A bit about the Bride

detail from Carla's wedding dress

At last, sanity is returning. I woke up this morning and my first though was something other than the kiss. I can finally concentrate on other things. 35 years old and I've obsessed about it for 10 days. Let's face it, that's just not healthy, but it was SO good, the kind you always wish you could have but everyone tells you it's unrealistic and that those things only happen on films. I'm so happy they were wrong. Mr P said I was having the same reaction that folk have to a severe trauma, except that luckily my trauma was a positive one. All very strange.

Of course there were other good things too, which my un-addled brain can now focus on. It was just fantastic to see Carla, the Bride, again. She lives in London and I haven't seen her for 2 or 3 years. We met when we were at college building our portfolios to apply to Art College about 18 years ago (!) and became instant friends.

I'd never met anyone like Carla before, she was like me, super enthusiastic, wanted to make everything, keen to try new things. She was also hysterically funny and had the best hand/arm gestures of anyone I know. I thought she was really exotic, her parents are Portuguese so she had this great surname (though at the time she was skipping part of it, but I new it from another Portuguese family). And she looked stunning, all her features were amazing to me, I'd never seen anyone else who looked like her. Her liveliness just shine through in her features. A happy face.

Obviously you have to share the bride with the other guests but we did get time in the evening for a bit of a reminisce about our early days. She reminded me of things I'd completely forgotten like the time we spontaneously (Carla was great at inducing spontaneous action) turned up on the doorstep of a guy I liked. He'd loosely made an invitation to visit in the summer hols but clearly never expected me to make the long trip to the north of Scotland with my best friend without calling first! We didn't even know his exact address but hunted him down anyway (ended up going out with him for 3 years).

It turned out to be a fantastic trip with a lot of 'special' things happening. Carla said it was extra special for her cause she was more of a city girl and hadn't done things like just running into the sea fully clothed and then drying off your things by a bonfire on the beach. One evening as we walked along I noticed that when our feet scuffed the sand it glowed, turned out it was full of phosphorous, as was the sea so when the gentle waves rolled in it all twinkled and glowed magically.

One night, I think maybe the same night, we all lay on the sand by the fire with a bottle of whisky and watched shooting stars. The skies in the North of Scotland are so clear it's really easy to see lots if you have the time. Then the sky started to ripple. It was the aurora borealis, which I had never seen before! It was mostly whitish and very flickery, disappearing and then reappearing a jump away. We were so thrilled, it just seemed like a whole day and night of being utterly immersed in the wonders of nature, and for me it was with two people I loved so it couldn't get more perfect.

But it did. About an hour after the aurora ended we were still watching for shooting stars when the sky went green. More Northern Lights, but these ones looked so different, all colourful and moving in a more liquid way than the first (I may have the order of all this the wrong way round, it was so long ago). The whole experience was unforgettable.

I think Carla is a bit of a lucky charm for me, whenever I am with her the most wonderful things happen. Sometimes they are things that I've experienced before but somehow when they happen with Carla there they are intensified... like the wedding kiss. They become the best memories and for that I can never thank her enough.

Gosh, that's the most I've written in ages. More on the the wedding later, including the great guests but for now I have a week of cat sitting to do so I'll have to slow down on the photo sorting and blogging.

Details from the walls of the reception venue...