Fifteen Love

Unless I am much mistaken, today is the fifteenth wedding anniversary of John and Clare Hayns. Happy anniversary! I was best man to them, back in my twenties. Gave a very outrageous speech - to which nobody listened, mercifully, as Clare's father had given the greatest Father-of-the-Bride speech ever and so there was no interest in anything that followed.

Clare has just been approved as a likely candidate to become a vicar. John, for those of you as don't know it, is a juggler. Well, children's entertainer. Well, corporate schmoozer. We used to do a bit of street theatre together, many moons ago.

Just before the wedding, John & I drove up from Oxford to Stratford to see King Lear. Clare had gone with her father, and John was missing her. Hadn't seen her for hours. I was a student at Wycliffe, John a lay-assistant at St Aldate's church, but his NUS card was still valid. We got to the RSC to find it wasn't King Lear at all, but the Merchant of Venice. John was sure it should be Lear, but we decided to get tickets anyway. At 7.28, two minutes before curtain up. (Obviously, Doctor Who wasn't in the cast for that Shakespeare play). With our student passes, we got front stalls for peanuts.

And, as we sat down in our shorts and T-shirts, in the best seats in the house, John was thrilled to discover that Clare and her father (dressed up to the nines, having paid a small fortune) were fortuitously sitting directly behind us.

In the interval, Tom looked forlornly at his drink, and then even more disgustedly at me, standing where his daughter should have been (John and Clare having vanished), and I practiced my pastoral skills on him: "Cheer up pops, this is what life is going to be like from now on!"

Hmm. Perhaps that speech at the wedding fifteen years ago today wasn't just for his daughter. I'm just wondering if there might have been the slightest element of "Best man? BEST man???" going on there...

Congrats, both.