10 years a sham

It’s ten years today since Gareth and I got married in Las Vegas. So much has changed. Back then we had to take selfies with our ARMS. No selfie sticks, kids. Times were tough.

One of the reasons I was excited to get hitched was because I was marrying into a Nokia 6230. This state of the art phone had a coloured screen and could take 640 x 480 pixel photos! And you could send photographs by email!

I had the bright idea of “live blogging” the day via a convoluted process of sending pictures to my Flickr account, which in turn zapped them to the blog by way of a bunch of embedded code. Except I forgot to email the establishing shot of us standing in front of the Graceland Wedding Chapel so nobody realised we were in Las Vegas and I got some concerned emails, “Why is Gareth playing slot machines on your wedding day!?”.

I was a terrified, jet-lagged mess the day before. We had to go downtown to get a marriage licence from the courthouse, where dudes wandered around in orange jumpsuits and handcuffs like on Law & Order. I launched into a panicky ramble. How the hell did we get here? What the hell are we doing? This is a huge mistake! Gareth did so well to almost disguise his Hmmm, you could be right there face.

But after the ridiculous ceremony, then the second ridiculous ceremony with bonus Elvis after they forgot to film the first one, then the Pharaoh’s Pheast buffet at the Luxor, then the Tom Jones concert, it all felt good and right.

There were many Sham Wedding/Only Did It For The Visa jokes at the time, but it did feel unreal and shambolic. It’s hard to take things seriously with a picture of Elvis on the marriage certificate. It’s only with the testing events of the last few years that the solemnity of those vows kicked in. I’m so glad that such a ridiculous start has evolved into something strong. Well. It’s still pretty ridiculous, too.

Thanks, G. You still RAWK!