This post is going to be mainly pictures with very few words since my brain is still a little overwhelmed with all the wonderful memories.

Firstly, we had absolutely beautiful weather. There were a couple of rain showers but considering that we were in Scotland in November, it was really dry and mild.

I was awake very early so sat and knitted while I watched the sun come up. You can’t really see it in this picture but I’m working on one of my Leyburn socks, of which I now have one and a half.

Then came the preparation: hair, makeup, little bit of champagne.

The ceremony went well and I managed not to cry. Since I’ve cried all the way through every other wedding I’ve been to, this was quite an achievement!

Nicki and Helen both looked gorgeous and we both really appreciated their help and support both before, during and after the day.

After the ceremony, we went outside for drinks and photographs and for Steven and I to be pelted with confetti.

The Myrtle leaf shawl matched my dress perfectly, especially considering that I bought the yarn online without having seen it in person and not having seen my dress for three months either.

Then we went inside where there were tables with origami centrepieces:

and cupcakes with origami flowers on the top cake:

Steven and I danced

and since we had forgotten to tell the band that we didn’t want the rest of the wedding party to join us for the first dance, the best man and bridesmaid were invited up to join us:

Fortunately, Nicki and Helen were excellent sports and, from what I could see, spent most of the dance in fits of laughter.

Then there was some more dancing,

followed by even more dancing

and then everyone went home.

Got married:

Went on honeymoon:

Did some knitting:

Uploaded some books to Project Gutenberg:

• Chelsea (The Fascination of London)
• The Chronicles of a Gay Gordon

and heard that I passed the two professional exams that I sat in April. I’m now one-third of the way towards being fully qualified!

More details on all of these (except the exams) to follow.

Steven’s blog.

We had a fantastic day and I’ll post more details, stories and pictures when we get back from honeymoon.

You will need:

• Beads (I used 2 glass beads and two seed beads to make the markers shown but you can use any quantity and combination that you like)
• Head-pins (1 per marker)

Start by threading your beads onto the head-pin. I started with a seed bead because the hole in my larger bead was large enough for the head-pin to slip straight through.

Once you have the beads threaded, bend the head-pin into a loop and thread the end back into the last bead that you threaded. You can do this in whatever way you like. I don’t mind if my loops aren’t perfect arcs so I just bend them around my thumb. You might prefer to use a pen or rod.

You now have a finished stitch-marker ready to use on your next project.

Have fun experimenting with different shapes and colours of beads.

November 11, 1918. The newspapers tell us that to-day the signal to “cease fire” will be given. This news is called “Official,” to give us assurance in the fog of myth. Maroons will explode above the City. Then we shall know it is the end of the War. We ought to believe it, because They tell us this; They who do everything for us–who order us what to think and how to act, arrange for our potatoes, settle the coming up and the going down of the sun, and who for years have been taking away our friends to make heroes of them, and worse. They have kept the War going, but now They are going to stop it. We shall know it is stopped when the rockets burst.

Yet “The War” has become a lethargic state of mind for us. We accepted it from the beginning with green-fly, influenza, margarine, calling-up notices, and death. It is as much outside our control as the precession of the equinoxes. We believed confidently in the tumultuous first weeks of the affair that mankind could not stand that strain for more than a few months; but we have learned it is possible to habituate humanity to the long elaboration of any folly, and for men to endure uncomplainingly racking by any cruelty that is devised by society, and for women to support any grief, however senselessly caused. Folly and cruelty become accepted as normal conditions of human existence. They continue superior to criticism, which is frequent enough though seldom overheard. The bitter mockery of the satirists, and even the groans of the victims, are unnoticed by genuine patriots. There seems no reason why those signal rockets should ever burst, no reason why the mornings which waken us to face an old dread, and the nights which contract about us like the strangle of despair, should ever end. We remember the friends we have lost, and cannot see why we should not share with them, in our turn, the punishment imposed by solemn and approved dementia. Why should not the War go on till the earth in final victory turns to the moon the pock-scarred and pallid mask which the moon turns to us?

I was looking, later this morning, at Charing Cross Bridge. It was, as usual, going south to the War. More than four years ago I crossed it on a memorable journey to France. It seemed no different to-day. It was still a Via Dolorosa projecting straight and black over a chasm. While I gazed at it, my mind in the past, a rocket exploded above it. Yes, I saw a burst of black smoke. The guns had ceased?

A tug passing under the bridge began a continuous hooting. Locomotives began to answer the tug deliriously. I could hear a low muttering, the beginning of a tempest, the distant but increasing shouting of a great storm. Two men met in the thoroughfare below my outlook, waved their hats, and each cheered into the face of the other.

Out in the street a stream of men and women poured from every door, and went to swell the main cataract which had risen suddenly in full flood in the Strand. The donkey-barrow of a costermonger passed me, loaded with a blue-jacket, a flower-girl, several soldiers, and a Staff captain whose spurred boots wagged joyously over the stern of the barrow. A motor cab followed, two Australian troopers on the roof of that, with a hospital nurse, her cap awry, sitting across the knees of one of them. A girl on the kerb, continuously springing a rattle in a sort of trance, shrieked with laughter at the nurse. Lines of people with linked arms chanted and surged along, bare-headed, or with hats turned into jokes. A private car, a beautiful little saloon in which a lady was solitary, stopped near me, and the lady beckoned with a smile to a Canadian soldier who was close. He first stared in surprise at this fashionable stranger, and then got in beside her with obviously genuine alacrity. The hubbub swelled and rolled in increasing delirium. Out of the upper windows of the Hotel Cecil, a headquarters of the Air Force, a confetti of official forms fell in spasmodic clouds. I returned soon to the empty room of an office where I was likely to be alone; because, now the War was over, while listening to the jollity of Peace which had just arrived, I could not get my thoughts home from France, and what they were I cannot tell.

Taken from “Waiting for Daylight,” by H. M. Tomlinson, 1922.

In the first lecture I attended on probability at university, the lecturer tried an experiment with us to show us how badly human beings understand and estimate probability. He asked us to do one of two things, toss a coin 50 times and write down the results or write down a series of results that could have come from tossing a coin 50 times. Meanwhile, he left the room for 10 minutes. When he returned, he asked people to show him their results and, in every case, he could tell from looking at the written results whether the person had actually tossed a coin or whether they had just written down some results.

The reason for this is that Nature is far more random than people think it is. For example, a coin landing on the same side 5 times in a row during 50 tosses is actually quite likely. However, this looks ‘wrong’ to people so they would never write this down as a possible series of results (unless they’ve encountered this experiment before!).

Similarly, people tend to notice and remember things that reinforce their world-view, the difference between the glass being half-empty and the glass being half-full.

The reason that I mention all of this is that I’m trying to convince myself that I haven’t been experiencing a run of unusually bad luck recently. Firstly, using the results of the first experiment, just because it feels like an unusually long run of bad things, doesn’t mean that it’s in anyway significant and things will probably balance themselves out in the end. Secondly, because bad things have been happening, I’m more likely to notice the bad things and dismiss good things as irrelevant when they do happen.

I should point out that nothing seriously bad has happened. I more appear to be the living embodiment of Murphy’s Law, in that anything that can go wrong has. Now, some of these things are in some way my fault, like getting on the wrong train and being 40 minutes late meeting Steven after work; some of them are at least partially Steven’s fault, like the car battery being flat so that I had to bring my wedding dress home from central London by public transport and some of them are just things that happened, like sitting on chewing gum on my way to a course last Monday morning.

I had decided this weekend that I was going to stop complaining about the world being out to get me and just get on with life while waiting for these things to stop happening.

Then I tried to get into work early this morning.

First, I got on a train, which travelled to the next station where it stopped and an announcement was made that it was going to be held indefinitely since a passenger had been taken ill. So I got off the train. As I made my way along the platform to switch to the Docklands Light Railway instead, they suddenly announced that the train was leaving, shut the doors and left. Undeterred, I decided to stick with my plan to take the DLR since there had been various other problems with mainline trains this morning. I get to the DLR station, get on a train, it leaves and three stations down the line they announce that the station I want to go to has been closed because of a security alert, the train will be stopping at a station that is still a couple of miles from where I need to get to and that I should change at Canary Wharf to get the Underground. So, I change at Canary Wharf, can’t get on the first Underground train that comes because there’s no space but get on the second one without having to wait too long. That travels almost all the way to the next station where it is announced that there are going to be severe delays to the journey because of a passenger being taken ill on another train.

Now, I realise that Londoners like to complain about transport and I’m certainly proving no exception to the stereotype but I live 6 miles from the office and what is usually a 45 minute trip took 2 hours. I could have walked it in that time.

The only rational explanation is that the world really is out to get me and until someone can convince me otherwise I’m going to go hide under a rock.