko's wedding down in Ayr. I'd been constructing a dress to wear to it for a couple of days beforehand, and just managed to get the rough edges tidied up with Wondaweb in time to set off:

Having chatted to the obligatory drunk guy who sat down next to me on the train (Adrian has since been giving me intensive lessons in ferocious eyebrow-waving) I got to the church actually before the wedding started and took an inordinate number of photos:


Natsuko and her Mum - lots of the Japanese ladies were wearing traditional kimonos.


Holy Trinity Choir plus lots of GU Chapel Choir folks singing the anthem that Jamie's brother Andrew (seen conducting here) had composed for the occasion.


The bit with rings


The bit with kissing


JD in a fantastic spotted dress that she had made with petticoats and matching knickers. Unfortunately my dress had neither of these matching extras and indeed had been made so quickly that by the end of the day it was in danger of unravelling from the inside-out due to the unfinished nature of its seams...

Jamie and Natsuko at the end of the service.

Back-lit - or maybe front-lit, since I was behind them?




Motley line-up of choristers

Me, Andrew, Rosie and Andrew.

Katie and some music.

Heather and Eilidh, with whom I got a lift to Culzean Castle in Andrew's open-top car, thereby continuing a theme that was emerging over the course of the weekend of being driven very fast in folk's unfeasibly flash cars (I think the alliteration may be getting away with me there...)

Heather striking a glamorous pose in the front seat.

Looking a bit more windswept as the journey continued...

to Culzean, which was very pretty, with gardens

and friendly sundials with faces.




Andrew drinking tea

Eilidh pouring tea

On the way back I was becoming slightly less terrified of the whole car thing and stopped quivering long enough to take this picture of the Ailsa Craig and join in a sing-a-long-a Bohemian Rhapsody (complete with Wayne's World style head banging towards the end from Heather and Andrew).

Katie and Helen in the restaurant where we went for some dinner.

Helen later came to speak to me for a bit and Eilidh took this lovely photo. Then she took the following two which are much more representative of my feelings on being presented with babies:



(This is all most unfair on Helen who is a very polite and sociable baby, as you can see ;-)


Afterwards, we all headed off to the evening reception where we found Jamie setting up the Campaign for Real Pipes

Before dancing with his new wife (he's in there somewhere, honest - the lighting was a wee bit difficult).

I then chatted to Julie and Katie before heading home on the train, which came with integral party

And folk group (out of sight) who were adopted by an itinerant (and intoxicated) bodhran player.

The chap on the right whose face you can't see looked as miserable as sin all the way home, sighing and rolling his eyes at the general merriment. He occasionally read bits from a massive and impressive looking tome, which turned out to be a copy of that vampire thing that's so popular at the moment. I did try to read one book, but it was like Buffy with all the plot taken out and just the draping-around-after-Angel bits left in...

I then finished the evening by catching a taxi home and dropping my house key in it. The driver very kindly brought it back the next day, although he'd regaled me with conspiracy theories all the way down the road, including an extremely imaginative one revealing that the prevalance of new sets of traffic lights with dodgy sequencing is part of a plot to allow town councillors to stalk people they fancy. Who would have guessed?