So, atreic and emperor got married yesterday, which was nice.

I managed to get through the ceremony without worrying too much about its transactional integrity, as I've tended to do at other weddings I've been to recently. Instead I found myself wondering what I'd do about clothes if I ever got married. My particular peculiarity, you see, is that I absolutely hate wearing a shirt and tie; I'm willing to do it for other people's weddings, but at my own wedding I would want to make it very clear that nobody should wear anything they didn't actually want to wear. But that only solves half the problem: having the occasional guest turn up in jeans and a T-shirt is one thing, but having the groom dress like that would still seem a bit odd even to me (and the hypothetical bride would have to be pretty forgiving to let me get away with it!). I haven't yet thought of a satisfactory answer to what I'd wear at my own wedding, so it's probably just as well such an event isn't looking the least bit likely in the near or medium future.

Also I've figured out what the deal is with four-part harmony in hymns. Ever since my social group started putting sheet music in their orders of service, I've stopped complaining that I could never remember the hymn tune from one verse to the next, and instead bemoaned my apparent total inability to sing it sensibly. I've now figured out what this is about: it's because I naively thought that given my vocal range I clearly ought to pick out the bass part from the sheet music and sing that. Unfortunately, singing bass appears to be incredibly hard: I can't clearly hear myself over the clamour around me, so I can't correct any pitch errors I might make, and also it's surprisingly hard simply to keep the bass part's tune in mind when all you can hear is the soprano part. I don't know how much of this is normal, how much is due to my musical skills being rather rusty, and how much is due to the fact that even when I was a musician I played the violin and hence mostly lead melodies or nearly so. But part way through this wedding I suddenly noticed that the men around me seemed to be singing the soprano part transposed down by however many octaves seemed appropriate, so I switched to doing that and found it to be almost laughably easy in comparison. Proper musicians are now welcome to complain, or offer helpful advice, or sympathise, or all three.

After the wedding I went home, ate some food, and changed out of my suit for the ceilidh. (I had seen an LJ post from emperor a few days ago saying they ‘officially’ didn't care what people wore to the ceilidh, which was very welcome given my abovementioned dislike of shirts and ties, and probably also what got me thinking about clothes in general.) A bit later it occurred to me that what I could have done to achieve comfort while showing a continued willingness to look at least vaguely smart would have been to keep the actual suit on but switch the shirt and tie for a simple long-sleeved white T-shirt; but by then I was half way through walking into town for the ceilidh, so it was too late.

Ceilidhs strike me as strange. What primarily strikes me as strange about them is the preservation of the tradition of people personally asking one another to dance. I participated in one of the early dances mostly due to not running away fast enough, and what happened was that we all arranged ourselves in a gender-alternating circle and then the men went round anticlockwise while the women went round clockwise, so the person who had actually asked me to dance rapidly headed in the opposite direction and I only saw her in passing once or twice thereafter. Not only does this make it slightly meaningless to ask someone to dance with you, but it also means that if etiquette requires (as I wasn't sure whether it might) that you thank your nominal partner at the end of the dance, you have to find your way through a milling crowd of randoms in order to do so. As far as I can tell, therefore, this is a nearly-vestigial tradition whose sole remaining purpose is to achieve the parity of gender generally required by the dance structure.

After that experience I managed to stay off the dancefloor for the rest of the evening and treat the event much as I treat the Calling (primarily a social gathering, with the added risk that the person you're talking to might at any moment decide to dash off and dance). As a social gathering it was definitely good, with about the right combination of lovely people I knew well, lovely people I hadn't seen in too long, lovely people I wanted to know better, and lovely people I'd never spoken to before. (Not all of these categories are disjoint. :-) So that was excellent fun, mostly.

On the way home my umbrella exploded. It was the only accessory I'd brought with me to the ceilidh, and I'd been a little worried that I'd forget I had it with me and leave it there. In fact I remembered about it with no difficulty (without even having to step outside, notice it was raining, and think ‘hmm, an umbrella would be useful – aha!’), but it did me no good at all, because as soon as I got outside and pressed its Up button, it shot to full extension with unusual force and then went *twang* and what looked like a couple of snapped metal hawsers shot out of the mechanism. Among the damage was the catch that held the umbrella actually open; I was able to hold it open manually, but that proved so painful after a few minutes that I abandoned the idea completely and just got very wet on the walk home. Bah.