The drinking party

This wedding has been fantastic. We're now in the bar after the reception and the ceremony.

The ceremony was held in a Shinto Shrine. The reception meal had twelve delicious courses and five different types of booze. There was bell-ringing and play acting and powerpoints and kareoke and moving speeches and tears. And I have been showered with gifts -- why, I am not entirely sure. But, what the heck, I'll take them.

Apart from my own wedding which I recall as a kind of euphoric blur, this has been the best wedding I have ever attended.

The only minor dip was my toast. I wasn't aware that I was supposed to do a toast until ten minutes beforehand and came up with a garbled analogy of single people being like uncooked rice and love being like adding water and marriage being like a cooking pot that brings it all together and creates fluffy delicious nourishing rice. I came up with this because I had just learned that the Japanese have different words for uncooked rice and cooked rice and I wanted to show off.

It wasn't a bad plan, but trying to do it in Japanese and English pretty much made it appear that I couldn't speak either language. I'm sure I just managed to confuse everyone. Immediately post-toast, however, I felt all right about it. But then Naved did his speech (which he also had not been warned about) and it was absolutely brilliant and heart-warming and brought the groom to tears.

He started with a dash of humour about his friendship with Derrick and then talked about how great it was that all of us from all these different countries could gather together to celebrate the marriage of two people from very different backgrounds and what a wonderful world it all was.

It doesn't sound all that great when I write it, but, trust me, out of his mouth it was brilliant. The bride even referred to the same sentiments in her own speech later on. That's the kind of impression it made!

If I didn't like Naved so much, I'd hate his guts.

Anyway, aside from being completely upstaged by a man who is normally an unsentimental conspiracy theorist, the entire thing was absolutely beautiful.