~ he and eve

Erin and Henrik were married in a blustering wind on a beetling ocean cliff. Behind them the sky was a startling unreal blue, streaked with long clouds which were beginning to glow orange with the coming sunset. On the shore beneath, waves beat themselves to a chaos of spume on dark jagged rocks. With only a fragile wire fence between the swooning couple and certain bloody death on the murderous crags below, one could be forgiven for mistaking the ceremony for a suicide pact - if it wasn’t for all that love in the air. And this particular agglomeration of freaks - at least one of whom was in a mouse costume - were plainly no run-of-the-mill Death Cult.

To be brief, it was by far the wildest wedding I’ve seen. At one point, to my bewilderment, I found myself getting quite weepy. There were origami envelopes with messages of love, communal gospel singing and, I’m told, a streaker - a large dark skinned man whom I believe was aiming to cause a ruckus. Instead, Lynne gave him a couple of dinner plates to use as nipple protectors. Others nodded in greeting before he scaled the back fence and evaporated into the darkness.

As the light faded the scene grew ever more Gothic. The shadows lengthened, the sea raged and the wind grew piercing. Stark against the brute elements, Heathcliff and Catherine stood hand in hand … but Heathcliff was wearing a top hat so lofty it resembled a chimney and Cathy could not resist flaunting her arterial red vinyl hotpants. What cool vibes there were. I loved how Erin just kept kissing Henrik the whole way through. ‘Nobody told me I was limited to one kiss’, she said.

Erin and Henrik, like are rusted-on arty types they are, turned their wedding into a three day carnival on the Mornington Peninsula and christened it The Love Fest. Polly and I travelled down on the Friday, just prior to the wedding itself, with the carless Lynne in tow. We pitched our tent and erred off the edge of the world for two dreamy sparkling days.

Almost immediately, Polly found a friend – Pepita – the daughter of some organic farmers from New Zealand, and somehow, after all that time in the sun, in a triumph of parenting, her cheeks were the only part of her the slightest bit burnt. On the Sunday, she was brave enough to spend eight minutes on a yacht before freaking out over its sloshing movements …

I had promised to do a reading of my egg poem [the ovist] but things were so bleached out and hyper-real that I couldn’t imagine actually doing it. After all, I only knew a handful of the people there and I was somewhat monged out and Erin’s father was doling out quantities of his excellent Buckley’s Beer … Yet I held to my word and it proved to be a pretty good performance. Raving, gibbering absurdity on an idyllic Australian beach … I’d hoped to use an emu egg as a prop, but had to settle for normal one … probably funnier in the end … I’m going to do another performance of it at Lynne’s Snatches show at RMIT.

The whole crowd was dressed in white that day and at one point we clustered together while Henrik took a series of 3D lenticular photos. I had unearthed a Najee suit direct from the Eighties and could easily have been mistaken for Simon Le Bon.

Such a fabulous weekend. Children dragging huge flaccid branches of kelp. Mirror ball helmets. Lou Lou, a circus girl from Cologne. Tierra del Fuego plagued by black and white rabbits, their rivers clogged by feral beavers from fur farms of long ago. A man who took too much viagra and could only see the colour blue. Rich kids in the Mediterranean getting themselves microchipped so they can be scanned as they enter clubs. Great permanent piles of frozen penguin shit in the Antarctic with a tart, fishy smell.

Lynne told us there are several categories of children at kindergarten: pushers, biters, pinchers, scratchers and Chinese burners. She asked Polly, ‘which are you?’ ‘All of them,” Polly replied.