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I was woken at 4am by the person in the room above moving around. There was basically no soundproofing in the hotel and every floorboard creak echoed through the corridor. I assumed the movement would stop. Either the person would go back to bed or be going out for this stupidly early start, but it carried on. Occasionally the pacing would stop and I thought I might get back to sleep, but then with excellent comic timing it would start again. What the Hell was this person doing? After half an hour I’d accepted that I was awake now. I did my Wordle and Quordle. That means the day has started. But I was tired and worried that this might impact on the rest of the day. Suddenly I wondered if wearing my noise cancelling headphones would work. They are pretty big and I didn’t imagine that they’d be comfortable to sleep in. But not only did they block out all the sounds in this terrible hotel but somehow I defied all odds and snoozed, on and off, for the next three hours. It was a result. I slept in until 7.30am. A veritable lie-in.
The breakfast was one of the worst I’ve had in a hotel too. I might be a snob now.
I haven’t been to many weddings in the last ten years since my own wedding (I think maybe one in person and one via zoom) and so today as we celebrated the wedding of a Drunk Woman (who was by the end also a drunk woman, presumably) I felt a generational shift. I was definitely moving into the old man at a wedding camp and had barely experienced the middle-aged man at a wedding phase, so in my heart I was still a young man at a wedding. Very much like my acting roles, there is a disparity between how I feel inside and reality.
I did, however, attempt to deny time its victory over me by trying to dance the night away, which was not only strange because of my aching legs and back, but also because I was sober. In the early part of the evening it was also still daylight and yet still I managed to overcome self consciousness, not quite becoming the drunken whirling dervish of weddings past, but still not feeling awkward about strutting my stuff. It was fun, even if as the night progressed, the drunkenness of nearly everyone else became a little harder to fully enjoy (though I still mainly enjoyed it). I wasn’t buoyed on by booze though and so it was harder to get over the hump of exhaustion by around 11pm.
They were now playing the hits of the teenage discos that I’d been to, though I wasn’t really sure what they would mean to most of the people on the dance floor. I was almost the oldest still on my feet and the youngest was maybe about 8. Tainted Love and House of Fun whisked me back to the Kings of Wessex school hall in the early eighties, at one point the room slightly juddered and I fancied that if I threw myself into a full on Madness dance that I would transport back to those days. Although this is a trope well covered in popular fiction I wondered if there would be something in a more horrific version of this time travel, where it didn’t progress from being happy to being 14 again slowly towards the realisation that those days were gone, but just concentrated on the horror of a 54 year old man with a happy life being trapped back amongst 14 year olds with whom he has nothing in common and rather than getting to live his life again or changing his future or doing the stuff he missed out on, just desperately tries and fails to escape his Hell. It feels like it exists already, but if not I might have a crack at it. Maybe its a little bit too much like Life on Mars.
The wedding had been excellent, the sun had shone, we were out in the courtyard of a lovely old house drinking champagne/cucumber water and the ceremony had been quirky and fun. Two comedians getting married is always a time for levity, but this one was played to perfecting, with the bride coming down the aisle to The Rural Jury song from 30 Rock and the assembled guests singing Africa by Toto instead of a hymn and funny, but cool vows. Weddings should be filled with laughter, not solemnity. They’re not funerals (well at least one in two aren’t). It was great to properly celebrate the people involved and laugh while doing so.
Not sure I am going to be dancing at many more weddings, but good to do it one more time.
