Weddings aren't really my favourite things in the world.

Being in a church for anything other than admiring the stonework is also an experience I try and avoid as often as possible.

Combining the two in such a way that a wedding is part of a nearly two hour church service is probably my personal idea of hell. Strangely then, the last two days have actually been quite good fun.

I've been up in the grey north since Friday to attend N and F's wedding (I went up a day early to help with the set-up. Gosh, aren't I good?). I've known both of them since their first day at Bristol University (over 10 years ago :-S) when I got famously drunk with N on his first evening in the hall bar whilst I was visiting some old friends still at university. The next night I was chatting - to in my mind, up in her's - F and she called over her boyfriend to save her, only it was N so he and I went off to drink more and play darts leaving her alone all night. She never really forgave me for that :)

So they finally tied the knot after a seven year engagement and the wedding was cool. I drank a lot with all the guys from the stag-do and made some new friends amongst the guys and gals who hadn't been with us in Edinburgh. It was also great to catch up again with Joanne who I hadn't seen since N's 21st birthday party. Since I last saw her she'd married an investment banker of sorts and was now a high-flying barrister in the British Virgin Islands while he commutes to and from New York. It's always nice to see people you like do well for themselves :)

Plus I also ate a HUGE amount. N and I are both big on cooking and would occasionally do dinner parties together for lots of people when they still lived in Bristol. Therefore I knew the food would be good, but it was excellent. I don't think I'll eat again until Tuesday!

One of N's oldest mates, who I'll call O, had something of a breakdown at the stag-do in the early hours of the Saturday morning and we'd all been concerned for him since then. So it was great to see him pulling himself out of the cycle of depression he'd found himself in and start to move on with his life, and he and Chris (who'd flown in from Sydney especially) were on top form all weekend and had me in stitches at the reception.

And I even joined in the Ceilidh dancing 8-/ (though that was mainly so I could dance with Lina the 6ft swedish ex-model who works with F. The fact that she was single and looking for a guy F 'neglected' to tell me until after Lina had left - probably to spare me making an arse out of myself, she was so far out of my league it wasn't funny!)

Outside of personal stuff - England won the ODI series against India 4-3 (I, ahem, survived the church service by keeping up to date via the radio on my mobile, ha ha), won their Euro 2008 qualifier against Israel and narrowly beat the USA in the rugby World Cup - all on the Saturday. You can tell N isn't into sport otherwise he'd have rescheduled the wedding. Well, I would've done anyway.

So we now have the 20/20 World Cup to look forward to next week (by which time my TV will hopefully be fixed) which should be fantastic, as well as some egg-chasing to watch in between games. Should be a nice back-drop to doing the scary amount of work I have left to do before Thursday :-/

Red Squirrel does, however, highly recommend M.O.R - the 5th studio album by the mighty Alabama 3 that is released tomorrow. There's one or two fillers in there but 6 or 7 cracking tunes too. I'm positively excited about seeing them before the end of the month both in Birmingham and Bristol now :)