Guest Post – A Colonist’s Conversion

I didn’t plan to watch the Royal Wedding.  For one thing, I live in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, and to see the wedding I knew I’d have to get up by at least 3:30 in the morning. Did I really want to see the dress that badly? I could always see it in photos. Did I really care about who the guests were, or what the Princes wore, or what the church looked like? I could just watch the recap on the evening news. Or maybe I wouldn’t even do that much. And what did it matter? I was a modern, Canadian woman. This had nothing to do with me.

Except.

The closer we got to the date, the more I felt this secret voice inside of me saying, This is history in the making, Jenny. This is significant to more than England. This kind of matters to Canada. This kind of matters to the world. I dismissed the voices, convinced that it wasn’t me talking, but the media, planting these ideas in my head. How could this possibly matter to the world?

People at the library in Guelph, Ontario were meeting for a Wedding Tea at 5am. People at the Saskatchewan Hotel in Regina were gathering at 3am to watch together in hats. “They’re crazy”, I assured myself, and felt fine with my decision to just go to bed.

But around midnight, as I was tucking myself in, I decided to check my email one last time. And before I knew it, I was navigating away from my gmail account and over to CTV.ca, where I knew the Canadian television channel was live streaming their wedding coverage from outside Westminster Abbey. (The secret voice inside of me made sure that fact was tucked away in my subconscious!)

“What are you doing?” I asked myself, as I clicked on the “Watch Now!’ link, but that other little voice inside of me, the one that had been encouraging me the whole time, sighed with relief.

At 1am I decided I’d seen enough. Though I found it all fascinating — the journalists interviewing family friends, the stories of tradition and history, and the shots of the thousands of people, (from all over the world, including many from Canada, I noticed), assembled in Hyde Park, I decided to get some sleep. Enough was enough.

But it wasn’t enough. I lay in bed, trying to sleep for an hour and a half, but I couldn’t do it. I had this excited flutter in my stomach. It felt like Christmas. Suddenly the girl who’d been dismissive of the wedding was desperate to see the dress, hungry to hear more details about the ceremony, eager for more of the couple that was clearly in love and the families that supported them.

So I sat up, pulled the laptop into bed with me, and decided to stop pretending and start indulging.

I nearly watched it all.

I watched Posh and Becks. I saw Beatrice and Eugenie’s hats (which I love, by the way). I saw William and Harry arrive at the church, and I saw Kate and her father climb into the car, him carefully adjusting her train as they prepared to drive away. I wondered if he was holding her hand. I hoped so.

Sometime in the night I noticed that along the side of my computer screen CTV viewers from all around the world were commenting in real time. Whenever Kate and William smiled at one another, someone in Bangladesh or Greece would write a quick “Awww!” When God Save the Queen was sung, someone in the US commented that he’d always wondered if she sang along or not.  The entire world was out there, engaged, thinking the same things as me and having the same reactions I was having. It made the whole experience that much richer.  I finally understood why those people were meeting for Wedding Teas at 3am. They weren’t crazy, they were seeking a community. Lying alone at 4 o’clock in the morning while watching a stranger’s wedding on your computer might seem a bit creepy or depressing, but if you’re watching it alongside millions of others? Well, that just makes you part of history, doesn’t it?

In the end, I only made it until 5:30. I’d been awake for 23 hours straight at that point, and my body was dropping from exhaustion. I gave in, and fell asleep.

My one regret? Not staying up that one extra hour. Because then I would have seen the kisses. I’ve seen the footage, of course, played back later, countless times. But watching the reruns cannot possibly capture the excitement of the real thing.

Guest Blogger – Jenny Ryan
youweregoingtobefantastic.blogspot.com