Sweet

[liv]

Last week, a good friend of jack's married his longterm partner. The wedding gave me an excuse for a really lovely weekend in Cambridge, and was also incredibly endearing for several reasons.

jack and I got to my parents' late lunchtime, and we bought them a hosting gift of cheeeese from the wonderful deli while we were waiting for them to get back from shul. So we ate the cheese and chatted and discussed politics a bit and were generally family-ish all afternoon, until it was time to go out for the dinner organized by ghoti.

ghoti did a brilliant thing, she made one of those LJ posts saying "who wants to join us for dinner?" and managed to get 20 positive responses! I'm really touched that she used my visit to Cambridge as the deciding factor between a range of possible dates. I walked along the river with jack and met an old schoolfriend I hadn't seen for 15 years, who recognized me because we're sort of approximately in touch on FB. So the evil Facebook is somewhat useful for something, at least. The meal was at Las Iguanas, a branch of a chain of South American restaurants that recently opened in Cambridge. The waiters kept asking us what we were celebrating, and were a bit bemused that such a large gathering was just for the sake of being social. We were celebrating ghoti being right that Las Iguanas is a nice restaurant, or the fact that for the first time in decades, there's a mid-priced restaurant in Cambridge that's good enough to actually positively want to go out for a meal there.

Things that are good about Las Iguanas: the food is tasty and varied, with generous portions, and an excellent range choice for people on special diets, notably veggie and gluten free. Service was very good, even with a party of 20 and even on a busy Saturday night. They coped admirably with the kind of geeks who bring small kids to meals out in mostly adult-focused places. It's in a nice location, at the Quayside by Magdalene, with nice views over the river. It's reasonable value for money, worked out about £25 a head with most of us having three courses plus several drinks. The cocktail menu is original and interesting, though not the greatest I've ever experienced; I had something badged as sangria, which was actually a rather over-sweet sangria-flavoured cocktail, not in fact based on wine, and then a jam daiquiri, which I thought might be too sweet but was actually just perfect with really complex and interesting flavours. Things that are not so great about it: it's somewhat bland and chainish, and I'm not completely taken with generic "South American" cuisine as opposed to authentic food from a particular country. Also really badly lit; there are these big gaudy chandeliers, which are so low to the table that they illuminate only a radius of a metre or so, and anyone beyond that was pretty much in the dark. Las Iguanas is basically somewhat like The Vaults, only better, notably because it's not ridiculously inaccessible through being located in a basement. It's a good place to take a large group of people with diverse dietary needs, really better than any other options in Cambridge, but it didn't quite cross my threshold for somewhere I'd consider exciting.

Anyway, I had a really good evening. I didn't quite get to talk to everybody I wanted to talk to, due to the long trencher-style table with not quite enough space to circulate. But I did see the hostess and family briefly, and chatted to my virtual running buddy rmc28. The rest of the time was spent very agreeably with planetxanna and aldabra, who is someone I really really ought to have met before now and somehow never have. We had to leave early-ish as the restaurant had another booking, so there was a consensus to head to the Carlton. This was kind of geographically inconvenient as it was in the opposite direction from where jack had parked; we decided to walk to the car and then drive it to the Carlton to save having to walk across town twice. This was very pleasant, especially as naath as well as Aldabra and Xanna accompanied us part of the way. But actually by the time we got to the car it was after 10 and we decided we couldn't be bothered to go to the pub at that stage; sorry if anyone was expecting us.

Sunday we were guests at Mum's Sunday Lunch, along with Granny, so that was again pleasant and sociable and familial. And then there was the wedding itself, which was absolutely delightful. It was a small, intimate wedding, mostly family and a smattering of the subset of jack's and the couple's friends who aren't part of the main Cambridge geek set we usually hang out with. Including J&D, whom we last saw when we stayed with them in summer. The venue was a farmhouse outside a tiny little village out Royston way, which had such delightful features as a steam engine (not a railway steam engine, the kind that came between horses and automobile tractors for moving farm equipment), and a sow with a litter of teeny adorable piglets. In an already wintry October, it was a bit cold to really enjoy the beautiful grounds, but there was a lovely heated conservatory (with giant Jenga!) and reception area that was part barn and part marquee to mingle in.

I think it's a sign of social change that now, weddings where the couple have lived together for years seem almost more real to me than the more traditional whirlwind romance or abstaining from intimacy until the relationship is formalized. It couldn't have been more obvious that the bride and groom are right for eachother, they're partners, friends and lovers as we say in the Jewish marriage liturgy. They've already been together for longer than the average marriage lasts, they've lived together, they've moved abroad to support eachother's careers and then returned to England, their families are already like a single family. They're touchingly romantic, no doubt of it, but well beyond being dazzled by limerence. They had a series of readings during the reception, which are too "religious" to be allowed as part of a civil ceremony, 1 Corinthians 13 from the bride's family Bible, that bit about marriage from Gibran's The Prophet, the description of Arthur Dent falling in love with Fenchurch from So long and thanks for all the fish, and a couple of more personal and less famous readings. I was pretty much in tears, not just from the bride and groom reading to eachother, but from their parents giving readings which really showed their love and support of the relationship. OK, so maybe I'm getting sentimental these days, but it really was the sweetest wedding you could ever imagine. Another thing that was adorable was meeting the groom's mother; she used to take care of jack's crowd when they were university students missing home comforts, and obviously feels very maternal towards them and was therefore really excited to meet jack's wife.

I had to leave halfway through the dinner to be able to catch the last possible train home. The chatty taxi driver who drove me to Royston station was genuinely interesting to talk to, and I was able to sleep on the train from London, which somewhat made up for getting in at midnight on Sunday night.

Basically one of the best things about being married to jack is how completely lovely his friends are, and how much they've accepted me into their circle. Last weekend was a really great example of that. This weekend is for finally getting a chance to catch up on my life after all the rushing around I've been indulging in since the beginning of September! Useful, but much less in the way of extrovert joy.

Comments

[angelofthenorth]

Yay that sounds fabulous :)