Last year I said I’d:

• Run another marathon.
• Write some more.
• Enjoy my new job and life in SF.

Well, I’ll score that a two out of three. Yes, I ran the marathon, but I stopped halfway (oh, the hills!); I didn’t really blog any more; but yes I enjoyed life in SF. Sometimes life makes things difficult, but my amazing wife and I got through it together.

We started the year in an empty apartment, sleeping on the floor, not knowing anyone in the city. By the end, I feel we’ve settled in and started to make friends.

This year I have:

• Had cataract surgery. (again)
• Passed my Driving Test. (again)
• Been visited by both mothers and both brothers.
• Launched a Follow Button and Web Intents.
• Tinkered with various aspects of twitter.com.
• Seen Buzz Aldrin, Snoop Dogg, Lady Gaga, and various others come in to the office to see where we work, and thank us.
• Been given free pretzels, trainers, earplugs, ice-cream, online music and books, just because I work at Twitter.
• Not been in a plane.
• Not been to England.
• Had but a single weekend away, on the other side of the bay.
• Become a dad.

Next year I plan to:

• Take it easy.
• Enjoy my new life and job new job and life in SF.

And I think that’s enough for 2012.

This project has turned out to be far more complicated than I ever imagined it could be, and so during development, my wife and I agreed to keep our news offline until the launch.

Now we’ve hit 1.0, and we’ve come to like the privacy. So we’re going to keep this one to ourselves, and enjoy ourselves without needing to overshare all the details all over Facebook and Twitter.

We’ve discovered a new respect for everyone who’s been through this development cycle before. Parents are heroes.

Let me know by email if you want to know more.

First up, you’ve also got a savings account. That’s money you’ve put away – you’re quite proud of that. But the truth? You failed. You spent it.

Because you’ve borrowed money on a credit card. You don’t realize how daft it is that you pay a huge amount of interest to the bank each year, because it’s only a tenner or so each month, so you don’t notice how it adds up.

£ 178m is paid in personal interest in the UK every day.

Effectively, you’ve borrowed money on your credit card from the bank, and then you put that money back in the bank. You’ve developed an ingenious scheme for giving money to banks.

Average household debt in the UK is about £ 8,076 (excluding mortgages).

Spend your “savings” on paying off your debt. Be honest with yourself. Because nobody made you borrow that money, on that credit card of yours. That was you.

This is just an example of the way that you, you personally, got us into the economic mess we find ourselves in.

You see, there’s really only two ways to make money: work and risk. Obviously you can earn money through your job, that’s real money. And then you can invest or gamble your money to increase that sum.

An investment in property is generally considered a low-risk investment. With low risk comes small reward. You won’t make much money, but you’re also unlikely to lose much. If you live in the house you own, you also reduce the risk that your rent will fluctuate. A sound investment.

But property still obeys the laws of supply and demand. When there’s problems in the stock market, many investors will sell their shares to invest in property, reducing their exposure to an unpredictable stock market. This demand drives property prices up, which makes property investments seem even more attractive. And of course, this brings yet more investment.

After a few years, your house has doubled in value. On paper, you’re in the money. Naturally you want that feel of that green between your fingers. So you remortgage your house, getting cash out now. In return, you’ve got a low rate on a loan.

But wait, where did that money come from? You had a property, and now you’ve got property and a big wad of cash. That cash didn’t appear from nowhere – you didn’t win the lottery. What happened was that you exchanged cash for increased risk on your property.

You took that cash and bought another property. Buy-to-let they call it. You get a mortgage on a house, and pay that mortgage off with the rent you receive from the tenant. After twenty years, you’ll basically have a free house.

Again, this house has simply come at the cost of increased exposure to risk. Your buy-to-let is only feasible if the rent income is greater than the mortgage costs. Those costs are dependent on the mortgage interest rate. Also, you assume your property will increase in value.

If there is increased confidence in the stock market, investors will tend to reduce their investments in property to find greater flexibility and returns from stocks and shares.

Supply and demand comes into effect once again. As demand drops, so will prices, albeit slowly. You might find yourself in negative equity as the property value drops lower than the amount you borrowed to buy it. With low demand, you’ll have difficulty selling up. Should rent demand drop or mortgage rates increase during this period, you, and millions like you, will be in huge trouble.

331 people every day of the year will be declared insolvent or bankrupt. This is equivalent to 1 person every 60 seconds during a working day.

And of course, huge trouble doesn’t work out well for the banks either. Foreclosing on a loan means cancelling the repayment of a huge percentage of the debt. As they do so, tax revenues drop, and the whole country falls into difficulties. That is why the governments are spending billions to prop up the property values and keep interest rates down.

£ 20.71m of loans is written off each day by banks & building societies.

Yup, it’s all for you. We’ve put ourselves into twenty years of debt because we can’t let you go bankrupt. I didn’t do that. You did that.

And the bankers of course. They did that. But how they did that, and why they did that, are because of you.

You see, investment bankers basically gamble with money. However, they’ve found a clever way to cheat the system, because they don’t gamble with their own money. They gamble with other people’s money, and take a percentage of the winnings. When they lose, they don’t actually lose a dime.

So whose money do they risk? Pension funds, on the whole. These investment giants are big movers on the stock market. The managers of pension funds are paid reasonably well for their jobs – “reasonable”, based on the standard market rate. The standard rate is based on the pay of the famous “fat cat” company directors, whose pay is decided by themselves, but must be confirmed by their shareholders at the annual AGM. Of course, it is the pension funds who are the biggest shareholders, represented by the pension fund managers themselves, and so executive pay rises are rarely disputed.

The value of assets held in UK-funded pensions was £ 1.92 trillion in 2009 (138 per cent of GDP).

The Pension Fund is a curious animal in that regard. The money in your pension is your money. Earned by you, saved by you. The only problem is that you can’t get your hands on it, and you have no influence over the investments it makes. You get no say at the company meetings where your pension is invested. You can’t refuse to pay bonuses to your fund managers in a year where your pension halved in value. It is money without worth.

Your pension is one area where you let everybody down. It’s your money paying the bankers, the fat cats, the expenses bills in swanky wine bars. You did that. I didn’t.

You see, the truth is that you don’t need a pension. Invest instead in bricks and mortar. Something you can see and feel and touch and trust. A property investment is the exact opposite of a pension fund – for the majority of the time, you get all the control, but the money is invested by the bank.

All you have to do is leave it be. When property prices rocket, don’t get carried away. Just smile smugly to yourself with your paper riches and just keep steadily paying your mortgage. When prices drop again, you’ll still have a roof over your head. When you’re eighty, then sell it and move on. It’s only a house, but there’s money in those bricks. Real money, money you worked for.

Voting with your feet like this is the best way to take control. Stop whinging that you didn’t get a say. This was actually your fault all along. Let’s learn your lessons from this debacle of yours, and grow up.

Finally, a suggestion for the manifesto. Because you see, a property is not quite like a pension. A pension has tax exemptions and employer matching, designed to help you put money away for the future, to stop you from frittering it away like so many credit cards.

Let us treat our house like our pension. Give us the same benefits as pensions, with the same lockins, but put us in control.

Because money is all about control. And I intend to hang on to mine.

http://www.creditaction.org.uk/helpful-resources/debt-statistics.html
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=1282

Eggs

American eggs are white.  There are thousands of egg-polishers employed to shine them up.  This may seem silly, but they break more easily into two halves, and just look nicer.  It is surprisingly difficult to find free-range eggs though, and this is sad.

Grids

I’m sold.  All cities should be made on grids. It’s just so much easier to navigate.  While we don’t have so many numbers streets and avenues as Manhattan, it’s still much easier to get around.  Please bulldoze Europe and start again.

Tube

There’s an underground system here called the BART.  It runs, but I don’t take it.  We live close enough to the action not to need it, and for this I’m eternally grateful.  While I’m sure the London Underground is a very clever system for moving millions of people from A to B and back to A again, it is also a sweaty smelly dirty hellhole which the average Londoner spends 2 unpaid hours a day in.

Weather

It’s not so much that the weather is better here (especially recently), but there is more light.  It doesn’t get so dark in the winter, and the roads are so big that the sky just seems overwhelmingly huge.  It’s not that the sky is bluer (though it probably is), but I can see so much more of it.

Fat

Americans are not fat.  Not in San Francisco anyway.  Sure, you’ll find a few living mountains in Las Vegas, but I’d say the average San Franciscan is 10% thinner than the average Londoner (whatever that is).

Breakfast

The English Breakfast is internationally agreed to be the finest breakfast in the world.  But here you can also have pancakes, french toast, bottomless coffee, crispy bacon, maple syrup and a hundred other options, leaving the typical English Breakfast looking like a greasy pile of swill.  Breakfasts here are taken seriously, and are a big deal.

Tips

Seems a bit funny to tip in a bar the first few times.  But it’s the done thing.  In London, you’re often served by a non-English speaking miserable mope, if they can be bothered.  In America, the service is usually friendly, courteous and helpful.  I wonder if there’s a connection?

ID

So they ID everywhere.  It’s not personal.  Carry ID, flash a card, get over it.  In London, you only get ID’ed if the bar staff don’t like the look of you.  It’s inconsistent and infuriating.

Brands

It’s hard to get by in your first few months because everything from washing powder to face cream is branded differently.  What’s good and what’s not?  Who’s the Colgate and who’s the Crest?  You don’t know.  But really, it never mattered anyway, did it?

Beer

The beer here is tasty, cool, refreshing and generally excellent. There is hardly any Budweiser to be seen, nor the typical English Carling, Carlsberg, Fosters, Stella or any of the other weak-tasting identical lagers.

So what do we miss about London?  The tube, the fireplace, the pubs, the gardens?
Not really.

Just our family and friends.  Hopefully they’ll come to visit.

This year had ups and downs. The downs are no fun, so let’s focus on the ups.
This year I have:

• Built a Formula1 website for some pirates, and won an award.
• Passed my Driving Test
• Got stuck in the Canary Islands for four extra days, due to volcanic activity in Iceland.
• Worked for the Government.
• Flown to San Francisco for just 48 hours, for an interview.
• Got a new job at Twitter.
• Had the whole house repainted, only to move straight out of it.
• Moved to San Francisco in California.
• Built a couple of fun experiments.

Looking back to last year’s goals, I’ve scored about 50%. I passed my driving test and had some more fun coding (especially for McLaren), but failed to learn any Polish at all. Ah well. I’ve managed to land a new job and new life quite unexpectedly. Sometimes the best things in life are the ones you don’t see coming.

Next year I plan to:

• Run another marathon.
• Write some more.
• Enjoy my new job and life in SF.

Fairly modest ambitions I reckon. But hey, we’ve only just got here, and our stuff still hasn’t arrived yet. Give us time…

I’ve always harboured a desire to move to California. The promise of better weather holds sway in my subconscious, and the Americans have some ways of doing things that just seem right. Of course, it’s not without its problems too – applying for visas took a great deal longer than I expected. We’d planned on a moving date, which we couldn’t make, and had to move all our possessions into some expensive storage while we camped out at my parents’ house for six weeks, or in metric, nine eternities.

Speaking of metric, they don’t have that here. I don’t mind really – the English switch to the metric system is a bit half-arsed. We still deal in miles for distance. Hell we measure weight in stones, which is surely the most imperial measure ever (equivalent to fourteen pounds, depending on what you’re weighing). And we’ll go ahead and measure temperature in Fahrenheit when it’s hot, because it sounds better (You can’t say “ooh, it’s a scorching 37 degrees out there.”) We know about inches, sure, but we know better than to use them in science. We know about kilometres too, but we think they’re a bit French. Basically, the English are double-dating both sides, and are comfortable with either.

Dates, though, the dates. God, the dates. They put the month first. I can’t see it as anything other than absolute lunacy. I’d accept any of their dodgy measures, even fluid ounces, if they’d agree to wake up and switch to a dd/mm/yyyy system. I’d go further – I’ll agree to drop the ‘u’ in colour. And humour. And flavour. And yes, ok, even favourite. It’ll be a wrench, but we’ll accept that – just use normal dates. More, I’ll give more. Tell you what, you can have Prince Charles. I think the Queen would agree to it. You can just have him. Send him to dinners or something. No more to be said – you guys switch dates, we’ll hand him over, and we’ll start saying ‘howdy’ and ‘bucks’ and ‘douchebag’.

Ok, I’ve started ranting. I didn’t mean to rant, I meant to write up the move here. I could rant about the thin-walled buildings with hardwood floors that keep us awake at night, or the funny victorian steam filled radiators that have no controls that whistle, or the laundries in the basements rather than the kitchen, or the weird half-inch gaps in American toilet doors that let you see out. But I’m determined to be positive, so I’ll keep quiet. Pretend I never said anything…

We’ve found ourselves in a temporary apartment in the Marina of San Francisco. It’s a nice, quiet neighbourhood, next to Fort Mason park, which has beautiful views of the Golden Gate bridge and Alcatraz. We’ve just managed to find a more permanent apartment just across the road, so the move will be easy, but then our full belongings won’t arrive until early January anyway, since they’re coming by boat. We decided that this would be a proper move, so we moved as much as we could. And since the printer-cartridge security issue last month, they cancelled air shipments, so everything went on the boat. But we’re doing ok with what we have.

I’ve managed to get a Social Security Number, and a bank account. We’ve found things are easy if you learn the lingo, fill in the right documents and go at the right times, to avoid queues. American forms, on the whole, are a usability nightmare, boxes all over the place, but you get used to it. Getting a driving license seems a bit more tricky, especially since I’ve only just passed my test at home. It’s not so important though, so I’m happy to wait a bit.

Twitter itself is proving a fantastic place to work. I haven’t really worked in any of the large online brands before, like Facebook, Digg, or Google. Lots of other new starters have, so the free (good quality, cooked) lunch, free drinks fridges, evening pizza and beer, and so forth is nothing new to them. For me, it’s great: I don’t have to go out to find a decent latte (though I do have to make it), I don’t need to run to the nearest, dodgiest sandwich shop.

The guys who work at Twitter really know their stuff and the communication is unbelievable. It’s one of the things they’re really keen on, to trust your colleagues. You have to switch mindset from the usual, “I don’t know this guy, he’s going to be an idiot who ruins my project” to “I don’t know this guy. Maybe he can add something.” It’s weird. But also genius.

The first week was new hire orientation. It was great to have a full week dedicated to seeing how the company worked, and what the other teams did. The next two weeks I’ve spent getting the hang of the codebase, and fixing a few basic bugs. It’s been good.

Twitter is often in the headlines for one thing or another, or sometimes nothing at all. So you’ll probably find I talk about it less. But hopefully, now I don’t spent two hours a day on the tube to work, I’ll be able to do some things besides work, and I’ll be able to talk about that instead. I’ve already signed up for the marathon here.

I can run to work. It’s amazing. It takes me about 30-40 mins to run in. I skirt around the coast to keep the run flat (since I have to carry my work clothes on my back), and to avoid the red traffic lights. As I run into town, I run towards the spectacular Bay Bridge, then turn in to the city just before I reach it. On the way home, I come up a short hill at the end to see the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance, across the park. It’s a beautiful run, and a great way to burn off the excess free-food calories.

So that was a bit rambling, but in summary: work:good, flat:good, food:good, living:good, arcane date system:bad. Overall, we’re very happy here.

The door is everywhere. To call it common is an injustice – it is as ubiquitous as the air we breathe, the water we drink, the taxes we owe. It is in our homes, our offices, our transport. It keeps us safe while we sleep, while we drive. It is our protection against the room next door, and the world outside.

The door is part of our vocabulary, our language. We “open doors”, we “close a deal”. We have an “open door policy”. We swing them open, we slam them shut. The door is our slave and our servant. The door is our bitch.

But the door is also our enemy. It attacks us, it frustrates us, it makes us look like fools.

The Toilet Door

The toilet door is my nemesis, the number one on my list of dastardly doors. And I’m not even talking about the cubicle door, that never gives you enough room to close without brushing your legs against the outside of the toilet bowl.

Nor even, the American cubicle door, starting a mighty three feet from the ground to allow full thigh viewing from urinal alley, and the inch-wide gap between the door and walls. One wonders whether Americans in public toilets in England feel lonely in their out-of-sight claustrophobic boxes. But these are not my primary concern.

My target is the exit door. The exit door? you ask. The exit door, I nod.

When leaving the toilet, or bathroom, or restroom, or outhouse, or water-closet, or so forth, the typical gentleman (for this is all I am permitted to observe), will customarily choose one of the following options. He will either wash his hands, or he will not wash his hands.

I shall not question the wisdom of the non-washers. Presumably they believe their hands to be unsullied by their efforts, usually involved in a mere “reveal-tug-dangle” gesture followed by the “tug-shake-tuck”. An inspection of the spray-deck in the men’s urinals does not reassure me that hands are quite as sanitary as their conscience. But I do not judge, I shall simply note that this practice exists and is commonplace.

A washer, indeed myself, would avail himself of the facilities, providing of course, and this is not always the case, that the washing facilities are cleaner than the sewage facilities. Equipment provided is usually an unpleasant soap, scaldingly hot water in one tap, lukewarm water in another tap, based around a basin area. The controls on the taps are judged to encourage the maximum use of water, such that there will always be one tap running for no apparent reason, which is impossible to shut off.

Once hands are adequately washed, one would look for the hand-drying facilities. These are allocated on a ratio of one drying unit to every three washing units, on the basis of physics completely unknown to science: that it is quicker to dry your hands than to wet them. The drying units will have been provided further back into the toilet area, to encourage awkward confrontations with other toiletting members of the public, and to generally persuade the user into joining the wet-hands-exit, wipe-on-trousers masses.

Further encouragement into this camp is provided by the drying unit. This has a fifty percent chance of existing, a forty percent chance of working, and a ten percent chance of actually doing any drying, since models manufactured before 2005 seemed to be modelled on the average drunk’s morning breath. Of course, you may just have one of those clever Dyson units, which are really neat but still leave a few drops on the fingertips don’t they?

Doors, doors, I’m coming back to doors. The exit of a toilet is always, always, always a pull door. Always.

Why. Why why why. I’ve just spent four seconds exquisitely washing, and four hours slowly drying, my clean clean hands. And now you’re asking me to grab hold of a door handle that has been held by every “tug-shake-tugger” and “wet-hand-wiper” who’s ever been in here.

That handle is never cleaned either. When the attendant (not a cleaner, never a cleaner), when the attendant comes to check the facilities, he (or she) will wedge the door open with their mop-bucket, and give a quick wipe to the spray deck. But we know they never check behind the opened door. That’s why that cock you drew in 2005 is still on that cubicle door over there. Wasn’t funny then, isn’t funny now.

To make matters worse, there’s often two doors as well. In case you waited long enough for someone else to come in (don’t ever try that), you’d still have the second to contend with. Your hands will be soiled when you head back to your table, and your hamburger/nuts/asparagus/finger food. It’s disgusting.

It’s disgusting and the door is at fault. Remove the door. Or let them be pushed, so I can kick it open. Either way, when we all die of goldfish-flu, this blog post is my “I told you so”.

CorriDoors

See what I did there? Clever, isn’t it. But not as clever as the build regulations that state that fire doors must be installed throughout buildings, and that those doors need to be closed at all times.

Which gives us the corridor doors. Harmless enough, just a barrier between you and where you want to be. Just give them a push.

Or is it a pull?

Hope it’s a push anyway, I mean, I’m carrying an armful of stuff.

But, hey, it’s got a handle. It’s a pull. One of those simple, clear, obvious rules of life. Right?

Wrong. Fifty percent of the time, your average push door is going to have a handle. Why? We don’t know. Maybe they’re future-proofing against change. Maybe the unions are in on it. In fact, if the door swings both ways, it’s even more likely to have handles. And most people will pull the doors, which is both awkward, and inconvenient. And unbelieveably, even though they pull to go through it one way, and pull to go through the other way, most people will never realize the doors go both ways. At this point, the door is looking cleverer than we are.

And one more point lost by humanity, to the door, is locks. Not the bold padlock, or the fancy chubb. No, I mean the slot locks at the top and bottom of the door. For we all know that when opening a set of doors in any building, the caretaker, janitor, or security guy will only ever open one of the two. God knows why – maybe they only see the doors at night, when they’re used by one person at a time. Next thing you know, you’ve got a hundred people pushing on both sides, before trying to squeeze through, ten abreast. Certainly at my school it was a regular scrum to get between classes, there’d be a cry of “bundle!” and a whiff of Hillsborough in the morning. This is how I lost all my teeth. True story.

Automatic doors

What an amazing invention it is, the automatic door. Sliding briskly aside as we approach, it is hard to believe that this work-driven slave to our presence could be a bad omen.

It is more of a trojan horse. For you never know how long it’ll take to open. And it’s always slightly longer than you’d like. Maybe the sensors are just waiting for you to get close enough, so you have to pause, wait, and then go on. It’s winding us up, little by little.

Either that, or they’re waaay too sensitive. You want to hang around in the warmth of the hotel lobby? Sure, but you’ll get looks, because even a hundred yards into this room, and you’re keeping the doors open. The doors will alert other visitors to this faux-pas, by inching in slightly, as if to say “have you moved yet”, before opening again. They’re playing a game, and they always win.

Lift doors, or elevators to our American friends, are widely know to be evil incarnate. Who knows what will appear behind those doors? Will there be a lift car, or will we fall to oblivion? Will they close at all, without us squeezing uncomfortably backwards into a lawsuit from Debbie in Accounts? This is why we face forward. We need to keep an eye on the door, but we also need to be able to push backwards without going face to face.

Automatic doors may not be killers, but they will add to your stress levels in a thousand different ways.

Door Etiquette

In this brave new world of unwritten etiquette, it is the men who suffer most. Do we buy dinner without asking, or should we split it. The success of the date depends on it. If she suggests splitting it, do we refuse? And if so, how many times? And the only thing we know for certain is that we’re not going home without paying something. It’s a lose-lose situation.

And so it is with the door. In days gone by, it would be appropriate to hold the door for a lady. Nay, it would be appropriate to open the door with gusto, and to wave the lady through.

Now, we’re in a quagmire. We all try to hold the door. Even when it’s not actually convenient. Especially when it’s not convenient. We hold it for guys, girls, and in case we can’t see anyone, a passing breath of air. I am not even going to cover the long distance holders, for whom you must race to be helped, for I think they’ve been dealt with repeatedly.

But it’s madness. Every time someone opens a door for me and waves me through I feel like wrenching out his throat and hanging it from the door frame. It’s a door, not a ten tonne weight! I’ve got it. I’ve got it.

Am I carrying heavy bags? No. Am I in some way unable to open the door myself? No. Am I wearing a hot dress that you’ve like to check out from the back? Not usually! Let me handle the door myself, and get out of my way!

The worst cretins, the real bastards, are the guys who try to hold a door open from the wrong side, while standing in it. I don’t even credit them with a throat-ripping. I give them a “what kind of plant life are you” look, and send them straight to hell. Girls, it doesn’t just happen to you (though I bet it’s a lot more frequent), it happens to everyone.

Let’s just agree now. You want to go through a door, go through it. After you’ve gone through, if someone else is about, just hold it open a second longer (just one!), and let go. Your friend has it from there.

It’s a door. We can take it on alone. It won’t kill us (unless it’s a toilet door). It won’t hurt us (unless we’re getting slammed by an automatic). It can’t chop us into tiny little pieces (unless it’s a revolving door). It’s no obstacle (unless it’s a corridoor). And we can get through it together (unless you’re holding it for me).

Or we can just move to Hawaii, where they don’t need doors. Personally, I’m on the next plane.

• Got married!!!
• Been to Hawaii on Honeymoon
• Flown over an active volcano in a helicopter
• Been to my brother’s wedding in a barn
• Been to my friend’s wedding in a hotel
• Graduated from a second BSc (in silly robes)
• Submitted a Chrome Experiment (fireworks)
• Rebuilt the company’s website
• Left my job for bigger and better things
• Painted the bathroom (no more green!)
• Been assaulted and robbed
• Given my auntie a cool new website and POS system
• Gone to Wales, Hawaii, Holland, Minsk and Brussels
• Run a successful hack day
• Sold dog food, credit cards, hair-loss cures, cars, banners, and clever things I can’t talk about.
• Won an award for last year’s work.

Next year I’m planning to:

• Learn Polish (at last!)
• Pass my driving test
• Have a lot more fun coding

Compare to last year’s effort here:
http://kenneth.kufluk.com/blog/2008/12/this-year-i-have/

How was your 2009?  And what do you have planned for 2010?

Leg of Lamb

I was most impressed by the way the Manor staff brought out everyone’s main course at once. I’m not sure what size oven they’ve got, but they managed to produce 65-ish sizable legs of lamb all at the same time.

The food was the main reason we chose this place. We wanted to make sure people were well fed, as it’s so common to find yourself with a cheesey canapé trying to last you for the whole day.

The main wedding meal is called the Wedding Breakfast. This is ridiculous.

After the lamb was done, and after we’d popped out for a quick breather, we went from table to table to have some of those awkward half-chats you have. It’s fun: no-one is allowed to say “what were you thinking, putting me with these nutters?”. But I hope everyone was well placed. There were certainly no obvious fighting.

We’d spent a long time trying to sit people together. You write everyone’s name on a scrap of paper, then place them on a tabletop, and try to group them together. Where you have gaps, you stick babies, and where there are not enough babies, you have space for people to see and the room to breathe. And once you’ve got it all sorted, someone will drop out and you have to start again.

We were happy with the result though, and to my deep satisfaction, we managed to get, mostly through chance than design, a table that went “Jamie, Amy, Jamie, Jennie, Jamie, Nicola and Andrew”. Not sure what the last two were doing there, but I bet they had fun introducing each other.
Andrew was lucky. For three weeks beforehand he’d been sitting with our auntie as punishment for not bringing a girlfriend, and escaped in the final rearrangement. (Rhona was lucky too – she escaped sitting next to a computer geek).

Having visited half the tables, dessert suddenly arrived, and needed eating. I remember we were given a choice of champagne syllabub, lemon cheesecake or chocolate cake. The chocolate was going to be avoided as too obvious, but was just too good to lose. Lots of people who would normally make excuses, had that dessert.

Cutting the cake

Once all traces of the dessert were gone, Keith came over with the microphone, ready to ask everyone to come into the main room to watch us cut the cake. Naturally, I took this task on myself. My wedding, my microphone, remember.

It was much harder calling people to order than I expected. I think I actually said, “oi. shut up at the back!”. I’ll never be a schoolteacher.

Our photographer, keen as ever to stay out of our way, got his photo taken before everyone else came out. CLICK. One snap. Done.

We were at a bit of a loss. At Bernard’s wedding the photographer had been there for hours with the cake shot. I expected more somehow.

So we posed with the cake. Do we cut the top or the bottom? (Hint for those about to do this: This would be a good thing to work out beforehand). We cut, we did it. People took photos. We stood nervously – not sure what to do next.

I went to ask the photographer if he needed anything else. nono, he says.

So, the moment that everyone had been waiting for. As they took the cake away to be cut, we prepared for the Polonaise.

The Polonaise

The Polonaise is probably the easiest dance in the world. It goes like this. As though walking: Step. Step. Long step. Repeat.

It is a dance that has a specific rhythm, and is well-known. It was danced by royalty in the middle ages in Poland, and across the continent.
It is a group dance. You dance in pairs.

We had planned to practise the Polonaise the evening before. Agnieszka had explained the principles to me, but I’d never done it as a group before, and yet it was my job to lead the dance. This was a little worrying.

Getting married is full of moments like this. You just get through them one at a time. The suit. The vows. The photos. The speech. The cake. The dance. And so on. As you do each one, a little load comes off, and you start to worry about the next one.

I took the microphone and attempted to explain the dance. Agnieszka and Shiff were going through the motions as I explained. Agnieszka demonstrated the wonderful decorations that one could do to embellish the dance. Everyone smiled. I wanted another couple to walk behind them to demonstrate better. So I asked if someone could line up behind them. The entire room did so.

It was amazing. Instead of four people, we had crocodile rows going to the back of the room, curving round, and coming halfway back up the room. My first thought was to say “nonono, let’s just start with 6″. But then I decided to just let it play out. I’m glad I did.

I took my place at the front with my new wife, and we started. The band had learnt the tune and were ready. We began, and led off. As we get to the front of the room, we turn off and head towards the back. When we got to the back of the room, we made an arch, and the next couple went under. They then made an arch, and the next couple went through both. Soon we had a room full of arches, so we led off again, going through the arches, and around the room.

It got brilliantly chaotic. As there were more people than there was length of the room, then people were turning off here and there, creating arches, then setting off again. We went around and around, laughing all the way, and no-one knew what was going on. Eventually, we gave the nod to Pete, who wrapped up the music (which I think was ending anyway), and everyone finished and applauded.

First Dance

As the room cleared away, I took the microphone again, and thanked everyone for their efforts: “I think that was exactly how it was done by royalty in the middle ages”. The microphone went back to the singer, and we were ready for the First Dance.

Ok, so you’re thinking that this isn’t the first dance, it’s the second dance. This is really not the point, and you’ll never be good marriage material. This is the First Dance of the married couple. Together and alone.

And it is also what is, to many the scariest moment, because you have to dance in front of all your mates. To this end, couples often have a dance routine organised, but we were agreed that this is dafter than calling your dinner “breakfast”.

You know what? It was easy. The band were awesome, the floor was smooth (my new shoes slid nicely), and there’s nothing quite like dancing with the most beautiful woman in the world in front of everyone you know.

So much so that we just carried right on into the second song.

We’d practised dancing before, with a few tango lessons (which are great). But I’d never danced with anyone in a wedding dress before. You have to go backwards all the time, instead of forwards, because when you do that you just tread on her dress. It’s a different ball game (an analogy probably very rarely used by dancers).

The Band

The band carried on playing as we retired from the floor, and others took our place. They played a mixture of jazz tunes, and were really amazing. If anyone is ever getting married, they need to speak to my cousin Pete. He was the most reassured and confident person I spoke to before the wedding. We sent him new songs to learn, which he did perfectly. He got us a band together exactly to our specifications, and it sounded great. Even just standing outside (the rain had cleared), and listening to it echo around, was like a dream. It was exactly right.

There were now people everywhere. The smokers and chatters were outside, the dancers were in the main room, the eaters were clearing away the cake and extra nibbles in the oak room. The sitters and gossips were in the blue room on sofas.

We had a free bar, but our wedding was never about drinking alcohol. The tab wasn’t close to finished by the end of the night. Howard came and asked me if we wanted to include spirits on the tab, and I decided against – no depressing rounds of sambuca or vodka for us.

We’ve been to weddings where the noise from the DJ is impenetrable. You have to drink 12 pints before you can move across the room without vibrating to the noise. We were keen for this not to happen.

At nine, the band finished, and we set up for the disco. I detest professional DJs with a passion, so we’d rented some kit from the unlikeliest of streets in the heart of Walthamstow village. We had disco lights and big speakers, with a decent amp. It was great stuff, running off Agnieszka’s Mac. And she chose the songs well, keeping everyone happy for hours.
(The bloke in the shop couldn’t really believe I didn’t want a CD player, but seriously who buys CDs these days? I won’t have them in the house.)

As Agnieszka performed for the dance floor, I went through to the Blue Room to chat and eat cake. It was a long day, and I don’t have the strongest of legs. It was good to chat to people.

To the games room

At midnight (or shortly thereafter), the manor closed down. We had to move on, though most people went to bed. The last of us (Bernard & Louise, Howard, Kevin and Beata, Agnieszka2 & her husband, and Alice) went on to the Games Room, playing snooker, pool and air hockey for another hour or two, sipping beer from tins. It was a nice way to wind down at the end of the day.

To sleep

And indeed on to the honeymoon, and the rest of our lives. Maybe I’ll write up the honeymoon in Hawaii. What do you think?

We’d like to thank everyone involved in making our wedding fantastic. Everyone who came, everyone who helped out, everyone who danced, everyone who sang (I’ve forgotten about singing Sto Lat at dinner!), everyone who was there for us. To the driver, the waiters, the chef and the cooks, to the bar staff, the security staff, and that funny woman on reception. To the Best Men and Maid of Honour. To my mum who made the wedding cake, to Agnieszka’s mum who helped her get ready. To both our families for supporting us all the way. We thank you.

I have been planning to write another post, about what it’s like on a day-to-day basis without any episodes, but 2 weeks ago or so, I felt tired again.
It’s got worse, and I’m now off work (something I really try hard to avoid). I’d write something about how it feels, but I’m knackered, my hands are shaking, I can’t concentrate.
Going to see the doctor at 8.45am tomorrow.
Currently drifting about the house, wanting to do useful things, but completely incapable. Arg.

I’ll try and mentally write a good post about it ready for when I can type it up.