Somehow this post was deleted, who knows how....but look, here it is, back!

Mu niece's wedding

I went to Melbourne for my niece's wedding last Saturday. The wedding was not actually in Melbourne, but in a tiny town in the country which has no hotel or motel where out of town wedding guests could stay. Thus those who stayed overnight had to bed down elsewhere after a 40 minutes drive to a rather lavish hotel in a  bigger town. I stayed in the same room as my sisters. They shared a king sized bed, and I had the other one all to myself. In the morning, as I crept around trying not to disturb the soundly sleeping late night revellers, I could not find the light switch, and had a very hard time getting the taps to mix the water. Turns out the taps operated in different directions, so no wonder I was confused. I am not accustomed to such higher forms of technology.

The church was very pretty - rebuilt after being burned down. There is no longer a parish priest, so it seems, that after much angst, the Authorities agreed to allow the next best thing, a woman, to run the parish. But only after they had assured themselves that she was Sound. A priest cousin came along to perform the ceremony.

My niece, as well as being intelligent and delightful, is uncommonly beautiful, tall and elegant, and she looked gorgeous, and totally happy. Her dress was elegant and beautiful, and not strapless, which to my mind is a plus. She wore her great-grandmother's veil, which was found, after some rather frantic scrabbling around in wardrobes by other family members, cleaned, mended, and a comb fixed to fasten it to her hair. The three bridesmaids all wore short black dresses, one of which was strapless.

When my niece walked up the aisle, she was accompanied by both her father and her mother. It was beautiful, and there was therefore no sense of the bride being 'given away' from one owner to another. The groom looked handsome and very happy. Everyone rejoiced in this truly happy occasion. The reception was held in the local Mechanics Institute Hall, which is now a community centre.

Instead of a traditional wedding cake, the mother of the bride and another sister toiled long and hard to make many fudgy chocolate cakes. Little bride and groom dolls, from the groom's parents' wedding cake, were supposed to have arrived, but had been forgotten, so another sister and I dashed around the shops of her part of Melbourne trying to find such a decoration. We had no luck at all. Such a task needed a lot more warning. Finally we found a bakery which had sugar roses, so we bought those and they looked just beautiful. Evidently you need a lot more notice, and should go straight to a cake decorating supplies place.

By the time we all arrived back in Melbourne on Sunday afternoon my sister, the mother of the bride, was flaking out. She was exhausted from all her hard work and all the excitement, and had picked up an extremely horrid and scary germ, epiglottitis, and was really sick. She is starting to recover, but it was very nasty indeed.

I have been loading all my photos onto the computer and reliving this very happy day.