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We all had a pretty fab time in Leeds, by my reckoning, and despite the fact we spend every Monday to Friday together it was fun spending a weekend with the rest of the team.

We were all staying in the same hotel - the hotel in which the wedding was taking place - so it was inevitable we should bump into each other as we checked in over the course of the afternoon. After a long but fairly smooth journey up, Paul and I arrived around four, which left little time for anything than a quick change, some room-service pizza and then a brush of the teeth before meeting up with Chris of the Phin and heading down in our jackets and suits to the third floor.

Chris of the Brennan was there already; he and Danny, his best man, wearing very fetching pink ties. It seemed barely a moment later that it was all done. We took our seats - MacUser split across the aisle - for a ceremony that lasted just 15 minutes. Short and sweet and to the point, and pretty much a perfect example of how a wedding should be. They posed for their pictures with Leeds as the backdrop behind them, and then we all decamped for champagne and speeches and dinner on the floor below.

It was quite strange being in Leeds, somehow. We have all heard Chris of the Brennan tell us so many stories of what it was like growing up there, and particularly of his nights at Flares, the nightclub across the road from the hotel, which proved to be a source of considerable amusement to us all.

It’s the first one you get to after stumbling out of the station, so there was a steady stream of people wandering in and out. Pretty much everyone seemed to be part of a hen party or stag do. It was de riggeur - from the looks of things - to arrive in either a stretch limo or police van (as Pippa rightly pointed out, that was all that seemed to be going past at any time) and as the night went on you were expected to get more and more drunk.

The highlight of the night, though, has to have been the first dance. Chris had been keeping the song very secret from us all for the last two months, and we have played pretty much every song in the library at work trying to work out what it was. We did play it - once - but discounted it out of hand, convinced it was just too unusual to be the right one.

It was You Never Can Tell, by Chuck Berry. The song from the infamous dance scene in Pulp Fiction.

They carried it off with style - even managing to do the whole sweeping of fingers past the eyes moves. I didn’t catch that bit, but I did snap a short video of part of it with my camera, which I have compressed to smithereens to make it fit on the web. Click play…

The trip up went well. I’d still have preferred going by train

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 26th, 2005 at 6:55 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.