Perform a best man speech

Being asked to be the best man at a wedding is a huge honour. It is a position normally reserved for a best friend or a close member of your family as you have to put all of your trust in this person on the biggest day of your life. I have been asked to do this 4 times and I have agreed on every occasion but I am not sure if I would do this again. The first time I did it was for a friend I have known since we were at school, the bride and groom were quite young and despite the fact that I knew I was too young to be considering anything as life changing I knew that they were ready. The wedding took place in a local registry office and the reception was in a pub in our hometown.
I can’t recall much of the speech as I was nervous and possibly rushed through a few cards and messages before raising a toast and leaving the stage.
20 something years later they are still married and have 4 children.

By the time I got to do the second of my best man duties I had gained a little confidence and decided to bring props. I had known Adam and Deb for a little while so I felt confident enough to make jokes about his long hair and him loving his car more than his wife. The speech went down well and they are both still talking to me.
They are still talking to each other as well and have been married for about 14 years now.

Ian’s wedding was a pretty special affair and I was genuinely moved when he asked me if I would take part in his wedding. I met Ian years ago when he joined the band I was in, he was our drummer and we later split the band up by going travelling for a year. Sadly for me but happily for Ian he managed to emigrate to Australia so my best man task for this year would see me travelling thousands of miles to Perth in Western Australia. I am not sure if this type of wedding is typical for an Australian wedding but it was not like anything I had been to before. After the Ceremony we all went down to the beach for some pictures and the wedding party were taken down the Swan River on a boat to the reception. Ian had carefully chosen music for all of the speeches so I walked to the podium to “Let me entertain you”. During the grooms speech I had to encourage audience participation and shout out punch lines to his jokes. He called it Kare-jokey. With it being Western Australia the buffet was an incredible array of fresh seafood and other marvels, I have never seen anything like it and the waiters were obviously under instruction to not let the tables go dry as the jugs of beer and bottles of wine were replaced as soon as they were empty.

The last time I performed the Best man task was for my cousin, Mark. We all arrived for the Civil Ceremony in a limousine on a sunny October day. After the ceremony I stood up to deliver my speech and I was reminded of how seriously people take these things as one of Marks friends advised that “I’d better be funny”. Luckily I have known Mark all of his life so there was no shortage of material and I even managed to throw in a few off the cuff remarks to cover my visible nerves. The beer and wine flowed well and the afternoon faded into the night, and we were all taken outside for a firework display. Even after the music had stopped and the bar had closed a few people wanted to carry the party on and hosted their own sing a long before we arranged to carry on at the Hotel bar. I am happy now to retire from the business of standing up and making jokes at other peoples expense, Mark returned the favour in 2012 by delivering his best man speech at my wedding.

Witness a world class firework display

Every year on Dec 31st the TV starts to show pictures and live footage of the new year being celebrated across the globe. A lot of the time this means a huge firework display with the backdrop of Sydney Harbour Bridge. Australians seem to love a firework display and they do it well. The best display I have ever seen was in Western Australia when I just happened to be over there for the Australia day celebrations. I was actually over there for a wedding but the dates coincided so I found myself caught up in the revelry. The whole day was a build up to the firework display, the local radio and TV stations were covering the celebrations and we joined the masses that had gathered by the Bell Tower in Perth. We had taken advantage of the boat rides that had been arranged for these celebrations and there seemed to be hundreds of other boats on the river doing exactly the same thing. From our vantage point we could see three pontoons moored up in the middle of the Swan River, the TV and radio crews were constantly reminding us that each of these vessels contained about $1 million worth of explosives and as soon as it was dark enough to fully appreciate the spectacle then all of this would be released to the world in all of its glory. Obviously we had to wait for night to fall before anything would happen but the whole event was an incredible celebration and it gave us the chance to really get to know the family that my mate was marrying into and also spend time with his parents who had come over from the UK. In all I think there must have been about 30 people in our group and all of them were in good spirits. At about 9.00 it was dark enough for the Skyworks (as they referred to them in Australia) and the countdown began. I have to admit that I was expecting it to be a huge anti-climax but it was immensely impressive, just as you thought it was winding down there would be another onslaught of lights and explosions all as impressive as the first. After this experience I have not been to an organised firework event as there is simply no way that any other pyrotechnic experience could compare to what I witnessed here and none of the photographs or videos I have seen of the Australia day celebrations do the display any justice at all. The sheer vastness and area of the sky that was covered simply cannot be captured on film.

Learn to dance

When I was a kid my Grandparents always danced, I remember going to the club attached to my granddads work and they would always be on the dance floor doing a Waltz or the Foxtrot or any other Ballroom number that would be played so I guess it was only natural that my parents learned to dance. I had brief interludes while I was growing up where my parents tried to encourage me to learn but I was never really interested, mainly because this meant dancing with my sister and I am pretty sure she had the same feeling as I did on the subject. I am not saying that my sister and I hated each other, far from it. We actually got on really well growing up but she was always taller than me despite being 2 year younger so apart from it looking silly it wasn’t the easiest of pastimes to pursue. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I actually started to become interested in learning but even then I initially took a little convincing. My parents told me that a new class was starting for beginners at the place where they had lessons and I knew that this was something Keely was interested in so I agreed to give it a go, if it wasn’t for me then we didn’t have to go again. Oddly enough I actually took to it. The first class saw us learning the very basic moves. I am sure the first thing we did was the Square Tango which was just a 3 step basic movement to ease us into the idea of dancing together. Once we had actually learned how to do the Waltz this dance was dropped as it the basic Waltz is very similar and we soon started to add the twirls as well as other additional movements. The class was initially quite full, there were about 4 of 5 couples learning in total but one by one the numbers dwindled away until we were the only ones, we then moved into the same class as my parents. There were now 6 people in this class and we found that we improved quickly when we joined this class as we had quite a bit of catching up to do. The class is ballroom and Latin but we soon realised that the Latin stuff doesn’t really appeal and we much prefer the Ballroom. My favourite of all the dances is the Foxtrot, I really do feel like I am dancing when I do this as there are 19 basic steps instead of the 3 or 4 that are in the Waltz and Quickstep. I imagine myself looking like my Granddad when he was dancing, I probably look really clumsy in truth but it just feels like a really elegant dance. Nowadays we have the class to ourselves as my parents have moved on to sequence dancing, we have managed to pick up a few of these as well along the way but still keep up with the Ballroom and the occasional Cha cha cha, this is the only Latin number we do now but we still refer to it as “The Divorce Dance” as we normally end up getting into quite a mess and blaming each other for the errors. When we were arranging our wedding we knew we had to have a waltz for our first dance, as we had been dancing for quite a while we knew we could easily have a proper first dance rather than the clumsy shuffle that you see at most weddings so we worked with our teacher as she found us the perfect song and even helped us to restrict our dancing to match the size of the space we would have on the day. This is something that I had never considered but I am glad we did this, we were so used to having the whole room to dance in that suddenly finding ourselves in a space the size of 2 tables could have wrecked the whole thing. We rehearsed the dance many times on the run up to the big day and learned a few spins and twirls to make the dance look more interesting but also had the option to exclude these if nerves got the better of us when we were in the middle of the dance. As it happens we did OK and chatted away while we went through our moves. Our first actual dance floor experience other than the wedding dance was quite daunting, there seemed to be people everywhere and my head was moving faster than my feet as I kept on the look out to see if I was going to collide with someone or if they were going to bash into us. I can only compare it to passing your driving test and then being sent out on to the starting grid at brands hatch. I felt I was fully in at the deep end. I still find a crowded dance floor a little intimidating, particularly when there are really good dancers out there. When I am feeling that way I remember what my Dad told me when we first came off the Dance floor and sat in our seats looking dazed and confused. He told me “nobody is watching, they are all there to dance, it is not a competition. Just get out there and enjoy it, we all make mistakes, it is how we learn and improve”. He also added that if we were not prepared to go and dance on an actual dance floor with other people then we were just wasting money on lessons. Anyone can dance in an empty room, it is much more fun when you are dancing with others and everyone up there had to learn at some point. Since that little pep talk we have been to a few dances and I have even danced the Waltz, Quickstep and Foxtrot with my mom.