Three months after my last endurance trip back to NZ, it was time to return again - to be best man for Tijs and Melissa's wedding. As I saw it, being a best man involved three main things:
1. Getting Tijs mothered on his buck's night
2. Not doing anything gormless during the ceremony
3. Deliving a good speech to the reception
As far as the buck's night went, 3 nights of no sleep thanks to jet lag had encouraged the creation of a range of challenges designed to mostly mess Tijs up - by the time Clint joined us at 8.30pm, he was sure that we would get booted out of the restaurant we were in by that stage.
The buck's night started off with some paintball - unknown to me was the tradition my friends had developed to make the groom and best man "run the guantlet" - which involved getting shot at point blank range by 10 guys with paintball guns. Neither Tijs nor I were in great shape after this!
We then got cleaned up and headed out on the town in Wellington. Tijs of course lost all his "challenges", resulting in him being handcuffed to an inflatable sheep wearing a t-shirt picturing himself naked in the foetal position and being required to drink copious amounts of cooking wine (which we found out the next day was "not for sale as a beverage"!).
In terms of the "not doing anything gormless during the ceremony", this was a little harder, as it was a Greek Orthodox affair, and Tijs didn't really seem to know what the running order was. As a result, it was a little difficult to know how many times they were going around the alter, and as a result, tripping over my own feet was always a possibility. Although it didn't eventuate, I was also a little confused about when to go witness them signing the deed. However, some frantic gesturing from the priest enabled me to guess when to cross the stage.
In terms of the speech during the reception, I felt pretty comfortable with this, given the amount of presenting I had been doing at work. I mostly spoke off the cuff about Tijs's high school and University antics. Clint wetting himself in the back row also did a lot to encourage me which was useful. I kept it short and to the point as there had been quite a few long speeches after me and I avoided using the mic as I still don't think these are necessary very often unless you have a quiet voice or are speaking at Wembly.
The night after the wedding it was time to fly back to the UK. Turns out flying for 24 hours with a solid hangover is a lot better than you might expect - certainly was easy to sleep even though the dozy Air NZ check in girl put Korina and I in the middle of a block of people (even though we asked for an aisle).
