JetPlane

Flew from Heathrow to Bangkok and spent an afternoon exploring the area around the hotel. Met up with our tour party and then spent the next day with some of them touring the Grand Palace and the river systems of Bangkok (by long-tail boat).

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We had a wonderful Civil Partnership day with family and friends at Hotel Felix. The day started with coffee and pastries at 11.30, before the ceremony at midday. We had a chance to chat with everyone around the bar bar for a couple of hours, before a buffet lunch from 2:00–6:00.

In the evening we met up with a smaller number of friends for drinks at the Granta Bar, where Michael and I first saw one another across the crowded room 15 years ago. Then off to the Dot Cotton Club at the Junction to round of a fantastic day.

Michael has set up a Flickr Group on the web for sharing photographs of the day Flickr: Graham & Michael’s CP. We hope our guests will upload some of their pictures of the day.

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Quite a relaxed day. Lovely meal in the evening at the Peking Restaurant on Burleigh Street.

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Had a great day at work today, with lots of good wishes from colleagues. When I arrived my office was decorated with balloons, wedding banners and glitter which I was completely unprepared for (even though this is an office tradition). Rebecca and Sula had put an imposing cock and balls on the office door that it was almost impossible to get past without getting hit in the face: nice! Some photo’s attached (from rubbish camera-phone photos—click to see a bigger version.)

At 2 o’clock about 40 of my colleagues all gathered to give me some gifts. Robert made a really thoughtful speech, about how it was about time that Michael and I got around to getting married. Why had taken us so long? That he was getting worried about us being such an old married couple: that I had asked for electric slippers and a chemical su-doku book as gifts. He went on to say that, as far as he knew, Michael and I were the first same-sex marriage at the RSC. This was all very good. There was a card crammed full of signatures and Robert and his family had sent a Brokeback Mountain-themed card full of double-entendres, which involved ‘rawhide’ on our honeymoon, 2-man luge and lycra. Ahem!

Robert had bought us eight lovely crystal champagne glasses and a couple of bottles of pink champagne, from my colleagues as Civil Partnership gifts. Thank you all. It was hard to get any work done this afternoon (and I didn’t touch the champagne).

We’ve been searching for a nice matching pair of cufflinks, that we can wear for our Civil Partnership ceremony. We didn’t see any that we liked enough to buy, then Michael came home today with a lovely pair of cufflinks from Austin Reed. They are made from Abalone and Mother of Pearl. I love them.

Nuala gave us a Portuguese-language Film “Central Station” for Christmas (Central do Brasil official web site). We finally got in the mood and watched it this evening. The film stars Fernanda Montenegro, whose superb performance carried the film. Her young co-star, Vinícius de Oliveira was also excellent.

“Central Station [1999]” (Walter Salles)

We downed a bottle of Bedrica, Biskupovac, 2002, from Skradin in Croatia. We brought this back from our summer sailing in Croatia last year with Chris and Matthew. It was a nice wine, and was rather strong—quite an effect.