The last few months have been quite busy and eventful, but also filled with happiness.

In early April, having agreed that we would just go out for dinner on the 4^th, I was wonderfully surprised when Helen secretly got together a whole lot of our friends who met us at a local restaurant to celebrate my 32^nd birthday. I must admit that I do find it hard to think of myself as being that old, and a lot of time I struggle to remember that it’s now my age (must be the first hints of dementia) – I can still remember quite fancying a girl who I never quite mustered the courage to try and kiss when I was 12 years old, and now suddenly that is 20 years ago!

April was filled with quite a bit of studies and lots of preparation for the big events to follow, as well as a fair amount of refereeing. By the last week of April, my parents arrived in South Africa, and shortly thereafter so did the first of my friends from as far as Singapore, and as near as Port Elizabeth. My best man Frank organised me a superb bachelor’s party on the evening of Tuesday 30^th April (Wednesday the 1^st is a public holiday in South Africa). We began the evening with a fun but tiring game of touch rugby (in which I had to wear a ballerina’s tu-tu with a Springbok emblem adorning it) after which we headed out to a local night-life area for some food and a significant number of beverages, for which I was dressed in a t-shirt with a picture of a bride and groom and the caption “Game Over”. My future brother in law was ‘kind’ enough to prevail upon me to have a shot of tequila with a Mopani worm in it, and someone made a stupid bet with me to dance on a table with my shirt off (even sober that would have been an unlikely challenge), and my poor Colombian friend Juan had to suffer through me revealing his dark past at 1am, but despite some of the finer details of the later parts of the evening being somewhat vague the next morning, it was an evening of good fun among many friends and family.

On the Friday night, Helen’s parents kindly hosted a gathering of all the members of both our families who were attending, so that they could all meet each other before the big day. It was a very relaxed way to start to put a face to many of the names I had heard over the course of our usual Monday night dinners at Helen’s parents’ house, and I think it made everyone that bit more comfortable on the day of the main event.

Saturday dawned with me alone in bed as Helen had followed the tradition of not being seen by the groom on the wedding day, and had stayed over at her parents’ house. Knowing myself, I had decided well in advance that since ours was a late afternoon ceremony, and that I didn’t want to spend the day thinking about things too much, I gathered a group of several friends who had travelled from far afield to be there (including London, Basel and Singapore) and took them with me to a school where I refereed a rugby game that morning to give me some exercise and keep myself focused on things within my control. We went on to a local restaurant for a nice hearty brunch, before heading home to prepare ourselves.

Having put a great deal of planning into place for the wedding, including holding a rehearsal at our venue the day before, when I arrived at the Rand Club, an ornately beautiful if somewhat faded colonial edifice, it was to find that things were running smoothly and Helen was already upstairs elsewhere in the building preparing herself (as far as I was concerned, that meant my biggest worry for the day – that she might come to her senses and run away – was resolved). My best man Frank did a great job of forcing me to absent myself from further logistical arrangements, and basically told me to let things happen and that he and my other groomsmen would take care of any issues. That said, about half an hour before the main bevy of guests was due to arrive, he walked over to me and said, “There’s been a slight problem, but it is being solved…” It turned out that the bus we had organised to transport more than half of our guests from a hotel in Northern Johannesburg to the downtown area (so as to save them issues with parking and directions in an unfamiliar part of town) had not arrived to pick them up! Luckily my mother saved the day by very quickly getting the hotel management to call up a cavalcade of taxi’s to transport the 75-odd guests who had planned to take the bus.

Though it started slightly late, once things got rolling, it was an unforgettable day. The layout of the club is such that once all of the guests had arrived (and I was able to welcome many of them personally as they entered the club) they were then very efficiently chaperoned to their places along two wide, deeply carpeted staircases above a landing in the middle of the stairs between the ground floor and the first floor. Our master of ceremonies Bruce did a fantastic job of herding people through the different stages of the event, and was superbly aided in this by my Helen’s brother Bryan and my brother Andrew, who also gave us a reading from Captain Corelli’s Mandolin during the ceremony. Helen made her entry down a smaller staircase to the side of the room from the 2^nd floor above the assembled gathering, and then gracefully made her way down the main staircase on her father Nigel’s arm. She wore a spectacular ivory-coloured dress and was radiantly beautiful.

The ceremony itself remains something of a blur in my memory, although I know I blubbed like a little girl several times – such was my sense of being overwhelmed by having Helen by my side as I stood on that landing surrounded by all the friends and family looking down to where we stood, and feeling quite awed by how many special people we were lucky to have with us for the day and how obvious it was that they cared deeply for us and shared in our happiness.

We kept our photography session after the ceremony mercifully brief (we're still waiting for the results of our official photography!), and this was followed by finger-food starters and a welcoming speech from my new brother-in-law Bryan, who congratulated a number of family members and friends who have already, or will during the course of 2013 be turning 60-years old. This was followed by an amusing speech from Nigel, introducing the Richards family, and also Helen. My parents spoke also, at the end of the starters, about the Butler-Wheelhouse and Bosworth-Smith families, and also about how Helen fits into our family very nicely, sharing the same birthday as my mother’s father, and the same name as my maternal grandmother.

At the end of the main course, which was a Cape Malay style fish curry, my best man Frank gave a heart-felt and incredibly kind speech. Not painting over my flaws (well Helen knows these) but explaining that many of them are a counterpoint to my best intentions and ambitions. I was touched by Helen’s sincere and expressive words, as she is by nature a much more private person than I, and yet in front of all those people she put into words the feelings we share. With so many loved ones there, I felt fortunate to be able to thank not only our families but also our friends for all of their kindness and support, and also to be able to explain to them all a little bit of why Helen makes my life so much richer for being herself within it. The rest of the evening was filled with lots of fun: dancing, having a few drinks, and enjoying sharing the day with all the people there with us.

On Sunday morning we had a brunch at our flat, which was a lovely opportunity to catch up with many people, as a wedding is often not a good time to actually get a chance to talk to people. But, by mid-day, having been socialising with people since Friday afternoon, I finally ran out of steam and wanted nothing more than to have everyone leave so that I could share some peace and quiet with my new bride. Unfortunately our honeymoon was doomed to be a brief affair due to the commitments of my PGCE course (which Helen was wonderfully understanding about) so we drove about 90 minutes outside of Johannesburg to a luxurious hotel where on Sunday evening we enjoyed the spa, ordered room-service to go with our complimentary bottle of champagne and fell asleep by about 9pm! It was a well-deserved rest after several weeks of increasing intensity in our efforts to organise and prepare everything for the wedding and we both very much enjoyed our few days of sumptuous buffet breakfasts, walks and mountain bike rides within the grounds of the hotel, even a brief gym session, and several visits to the spa, including a rejuvenating full-body massage.

On Thursday after the wedding I began my first real block of practical teaching experience. I spent two and a half weeks teaching History, as well as filling in a bit in the Geography department of a local private Catholic boys school called St David’s Marist Inanda. It is a very well-run school and I thoroughly enjoyed meeting the staff, and getting to know the boys: I had a Grade 10 history class, and a Grade 8 history class (it was interesting to see in practical terms the different levels on which I had to teach these different ages of boys), as well as taking 2 Grade 8 classes of Geography. Some of my time in-between those classes I spent preparing lessons and materials for teaching, but some of it was also spent observing various other teachers’ classes and seeing their different styles and approaches, even to the same content and learner age-groups. It was also interesting to see how the different classes varied in their interactions and characteristics – with some being more participative, some more fractious, and some less engaged than others with the various subjects being taught. It was a great experience and I would feel privileged to be able to teach somewhere with boys (or boys and girls) as willing to participate and eager to learn.

I was very fortunate that this school is less than a kilometre from our house (it was my first choice nomination for this teaching experience) as I was unfortunately involved in a car accident on the Wednesday before this teaching experience started. Luckily, no-one was hurt, but my poor little red car, nicknamed Porky, was a write-off, and for a few days I was car-less. I am incredibly lucky that my mother’s cousin Jane was heading to Europe for a week shortly thereafter, and she very kindly let me borrow her car while she was away. I have now purchased a replacement vehicle – a used VW sedan that is running very nicely.

I have started to make contact with various schools in the Johannesburg area, and have even been fortunate enough to meet with headmasters and deputy head-masters at a couple of the schools I have written to. So hopefully over the next few months I will be able to secure myself a good place to start out my teaching career next year. Helen meanwhile has had a tumultuous few months at work, with her relationship with her boss deteriorating to the point where Helen decided to move on, and fortunately she has managed to find a new opportunity at a very highly-regarded digital advertising agency where she will be starting in July.

At the end of my teaching experience Helen treated me to a lovely surprise: a weekend away in Cape Town. Despite cold, foggy, grey weather, we very much enjoyed meeting up with some of Helen’s family, taking a trip to Robben Island (although I was thoroughly disappointed to find that the little notices which used to be located in each cell, telling in their own words of the experiences of political prisoners who had been in that cell, were no longer there), visiting a quaint little marketplace called ‘Biscuit Mill’ that reminded me of London’s Borough Market, and later eating out at a Mexican restaurant called El Burro (which has to be one of the finest restaurants in South Africa) as well as beating off the gloom with a Sunday afternoon spent exploring many different flavours at a wine and food convention.

South Africa is now well into the rugby season, and I have been very much enjoying my refereeing. Although my father was kind enough to accompany me a week before the wedding to a very disorganised rugby tournament in one of our more underprivileged township areas, in general I have found that this year the quality of games I have been lucky enough to referee has improved steadily, and also that I have been able to gradually absorb more of the teachings of our referee coaches and to use these to make my management of games more effective. I was very pleased to find out at our most recent society meeting last week, that I have been promoted to Level 1 within the provincial referees society (new referees are Level 4). My next step will hopefully be to graduate in time to being named a Pirates-reserve referee – as the Pirates referees are the top referees in the province. But it will take many more games for that to happen!

I soon have mid-year exams coming up but we are also looking forward to some great holidays. In the first week of July, just before Helen starts her new job, we’ll be heading to Singapore and Malaysia for a proper holiday, perhaps in part to make up for our all-too-brief honeymoon. And then in August we’re going to be in Sweden for my mother’s 60^th birthday, and then in London on the 17^th we’re having another celebration of our wedding with family and friends in that part of the world (do let us know if you can join us).

Being married has been a great experience so far, and I continue to feel lucky every day that I have Helen in my life.

Please do get in touch if I haven’t heard from you in a while – for me it is a blessing to have so many great friends in so many different corners of the world.