Manchester Calls

Kinda following on from Roh's post about Haroon getting married, we've now hit week zero, and in, oooh, less than five days Haroon finally gets hitched. It's such an important occasion, that it's even caused me to break my rule of not personally naming or referring to people on my blog. Cripes. Anyway the post gets a big "Hear, hear" from me.

Unlike for Roh, however, Haroon is not the first of my IC colleagues to get a ball and chain. That accolade goes to Aleem, who got married before the in dried on our degree certificates - we should be meeting his sprog for the first time during the valima on Sunday.

And Sunday will be exciting. Unless I'm mistaken, it will be the biggest gathering of my IC mates since our graduation back in 2001. Haroon and I had a lot of common friends, probably a consequence of having similar lifestyles and interests, so it would be good to be among them this weekend.

A big shame is how little time we've all spent together before the wedding. There is so much to talk about (and of course, so many jokes to make and stories to tell his fiancee), but very little opportunity to do so. It's shocking that for some of us, we'll only see a single Haroon for a few hours before the nikkah; for others the next time they see Haroon he'd have been on The Dark Side for almost a day. It sucks, but is what it is.

Although I use "finally" in my first paragraph, the truth is that the last three months of his engagement have almost gone as quickly as the time lapsed since we all had first met. It's just another sign that we are continually growing up. In many ways we are the same people we were in uni but in important others we are so different. And as Rohit alludes to, Haroon getting married is a weird notion. As strange as any one of us getting hitched actually (well, apart from Steve of course). It's probably a testament to my lack of imagination more than anything else, but still it's all very surreal.

But sure, in the macro view any of us getting married isn't surprising or unexpected. On the contrary, we have all literally come of age and I suspect that Haroon will not be a pioneer in this respect for long. In fact, I predict this to be The Year of Imperial weddings, with Haroon being the first domino to fall in the next twelve months (and, no, there will be no bets for who's next. That much is obvious. Ahaha).

I've no doubt that going first will not hinder Haroon in any way or form. Quite the opposite - he'll be the prime example showing us how it's done. And so he'll be the one we'll look to for help and advice since he'll have that much experience over us. Scary.

Oo oo ah ah indeed.