My groomsdudes #6: my dude of honour

I have recently decided that my friend Louise is my dude of honour. She was the ringleader for ensuring that I hada hen do. This was so that all my female friends had a chance to embarrass me as well as my male friends. They (rather understandably) didn’t want to be left out of the fun of embarassing me.

Louise will also be a witness at our wedding, so I hope she has been practicing her signature. All of this means that she has earned a place as my honorary groomsdude.

I can’t remember exactly when I met Louise. It was almost certainly through mutual friends, and was definitely before her 18th birthday, as I remember going to her party down on Camber Sands. I had only been driving a year or so and it was an exciting adventure to drive down the coast with my friend Tom who most likely brought along a whole bunch of ska-punk cassettes with which to educate me with during the journey.

Generally we always seem to do cool stuff for Louise’s birthdays. A number of years ago we went to Paris for a day trip (although it rained and was generally a bit miserable). This year we went to the O2 see The Blink 182s who were kind enough to not only put on a show for her birthday, but also dedicated I Miss You to her.

One of my favourite memories of Louise is when we went to the silent disco at The Shard last year for her birthday. I was listening to the Bee Gees and was strutting, jiving and singing at her, whilst she was listening to T’Pau’s China In Your Hand singing away and air grabbing with the full intensity that the song requires. It’s difficult to explain how awesome it was just with words, but this moment alone made the entire evening worthwhile.

We first started spending more time together when we were both working at Saga, often having lunch with my brother and our friend Ron. We used to have a competition to see how much of the self-service desserts we could hide underneath custard whilst still only getting charged for one portion.

Louise worked in HR at that time, so she was able to provide us with all the gossip about what was going on. For the sake of all concerned, I should probably not repeat any of this gossip here. I’ve never managed to be able to acquire much gossip working in the accounts department. It’s a very gossip free kind of career path.

Many years later, the house next to the one I was renting with three other guys went up for rent and we managed to persuade Louise along with a few other friends to move in next to us. It was like being in Friends. We lived in the House of Boy and they lived next door to us in the House of Girl. We even took down the fence in the back garden so that the houses started to flow into each other, which was especially useful for parties.

Around a year after they moved in, we had to move out of our house and there was a space available in the House of Girl which I moved into. Whilst I only moved my stuff about five feet from the top floor of one house to the top floor of another house, in one of the most demoralising moments of my life, I had to take it all the way down two flights of stairs, a few feet along the street and then all the way up two flights of stairs again.

Some of my favourite memories are from the time living in those houses, with chaotic house parties and hanging out with good friends. One slightly less chaotic memory is how I was exhausted and had a really early night before I moved into the House of Girl. Natalie, one of my new housemates, found out about this, and decided that early nights were unacceptable and put in a rule about bedtime curfews. The first Saturday night after I moved in, Natalie was out and me and Louise had an extremely rock’n’roll evening of watching a film and having an early night. I felt extremely rebellious defying the curfew.

When I bought my flat, it turned out that Louise and Lisa had to move just before and we ended up living round the corner from each other so we got to spend quite a lot of time together. One of my favourite things about this was on Christmas morning we would all gather round their flat for a Christmas breakfast fry up and bucks fizz I’m a fan of Christmas and anything that makes it even better is always going to go down well with me.

Louise has been an invaluable source of advice when I have been dating which, over the course of our friendship, has been quite a lot. Her understanding of how females work was invaluable, as was her patience as I rambled on and on almost non-stop about my dating woes.

When I met Jo, Louise was able to tell how happy I was and was very quick to invite her to join in with group activities. This included an invitation to the annual viewing of Love Actually in November. There is pretty much no bigger honour than that.

I find Louise to be an inspiring person. She likes taking on challenges, such as when she persuaded a bunch of us that we should start climbing mountains and we foolishly agreed that it was a good idea. We have now climbed all of the three peaks and I feel very accomplished for having done so. When Louise sets her mind to do something, she is a very dedicated person. She has very strong feelings about wanting to make a positive difference in the world and she is very determined to do what is right for both others and herself. Louise is one of those people who has great qualities that I want to emulate, and I am proud to have her as my dude of honour.