Father of the bride

('Father of the Bride', MGM 1950)

I'm back from a lightning visit, in more ways than one, to the Gold Coast for the wedding celebrations of a daughter of one of my longest standing friends.

There was thunder and lightning and rain in Sydney shortly before my flight's departure time and there was more thunder and lightning and rain on the Gold Coast during the wedding reception. Fortunately those weather conditions did not prevail whilst I was in the air so apart from very strong winds on the flight up - which provided a few mildly anxious moments - I was not exposed to much in the way of adverse conditions whilst in transit throughout the weekend.

The flying time between the two cities is about 1 hour and 30 minutes each way but a good 15 minutes of that each way is spent simply on the plane taxi-ing between the Sydney terminals and Sydney's third runway which is the runway used for nearly all domestic services.

The main north/south runway is reserved it seems for international services and the east/west runway seems to only be used for certain wind directions or for those limited times when the Eastern suburbs of Sydney are required to take our (minor) share of aircraft noise to give the inner western suburbs relief from the majority of noise they have to bear. (Queue sardonic comment from Andrew at this point.)

It is odd that the so called 'third runway' is always referred to with that name yet the original north/south runway and the subsequent east/west runway are never called the first and second runways respectively.

Anyway, to get back to the wedding my friend Rt, the father of the bride, is a good natured soul. He is never short of a joke and has endless anecdotes to relate. In what must be a contender for the longest Father of the Bride speech ever delivered Rt tried to fit every possible joke and anecdote into his speech which he read, seemingly word for word, from one sheet of paper. His comments not only covered his daughter, the bride, but also his wife, his two other daughters - already married - his son -not yet married - his two grandchildren and a third on the way and his new son in law and family. I didn't time it precisely but I think it was a speech of about 40 minutes, give or take a few seconds.

I'm amazed that so much speech, word for word, could be drawn from one sheet of paper.