impending

After a leisurely breakfast of warm fruit juice (thanks to the constant flow of warm hotel air through the tiny gap in the fully-opened window in which it had been sitting overnight) we packed up and headed out to get some coffee and observe Kingstonites about their morning businesses, which seemingly included smokers carefully picking outside seats of coffee-shops to maximise the amount of fagsmoke wafted back indoors by the prevailing breezes. We were picked up and taken along to the wedding-venue shortly after hotel kick-out time, there to observe final preparations and meet various fambly and friends as they trickled in.

As with my own wedding, with this one involving my own family there was unlikely to be the usual whothefuck-syndrome guest-identification issues. With no official tasks I would not be required to know who anyone was that I didn't already know , which was fortunate as (bar Ralph) the only people not from my side of the family who I'd have stood a chance of identifying would have been a couple of Clare's former housemates, though not all of them were supposed to be turning up and then not until the evening. There was a risk of possibly confusing other-side guests and venue staff at some point as they sometimes had the same style of tentative-interpolation when approaching slightly lost-looking groups of other guests. The venue was a big old toff-house owned by some of Ralph's richer clients, fortunately also offering standard business-venue facilities as well as hotel-ness and therefore featuring unsecured wifi. There was supposed to have been another set of guests here for something today but (apart from a couple of roomsful of corporate-event-looking-paraphernalia) apart from the odd random person or so who looked busy most people were probably some sort of guest.

Most of the afternoon was spent sitting in the largest available room (parents') monitoring texts to see who was arriving when, fielding uncles before they jumped shouting into the room when Edgar was napping and practising tying my real tie-able bow tie via online videos. Doubtless it becomes as easy as tying a normal tie with sufficient practice (such as every day for several years at school, though I had to just let my hands remember when I came to need to tie one again after several tie-less years when I needed to suit-up again for job interviews post-uni) but it would certainly be easier for beginners if people had an extra small pair of arms mounted on their neck, or perhaps even just a pair of pedipalps beside the mouth. I reached the point where I was able to tie it without looking at the instructions though it always ended up far from even and not looking very tweakable should it become dislodged or start twisting.

It would be handy if venues such as this place (located a couple of miles from the town centre) maintained a small fleet of folding bicycles for guests to use if they needed to pop into town for something. There were the usual tea-and-coffee-making facilities in each room but ...