Whodunnit

I always knew that I would not be having bridesmaids, even before I became immersed in the wedding world and heard all the dress-shopping dress-fitting expensive-makeup-demanding jealousy horror stories. The traditional role of a bridesmaid is to wear a dress she doesn’t like in a colour she didn’t choose, smile, look pretty, and maybe organise a hen do. So, in other words, dead weight.

I didn’t even have an idea how expensive bridesmaids could be before I rejected the plan absolutely. I wanted to get married: we didn’t need all the frills, and we could and would pick them and choose them! I resent being confined to gender stereotypes, and most of my friends are men anyway, so I felt no obligation to organise bridesmaids.

What you really need on a wedding day is someone who actually does something; someone who could be relied upon to sort things out if they went awry; someone who actually represents your closest friends and has not been preselected on gender, age or marital status!

My best friend, James, has known me since I was eleven; we work well together and share a sense of humour; he’s ‘solid and reliable’ and knows how to take charge of a situation (he’s a teacher!). And, of course, he’s always up for a challenge!

In full ‘teacher mode’:

So, if the groom could have a best man, why not the bride?

James was, understandably, a little confused about his role and responsibilities as my best man, and whilst I didn’t have a specific list in mind when I asked, this is what he ended up doing:

– making ~230 origami cranes
– organising the hen do
– fastening my dress (!)
– taking care of my handbag until the dinner reception (!)
– witnessing our marriage
– announcing us into the dinner reception
– announcing the speeches
– taking care of our honeymoon bag
– doing his own impromptu speech (!)

In fact, the role he ended up with was a pretty good cross between a Maid of Honour and a Master of Ceremonies!

We also considered ushers.

Ushers, unlike bridesmaids, have a point: they meet and greet everybody, direct people to and fro and generally keep the day moving and act as hosts when the bride and groom and their parents are preoccupied (as happens at weddings)… And since we’re flouting the gender roles already, our ushers were not going to be men, and neither were they all going to be from his side.

It was very important for us when picking our ushers to get scary, bossy, organised people. Or people who knew how to be scary, bossy and organised at the appropriate moment, anyway! When you hire someone for a job, you pick the person who is best at the job, and this was no different. Looking back, I am so glad we used this filter, because we do know some completely lovely, totally useless people and, given them the reins, I would have had a meltdown.

In the interests of symmetry, I must point out that we ended up with two men and two women, two of Guy’s friends and two of mine, and two tall people and two short people – but we did not pick them on aesthetics! They do look charming in this picture, though…

Cecily

Cecily is one of the aforementioned Cherubs and longtime Somerville friend of Guy’s. An excellent cook, we immediately conscripted her for help with the wedding cake and, whilst her abode generally looks like a bomb has hit it, can definitely do scary, organised and in charge! She is also based in Oxford, which came in handy later on, especially for those who wanted to party after the wedding was over…

Tom

Tom of the getting-lost-in-the-fog-on-the-Pennine-Way-incident, an old school friend of mine, was also lined up. As a rule, he’s a bit of a bum, but if you ask him to pull his socks up he will take the challenge to new levels. For example, as a postie, he often works on Saturdays. Taking the wedding day off work would have been enough, but Tom took the whole week before the wedding off and came down to Birmingham from where he helped us pack up and transport everything to Oxford and thereon took on the role of head usher!

Oscar

Oscar is an OTC friend of Guy’s. Don’t be lulled into a false sense of security – because Oscar is a small but angry man, who takes on responsibilities with a military efficiency! On the other hand, he moved from Oxford to London during our wedding planning, and then forgot the wedding day: he thought it was a week later! Luckily he managed to find out via facebook and his train ticket.

Elizabeth

Elizabeth is a Somerville friend of mine. Whilst housemates in our second year, I discovered that the ditzy Elizabeth hid a very scary super-mega-efficient Elizabeth when she took on an Entz Rep position and several other societal roles. She actually acted ditzily whenever I saw her on the wedding day, but stuff got done, so I suppose that was all part of the pretence.

Between them, the ushers did a fantastic job on the wedding day, including

– delivering vases to florists and other stuff to the Town Hall
– setting up the ceremony room
– transporting and setting up the cake
– setting up the cake stand
– meeting and greeting and giving out (some!) of the buttonholes
– organising the music
– organising rickshaw rides and guiding people to and from the drinks reception
– organising photo groups
– saving the cake from collapse (!)
– looking after the hat prize and cards, which then they made sure we took away on honeymoon
– getting the guest book signed by almost everyone
– sorting out what happened to leftover cake

So a lot of stuff!

Now, if only Guy could decide upon his best man…

The trouble he had was that there were three obvious candidates, and weighing up each of them wasn’t easy! He had already discounted his brother for the role, for as children they had an unrivalled rivalry… Now he considered all the responsibilities that went with the office of best man, and decided that there were three major roles of importantance: organising the stag do, giving a speech and being generally helpful and organised.

It was important to him that the stag do was fun and neither formulaic nor calamitous – in an A & E kind of way. As the best man’s duty to set the tone of the stag do, and with the cherubs in full swing, this would be no light task. As for the speech, well, the best man for this job would have to ensure his speech wasn’t too earnest and worthy, but make sure he didn’t do a shabby job of it either (notably, not being embarrassed was absolutely not part of the criteria!). Guy didn’t want to give the job to someone who would find it too nerve-racking. Being helpful and organised was harder: of course everybody had the best of intentions, but some best men would be too laid back, and others simply wouldn’t be able to commit the time. Tricky…

So, after lots of umming and ahhing, his eventual choice was Caz, who is very organised, but very busy: she works in events management. Oh yes, she.

So we had a best man for the bride and a best woman for the groom – neat!

Guy was worried about putting Caz under too much pressure, so we didn’t ask her to do much leading up to the day. However, at the last minute she dashed round to collect lots of wedding stuff we didn’t think we could carry and transport it over for us. She also performed the vital duty of taking the groom for a steadying pint on the morning of the wedding, and giving him his something borrowed. Like James, she witnessed our marriage, and of course took care of the rings. She was very nervous about the speech and said she might not eat much of the wedding breakfast, so we put the speeches between the starter and main breakfast so as to get them nicely out of the way without letting our guests starve. Needless to say, her speech was brilliant.

We decided not to kit out Caz with anything, although we bought ties and waistcoats (waistcoats were from Next Clearance – they have fab deals there) for the boys. James assumed his was hired, and was very pleased to discover he could keep it.

I bought gloves and pashminas for the women ushers, although one of them didn’t wear hers *sad face*.

And everybody got handkerchiefs/pocket squares, which I painstakingly made from excess dress material and ivory satin using my temperamental sewing machine.

I include our readers here, because whilst they weren’t the “wedding party”, we felt that it was an important role and chose people who were important to us and whom we thought would perform well! I will be telling you about the readings later, but here they are:

David – a friend of mine from Oxford.

Narmeen – a friend from Oxford.

Harry – Guy’s brother.

Brian – a friend of Guy’s from Somerville.

There are two more vital roles, and they’re even more important to mention here, because you wouldn’t know that they are two: walking me down the aisle, and giving the father of the bride speech. I have neither a father nor a stepfather to take one of these positions, so I asked my lovely mother to walk me down the aisle (but not to give me away, as I’m not into that kind of thing at all) and my grandfather to give a grandfather of the bride speech (which memorably started with the line, “I first met Rowena when she was one day old…” and taught me a few new things about my infant years!).

Here they both are – I expect you can guess which is which.

We didn’t arrange anything for them except buttonholes, and my mum eventually went for white and navy – to avoid the royal blue which didn’t suit her. She sent me a text the week before the wedding declaring “At 11th hour have dress!” She was especially pleased with her hat (which she continued to hide behind) and how she and Guy’s mum were accidentally coordinated (Guy’s mum had threatened to wear fluorescent pink).

The Groom’s New Suit

I have considerably less to say about Guy’s suit, for the simple and compelling reason that I had considerably less choice in the matter.

We didn’t set a budget, as such, only decided to spend what we could and save wherever possible, so originally Guy was going to wear his tailored suit that he wore to graduation, accessorising it with tie, waistcoat

Then my mother got involved…

She was determined that he should get something new and special for the wedding day, and afterall, why not? I would be getting a new dress. And, she declared, light grey tails would really cut it (though you should know from the last picture that he won’t end up in grey!). Guy’s height and slim build are made for tails, and whilst at first he was reluctant to commit, the idea began to grow upon him.

We were never that committed to hiring: with the current plan to leave for our honeymoon at the end of the day and drive away into the evening, hiring presented a few complications! Besides, Guy was worried about the fit, the faff of collecting it in the week before the wedding, and would really prefer his own suit, if he could get away with it. Still, it seemed worth looking at a few hire places; if for nothing else, just to set the guideline.

And so we went trooping around tailors in Oxford city centre (missing out Moss Bro’s, because Guy didn’t want the same hire suit as thousands of others), and ended up in Ede and Ravenscroft, whose assistant measured him up by eye! We were impressed by their service, but looking at the prices we thought we could do better – we thought that we could [i]buy[/i] something for very little more. And we weren’t wrong!

Ebay offers large assortments of suits of different kinds and colours, most notably separate jackets and trousers, so that long-armed narrow-shouldered quandaries like my lovely husband can do a bit of a mismatch jobby – for about £50 each end. This didn’t help with the good fit situation much though, and meant that Guy would not be able to touch and molest the fabric to inspect the quality before purchase. Well, I asked, where did he think he could do that at bargain price?

And so one day, Guy got up, packed a lunch, phoned a friend, and got on a bus to London.

His journey was to Lipman’s, a tailor who sold on ex-hire suits for knockdown prices. All I knew about it was that he vanished for the day, had lunch with a friend and reappeared hours later, suit carrier in hand.

For £200 (twice the cost of my dress!), Guy had brought home morning dress! He had tried haggling with them, he said, but they wouldn’t drop the price, although they had thrown in a white shirt for nothing extra.

And here he is looking sharp on the day:

The waistcoat and tie you see him in were another matter… We decided we wanted him in a different colour waistcoat to the ushers, but all in waistcoats and ties. We ummed and ahhed over ivory or royal blue combinations, but the gist of it was still that we would need to find things in royal blue. That was hard.

We looked in tailors and department stores: M&S, BHS, Debenhams (where we discovered that my 6 foot husband fits a size “small” waistcoat!) and several others, but nobody did royal blue. There was an abundance of pink; purple was having a field day; powder blue was pretty happy with itself; red was here and there; but as for more, well, masculine shades, we found nothing.

So we returned to the internet. Here’s a tip: googling for “royal blue ” gets you nowhere: googling for “coloured ” will turn up a plethora of sites which do these things in custom colours, and then you have to hunt through them for the one with the colour you were looking for. We ended up on waistcoats4weddings. We couldn’t be sure of the quality or the colour match, but it seemed like our best bet.

At this point in the proceedings, Guy surprised me. I thought I was abominable at making decisions, but he couldn’t decide whether he wanted ties or cravats. Ties, apparently, are appropriate wedding attire, but recent fashions have leant towards cravats.

In the end, I made the decision – yes, I did! I told Guy that I preferred ties: they look neater on, and they might actually get reworn. So he ordered his waistcoat, and ties for himself and the ushers. They were actually delivered to my labs, and I had a terrible time not opening the packet until I got home. Guy immediately tried his waistcoat on, refused to let me see him in it, and compared the colour to my dress – it was a good match!

The quality is also good, and the material all nice and strokey.

Well, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it!

A Dress

My next thought in planning was my dress. Whether it was on the forum or elsewhere, I had read that you should start looking about a year in advance. At the time, I was oblivious to the early order expectations of dress shops, or that you had to give a date and wouldn’t receive your dress until mere weeks before. Characteristically, I was incredibly wary about giving a date to any supplier, just in case they were reluctant to process my order massively in advance.

And anyway, I hadn’t been thinking about dress shops – it was my mum who first put dress shops into my mind – I had been thinking online.

Have I mentioned before that I HATE, LOATHE and DETEST shopping?

Well, online is different. Click open a browser and you open the lid to a treasure trove of possibilities, no harrassments, no browsing through rails of completely the wrong thing and trekking doggedly from shop to shop – in an instant, in a single click, you can close the whole thing down and walk away to resurface into real life and grab that much-needed cup of tea. And I already had one dress in mind – £125, custom size and colour, and floor length slimline satin – a style which worked on me.

My dress idea:

My only concern was the fit under the bust – this dress had the potential to hang down rather than “clip in”, and it was important that my wedding dress did not sag! Still, I had not set my heart on this dress: it was still just an idea – I would keep exploring.

I had told myself that for the wedding I could buy something really special, spend a proper amount of money – I had had a think and come up with the budget of £250. That, I thought, would be generous. Oh dear! But I had made a plan, and, stubborn mare that I am, I would stick to it!

And thus I brought my mother into the equation. I told her I had seen a dress online and was considering it; I showed her a picture; her response was… deep dissatisfaction. And then she declared that she would take me dress shopping!

Now, let me really set the scene for this: my mother hates shopping as much as I do. And if anyone is aware of how much I hate shopping, it is my mother. She is terribly indecisive and rarely manages to come home with anything from a shopping trip… And so her suggestion rather took me aback. The “taking your daughter dress shopping” experience was entirely lost on me: my mum doesn’t believe in marriage and had never expected me to get married. But here she was, taking me round wedding dress shops in Sheffield, determined to find me something more “wedding dressy” (more structured than what I had been looking at) and trying to tempt me towards ivory.

Whites are emphatically not my colour – and wasn’t it Agatha Christie’s Poirot who said that when a woman has made up her mind that a particular colour does not suit her she will not wear it?

I have very fair skin and lots and lots of freckles: the perfect combination for a mottled effect, especially at a distance: an effect enhanced by white or pale colours, giving me a smudged, slightly grubby and unwashed appearance.

The symbolism of bridal purity had never appealed anyway, and somehow I had picked up that weddings had “colour schemes”, a principle which made complete sense to me. Afterall, when I decorate a room I have a colour scheme in mind; I try to make things match as much as possible; I use aesthetics to create harmony – surely it would be the same for a wedding?

I wanted a colour I hadn’t worn before, and a colour with wow factor. The colour choice was always going to be a joint decision between me and Guy because it was our wedding, and he would naturally help me decide upon a dress – it was only sensible (although I did decide he shouldn’t see me wearing it until the day). And so I voiced the suggestion of blue – bright royal blue. Guy liked blue.

I only actually tried on dresses in one shop; somebody was meant to tell us, my mum and me, that you go to wedding dress shops by appointment, but nobody had done it. So in some shops we browsed through the dresses, and in others we looked through magazines and at bridesmaid dress colour swabs, and then we went to Pronuptia, who gave us an appointment for a few hours later, and so we went off and had tea at Nero’s.

At the time, I had no experience of wedding dress shops: I had never been anybody’s bridesmaid or anything. And so they were big and scary and I felt small and cheap and out of place in one – a tresspasser on foreign territory. – But, in hindsight, I realise that Pronuptia were a very good dress shop. I was completely honest with them that this was only a preliminary venture, and that I was unlikely to buy a dress because I wanted one in colour. The dresses were all in transparent bags, and they let you go round looking at whatever you liked, touching them through the bags, and asked you to turn round the tags of things you’d like to try – as many as you liked. I remember thinking about how they all looked like very heavy sacks, shapeless on the hangers, and I was seeing beading EVERYWHERE. Beadings and sequins are desperately not to my taste, and I feel they cheapen a dress: for me, the fabric has to do it all: lace, embroidery, layering and cut – those are the qualities which can make a dress divine. And yet I had no idea what I wanted and went round turning tags higgelty-piggelty (I was in and out of the dresses very quickly anyway). My mum also went a bit tag-happy. They sent me upstairs and brought up the dresses in fours or fives, helped me in behind a curtain and laid out the train as I emerged and, because the dresses were all 14s and 15s, held the back so I could see what it would look like fitted in the huge mirror I was faced with.

My mother did not cry. She did not become even the slightest bit emotional. And neither did I.

‘The One’ is not a belief system I subscribe to, let’s get that straight. It is an emotional response to an aesthetic pleasure at an emotional moment! Just like the key change up by a major third (Guy’s wording – I’m no musician) used to move congregations. There is not one dress for one woman, no more is there only one man you could have been happy with – otherwise nobody would ever criticise anybody else’s dress – but once you have found one you are that happy with you really are blinded by love – why would you consider any other when yours is perfect? So all I was looking for was a nice dress that would make me feel amazing: I did not expect miracles.

And at 5 foot 3, I looked like a little girl playing dress ups: I was swamped. I could barely move.

Here are the four dresses the shop assistant wrote down for me, that I had liked the most. I don’t have photographs, as these weren’t permitted, but here they are on the models.

Ella 5471 @ £829

Ella 5497 @ £929

Ella 5482 @ £879

And, my clear favourite: Essence D940 @ £1129

It was a valuable learning experience and the first idea I had had about how much wedding dresses cost. But it also helped me understand what I liked and what I didn’t like. Some of it was old, but a lot of it was new to me. For example…

– I liked A-line dresses and I didn’t like fishtail dresses, princess dresses, or any dress with a large skirt.
– I liked corset backs, but I also liked covered buttons.
– I liked dresses with folds and layers in the material, especially twisty effects around the bodice.
– I liked sweetheart necklines, but I didn’t like like straight necklines, sleeveless dresses, halter neck dresses or dresses with straps that shape into the neckline.
– I didn’t like trains – at all. Not even little puddle trains.

My mum was keen to discuss colour with me. She challenged my preference of royal blue (which I later understood to arise from her concerns about how royal blue would look on her!) and, following her abortive hints towards the traditional whites, tried to persuade me towards apple green or red – both colours I loved, and which suited me. There was a picture of a bride in red in the Town Hall’s wedding brochure, which she took to looking at, pointing out how the colour complemented the room: well, I have been told not to fight a colour scheme, but nothing is ever quite so satisfying without a good battle for it first – and the Assembly Room was red, but the Old Library was dark green. But I was determined that red was not even an option: The look I wanted was elegance rather than fussiness frills, and if I were looking for an occasion dress, I would have to be careful to avoid “sexy”. Red symbolism was definitely sexy, and I was as dead against it as I was white.

I thought very seriously about the apple green. I really liked the colour and I knew that it would suit me, whereas I could only guess at the blue. Grey blues suited me, but I wanted a stunning colour, a colour of power and magic and meaning. And on your wedding day, you are supposed to wear something blue…

Trumpeted back to my online world of shopping without consequences, I began the hunt for a dress that could win me. I found myself on Chinese sites, comparing outdated copies – £250 was suddenly a very reasonable budget once again and I ended up torn between two dresses in particular:

and

I loved the corsetted back and soft light chiffon of the first dress. I would have to have two straps, of course, but I was sure that would be fine with a custom dress. But would the blue look as stunning in chiffon as satin? I wasn’t sure.

On the second dress I loved the thinness of it’s look, the satin and the lace embroidery. It had a low back, although no corsetting, and a train and beading that would have to be removed.

I emailed both sellers.

And in the end my decision came down to the most basic requirements: seller 1 spoke very poor English, and seller 2 had good English: I was confident that seller 2 could understand my requirements and carry through my requests. And so I bought dress 2: and £101 lighter, I was the proud owner of a rather crumpled, but surprisingly not subject to import tax, royal blue copy of Maggie Sottero’s “Cathy”.

It was only after several months of wedding chat that I looked up the name of my dress. Designer Culture had always disgusted me in everyday life, but I began gradually to understand the appeal when it came to a one-off dress like a wedding dress, a dress you would talk about, compare, maybe sell on preloved… I knew my dress was a Maggie Sottero because of the distinctive photography and backdrop, so I trawled through the older models on her site until I came across my own – with a little skip of my heart.

Have you ever read Emily Bronte’s ‘Wuthering Heights’? We didn’t use a quotation at our wedding, because in the best passage the heroine is choosing between two lovers; but it still remains my favourite love story of all time: a love story about two fallible, faulty human beings, who love each other for good or ill, knowing each others’ weaknesses and loving each other, irresistably, despite.

The heroine’s name is Cathy.

And here she is, as my mother walks me down the aisle! As you can see, she went for navy blue and white in the end.

The dress was altered to add lace to the straps and to have the small puddle train lopped off to allow me to dance in it. It was altered in Sheffield, and when I went to try it on I had been grossly overfed by my adoring mother. I was nearly a stone heavier than I normally am, and the dress didn’t fit around the ribcage. I spent months in anxiety. Shortening the straps had lifted the bust and made it tighter underneath. I wasn’t sure it would fit me when I was at my ideal weight. I would wait until Guy had gone out and weigh myself before trying it on, trying to convince myself that everything would be okay. But I still fretted and panicked. I didn’t want to pay to have it altered again, especially as it had cost nearly as much as the dress in the first place.

On the day the hook and eye I had sewn on came off! People had to put a pin underneath the zip to hold it in place – you can see it here!

But, in the end, I am still so pleased that I bought the dress from China – I used alibaba.com and the buyer security on their site is excellent. The quality and the price were more than satisfactory, and my custom demands were met without question or demand for greater payment. I can wear the dress again – although only to very special occasions – and, whilst I liked corsetted backs, I liked them trying on dresses 3 or 4 sizes too big for me; after hearing all the fears about back fat and such forth, mine was definitely the easy pick. So, three cheers for zips and buttons, and a better catch for next time around…!

The Florist

It was Maytime, and we would be getting married in May. What better a time, I thought, than now, on the very same season, to look around and see what was in flower!

I had only been to one wedding before, my godmother’s, when I was around twelve. My mum had been her Matron of Honour and had given a speech. To involve her in the planning, my mum and I had wandered round a large warehouse-type store with her looking at small, decorative bits, and I remember especially looking at some of the artificial flowers and liking the blue thistles.

And we could have blue thistles at our wedding – why not? We had decided our colour theme would be royal blue – the determination of which will be explained in the next post. So what else was blue? Not pale blue or purple blue, but really blue blue?

Well…

It turns out that there are only two really blue flowers around: cornflowers, which come up in August, and delphinium, which are around in… May.

So, delphinium anybody?

These were also wilder looking flowers, and I liked that. We thought about white or cream flowers to go with them (or black, but we gave up on that!) and settled on sprays of delicate, wild-looking gypsophilia and lisianthus – very like roses, but cheaper and softer looking! I am not actually that keen on roses in a vase: I love them when they’re growing in bushes or on vines, but stem them and they look unnatural, the heads are too big, too sculptured. The lisianthus was smaller, rounder: just enough like a rose, and just enough not like a rose.

The ceremony table was decorated with lisianthus only – and for a very special reason: Guy and I decided to incorporate a Flower Ceremony, more commonly known as a Rose Ceremony, into our wedding: not the traditional one of swapping a flower, but the one where you give a flower each to your mothers in recognition of everything they have done for you. The lisianthus was perfect for this, and we could each give a stem flattered by an array of buds.

The Ceremony Table

My mother

Guy’s mother

It took us a while to find a florist to do our flowers. Most of my thanks should be extended to Orchis on London Road in Sheffield, who let me go through pictures of flowers in their shop and offered material advice, even though our wedding was in Oxford! I was really worried about the florist because it was so important to me that they were reliable: and I had no way of telling when it came to flower delivery.

In the end, of course, there was no problem at all, and the florists we chose did an excellent job – the ushers not so much so, because I had asked everybody to collect their own buttonhole, thinking it would save the ushers the work of distributing them. Industriously, however, they took on the task, despite not knowing the list of everybody who was meant to be wearing them, and thus developed the saga of the wandering buttonhole, where Guy’s buttonhole ended up not upon Guy, but upon my mother, and later on, my grandfather!

Buttonholes

Eventually after some lack of enthusiasm from one Oxford florist, we booked with Joe Austin on Cowley Road – right beside our flat (although by the time we booked we were no longer living in it). And it was Robin from Joe Austin who helped me solve another problem I had with flowers: what to do with my own.

I knew I didn’t want a traditional bouquet – they seemed such a useless addendum, I didn’t feel inclined to toss it, and I didn’t wish to have my hands full. But neither was I happy with pinning something to the front of my dress. I considered decorating a parasol with flowers, or hanging them from its handle – any other option I could come up with! I had initially been uncertain about the idea of a wrist corsage: I seen several in pictures and was not particularly impressed, especially when the flowers were large and upside down, but Robin suggested them, and a bit of hunting about came up with a new phenomenon: trailing wrist corsages. I liked trailing bouquets – frankly I liked any flower arrangement which wasn’t too round and perfect and structured – and I liked trailing wrist corsages too.

My inspiration:

The result:

We provided our own vases for the flowers: we had always meant to, for simplicity if nothing else, and one of our ushers took them over to the shop the day before. But they would have to be fun vases, and they would have to be cheap. Recently, poundland has sported an impressive array of apothecary-like vases, and these were exactly what Guy and I were looking for: but at the time, found none. And thus in a like-minded way I wondered across a shop which sold science supplies, and found 250ml conical flasks at about £2 each – bargain! Guy humoured me, I think – for I was very excited about my chemistry vases – I kept the box they arrived in to transport them to the florist, and filled the bottoms with pretty blue glass beads, a simple but effective display.

Vases

Table displays

Giving Notice

The dreaded moment had arrived – giving notice. Of course I was terrified: if I fluffed up, that could be it for marrying the love of my life.

And fluff up I did.

Luckily, however, fluffing up the spelling of your fiance’s middle name doesn’t carry the kind of implications I was afraid of! They put an ‘inconsistency mark’ on the record, and that, thank god, was that.

We gave notice in Oxford, which was where we lived at the time and where we were getting married, but before we were married, we moved to Birmingham. Had we already been living in Birmingham, Birmingham would have been where we gave notice, although Oxford registry office would still have been the one we dealt with when it came to the planning!

It was a remarkably simple procedure, although made to feel scarier than it was by separating us and going through what wasn’t allowed in the ceremony… not that they told us everything, as you will find out later. And at this juncture, we had barely set the date!

Here are some of the things you will be asked to state:

– Your name, date of birth, address and job title.
– Your fiance’s name (and it’s spelling), date of birth, address and job title.
– That you and your fiance are free to marry, whether either of you have been married before, and that you are not related.
– Your wedding date, time and location. You can change the wedding date but not the location – if you need to do this, you have to pay to give notice again.

Also worthy of note is the registrar’s good intentions: they do want you to be able to marry, and do expect a degree of nervousness. They are there to help.

As for ID, if you are a UK citizen with a valid UK passport, bringing your passport is enough proof of ID (you do not need a driving license as well). You will also need proof of address: we brought our polling cards – a good trick if the bills are in only one name, or your landlord has started redirecting them and paying them for you… (!)

Our appointment took around 40 minutes, and that because we were asking lots of questions. It was very formal and formulaic, but that didn’t prevent me from becoming emotional the moment we stepped outside the offices, whereupon I threw my arms around Guy and started – yet again – to shake! But not quite so debilitatingly on this occasion. It was an exciting moment, and though I am sure many brides will feel that giving notice is just another bit of admin to work though, the act of making it legal was important to me and marked a new step in the journey. From now on in, what we were planning was a real wedding: it was going to happen.

The Venue – The Planning Proper

It seems strange to start on food and makeup, but they were only the beginning of a slide into wedding planning – a tumble down the slippery slope to suddenly finding ourselves online, searching for licensed venues in Oxford, Birmingham, Sheffield and Bristol – but mostly in Oxford.

It was like my wedding brain – our wedding brain – had perked up, or activated.

Our parents had already asked about where we would be getting married. When we told them of our engagement, my mum had said, “So, hotel or registry office?”

And we had said, “Neither!”

…I could practically hear the dread in her silence on the other end of the phone as the thought entered her head that we might be considering getting married in church…

Guy’s parents had asked, “So, church or registry office?”

And we had said, “There are other options, you know!”

We were not considering a church, of course – both of us are atheists, and I can’t imagine anything worse than being made to lie through the most important promise you will ever make. But equally we were determined not to marry in a hotel. Guy felt they were impersonal and souless: a place for comings and goings, but not to marry in. And we had another reason: if I wanted a personalised menu, we were going to need an external caterer. A package was never going to work.

This wedding forum has shown me that people look for venues, and view places they have never been before, but I had always assumed that you got married somewhere you had a connection with: because that is what is done with churches. I think this is lovely, and wanted to embrace the same sentiments.

What’s more, we wanted the whole wedding in one location: since we weren’t using a church, it seemed unnecessary to shuffle everyone around! And the first place we tried – the first place we thought of – was Somerville College.

However, it was not to be. Somerville charged us far more than we could afford, including a £2000 fee just to have the wedding on the premises, additional to the admin fee and hire charges for the buildings; more crucial, however, was their date restriction: we had our hearts set on May (exam season… uh oh), but Somerville would only do a wedding on 3 dates in August!

We had a rethink. We approached Somerville and asked whether we could have the ceremony only in May, and then proceed elsewhere. The answer was yes! …if we got married at 3pm.

We were unhappy again. We wanted to leave for honeymoon that night, and were considering a late morning ceremony. Getting married at 3pm would mean we spent more than half of the day just waiting (I am notoriously poor at waiting), and the wedding would be cut short by a whole 4 hours. Somerville couldn’t offer us an alternative, and so, very sadly, we had to start looking elsewhere…

My mum was keen to move the wedding to Sheffield, where I grew up, but Oxford was where we both lived now, the city where we had met and fallen in love. Guy felt that this would be making the wedding “mine” rather than ours, and preferred the neutrality of Oxford, or Birmingham, where we would soon be moving for my PhD.

There was only really one licensed venue in central Oxford that was in budget, handsome, and we had a connection with: Oxford Town Hall.

We had been to a ball there only a few months ago, eaten delicious food, and occupied two of the three rooms available for civil weddings and big enough for our party: the great hall and the Assembly room. My mum saw pictures online and loved the Assembly Room for it’s light and wood panelled walls.

St Anthony’s Ball at the Town Hall:

The Great Hall:

The Assembly Room:

The third, smallest room, is the Old Library, and Guy immediately adored the idea of getting married in a library. The Great Hall was too big, seating 500 theatre style of 300 for dinner! – so the decision would be between the Old Library and Assembly Room.

Old Library

And then the Town Hall gave us some good news: the Old Library and Assembly Room are connected, the Old Library being accessed via the Assembly Room, so they would not book separate events in both of the rooms. We could put a deposit on one room, and changed our mind later.

We booked.

Initially this was just for the ceremony, but we toyed with the idea of hiring both rooms and having the ceremony in the Old Library (which, with South and West facing windows has more natural light in the morning) and reception in the Assembly Room (with big West facing windows for lots of light in the afternoon – I have heard too many horror stories about wedding photography in the dark!). But there was one major drawback. There was no outside area, no grass or garden for taking pictures in: and I did want our formal pictures outside!

So we started looking at village halls – low hire rates, and a space we could make our own and have external caterers in. After a lot of searching we found two possible venues: South Oxford Community Centre, which backed onto a beautiful park and was just down the road from the Town Hall, or Summertown Church Hall – a prettier building, but substantially further away and with a restricted outdoor space.

South Oxford Community Centre

Summertown Church Hall

At this juncture in the narrative, my mum threw a massive wobbly. She felt the Community Centre, our first choice, looked like a Victorian Workhouse and insisted we book the whole wedding at the Town Hall: she and my grandparents would be contributing. This caused a lot of stress between my mum and me for a while, and was especially hard because she has always valued outdoor spaces and is very fond of her garden.

It seemed for a while that we were at a stalemate – then we had another idea.

We went back to Somerville.

Yes, we had given up the idea of having our wedding reception there (August only), or ceremony (3pm only), but now we had a new plan, and this time we were able to carry it through… We asked if Somerville could host a drinks reception between the ceremony and dinner reception, allowing us time to take photos and enjoy the outdoors, before going back to the hotel. The booking fee was reasonable, and we bagged the Margaret Thatcher Conference Centre as our indoor space, and selected Cava, Buck’s Fizz, orange juice, Pimms and white and rose wine to offer. We would have our wedding in Somerville afterall!

All that was to be done now was return to return to the Town Hall and extend our booking to the wedding reception. Our wedding would be happening on the 19th May 2012, and we finally booked our venue for the event on the 19th May 2011 – exactly a year to the day. To celebrate, we bought a bottle of wine and headed out for a meal at a sleazy Italian BYO – it was a fantastic feeling.

Makeup

I knew nothing – nothing about makeup, that is. Most of what I had had been given to me, and wasn’t the best quality, and my daywear consisted of eyeliner and mascara – job done.

So I turned to the internet for help (my mum certainly wouldn’t’ve been any use) and watched youtube videos. Seriously? Yes, seriously. I learnt how to put on makeup from youtube videos. I also researched products and read reviews. I tried on samples in department stores and rated whether waterproof eye makeup was really waterproof and how long the lippy lasted (crucial: lipsticks never last any time on me and I intended to be (and indeed come the day did find myself) kissing and eating and drinking).

I learnt how to put on mascara to full effect (false lashes were a no-no), lipstick to hide a thin upper lip, what “primer” was, and what “lighteners” were – because foundation was something I was also adamanent against: I had never wore it, except when acting at 13, and I wasn’t going to cover up my freckles with a mask so that I looked nothing like myself on the day. If the photos were awful as a result, at least they’d be honest!

I looked at colours and decided to be adventurous, to get a purplish lipstick to compliment my dress – a new colour for me (besides the vivid Haloween purples). I wanted to keep my eyes more natural and went for brown liners and mascaras instead of my usual black. At my grandparents’ house, I tore a picture out of their telegraph of a woman with lovely soft brown eye makeup, and stuck it to a piece of cardboard; likewise I made two Audrey Hepburn “eyebrow” cards – and used these on the day for makeup guidance. This worked really well, as I had a clear idea what I was doing and could refer and compare as I worked. I’d recommend!

In the end, I bought and used rather a lot of makeup, although I didn’t compromise any principles and give in to pressure to wear foundation (immense!). I also acquired some of it for free! Here is the collection:

From left to right and in order of application:

1. Primer (in a little lip salve tin). I actually stole this from the shops in lots of tiny bits of free sample, which I collected together until I had enough. I thought I might as well apply some in case it helped the make up stay, and since it didn’t budge on the day, I can only presume it worked!

2. Lightener for round my eyes, brown bones, nose, outlining lips, et cetera. Bought from the Body Shop. Mine is the lightest shade as I’m really pale behind the freckles.

3. Powder, just to lightly dust my face (not to look like vampire). This is just something I had lying around. It’s just ordinary talc.

4. Blusher and eyeshadow, with lots of brushes. The brushes I bought from the Works for £2, since I needed some new, pointy ones and it’s so much cheaper to get ordinary brushes rather than makeup ones! The blusher I’ve had since I was about 13 and was given to me by my mum at the time, but I was only applying a little and like the colour, so I didn’t feel the need to buy a new one. The blusher my grandma got free from somewhere and sent to me, supposing I wouldn’t really use it, not knowing that it was in just the colours I’d had in mind!

5. Lipliner and sharpener – old sharpener, and liner bought from the Body Shop to match the new colour of my lipstick. It’s actually a bit darker, and when I coloured in my lips before putting on the lipstick, I looked like a child who’d been at the strawberry jam – disastrous! Luckily my manytrials had forewarned me about this, and I wasn’t phased.

6. Lipfinity lasting lip stuff and gloss coating – an excellent buy (online) and the only long lasting variety I had tried which could withstand two let alone three of eating, drinking and kissing. I bought ‘Iced’ 160 and love the colour – just that slight bit purpley and soft in colour. Donald recommended I go for a stronger version of my lip colour and more natural look, but my lips are very red and again, this just looked like a strawberry jam disaster, so I said No.

7. Eyeliners – I bought a brown waterproof one online for a couple of quid and, because it was a lighter brown than my hair colour, added definition with a touch of black liquid liner, which I could add as a very fine line.

8. Waterproof mascara – I got a black one free from the Body Shop when I bought other make up, but wanted brown, and my mum picked this up for me. It was good stuff, but I didn’t like the brush, so I removed the brush from an old Maybelline mascara, washed it, and used that for good application.

9. Lip gloss, again from the Body Shop, which was a bit more purpley than the lipstick and very sparkly, adding a nice gloss! It did come off pretty quickly, but I expected that and it was only a frivolous addition. It lasted until the kiss!

Not made up (the “basis function”):

The wedding day – partly made up (the freaky state):

Halfway through the reception (and after a little wear and tear):

I’ve never understood girls who have their hair or makeup professionally done for a ball or a night out, but a wedding was the one time I might have justified it – but didn’t. Guy would never have understood, and furthermore, I didn’t want to. I especially didn’t want to have no choice over the products, nothing left to show for it and an argument over foundation. Wedding morning stress could easily be achieved in my case by having a stranger all over my face and being forced to trust them completely and not interfere…! At one point after reading a discussion on a forum, I actually had a nightmare about my mum and best man forcing me to have my make up done and making me late for the wedding. It was my one and only wedding nightmare.

So I was always going to do my own makeup, even if I knew nothing. And it is one of the things I am most satisfied with… I look back at my photos and the faultlessness of the makeup, and think, wow, I did that. I did that from scratch, knowing nothing at all about it, learning slowly, using resources from round the world, practising, trying products, and I got there – I learnt enough. I achieved something. I was able to look like me and only wear the makeup I was comfortable in, but still do a good, lasting job. And of that, I am proud.

The Warm Up

Later reading on websites and forums told me I should have launched enthusiastically into the planning right away – but I did not. Why was that?

…I suppose the chief reason was that I had not expected the proposal – and I certainly hadn’t been waiting for it. Marriage, let alone weddings, couldn’t’ve been further from my mind. So the first thing we had to do once we were engaged was get used to the idea: get used to the exciting, tumultuous feeling of knowing we were going to marry each other, knowing we would become husband and wife and spend the rest of our lives in each others’ arms… Incredible!

Of course, other people asked about the wedding. There would have to be a wedding, of course: that was how people got married, and it never occurred to either of us not to get married surrounded by our loved ones. Very well, there would be a wedding. When?

Now, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge may have been able to pull off a wedding in 5 months (or even Guy’s parents, 30 years ago), but we didn’t have the resources, and I still had a degree to finish. So we decided to wait until the spring/summer after next (the year 2012), and settled on May, the month of the honeymoon of our relationship, the month of punting, Pimms and revision on Somerville quad – the month where the Oxford year ended and the celebrations of freedom and progress were underway. Besides, the last two Mays had had beautiful weather, gloriously hot and sunny.

So we had 18 months to go before the wedding, and that left plenty of time to enjoy ourselves. We didn’t need to start planning the wedding until a year before, I decided; even the guidelines in various wedding-related media didn’t think so. So we happily put the wedding aside and got on with affianced life for a while.

It started slowly. Around March 2011 the degree was winding down, and I had started my thesis writing. My mind began to wonder to my next project – the wedding. My preliminary thoughts were not about the big things, the date or the venue or what I would be wearing, but about the niggling concerns I had about not really being bride material. I bite my nails, climb and cook and lab my hands to shreds and, quite frankly, knew nothing about hair and makeup. And yet I was supposed to be beautiful, bridal and the centre of attention. Heavens!

I tried to curl my hair using some heated curlers my grandma gave me, only for the curls to fall out as I went along. Undeterred I read tips and watched demonstrations, only to have them fall out again. I bought soft rollers and did this:

But I was clearly in need of hair help… My mum’s friend Hilary had a go twisting bits of hair and clipping it, and did this:

And my mum’s hairdresser had a go with straighteners and did this:

And then my mum had a go:

I also started trying to stop biting my nails and bought a metal nail file. It was clearly having some effect because a couple of months later, visiting my mum, she noticed, and told me how she had been going to “have a chat with me about that”!

Food was also on my mind. I decided I wanted to have a blackcurrant sorbet as a palette cleanser between courses: or even better, a cassis sorbet! Blackcurrant sorbet had been a speciality of Somerville’s, as well as many blackcurrant desserts, and I wanted to recreate Formal Hall. Cake came to mind too, and I trawled the internet for interesting cake recipes, ran trials, and did my best to make Guy fat. I finally emailed the St Hugh’s chef to ask for his delicious recipe for a cheese pate I’d had at formal there three years ago.

Around this time, a friend of Guy’s who had married last summer linked me to ‘the forum’ – she had gone there for inspiration only, but I joined, and soon began to use it for chatting, socialising and planning. I set up a planning thread and started this blog on wordpress.

The planning had begun.

The Ring

Of course, I had no ring, since Guy hadn’t planned to propose – so we went shopping together. I hasten to add that I lack the shopping gene, just like my mum and my grandma, and going shopping for something as expensive and important as an engagement ring was a massive deal – I was terrified! When we paid for the one we chose, I nearly swooned.

A pair of my friends had got engaged before we did, and I had seen his engagement ring. Strangely, despite this, and despite my views on equality, it never occurred to us to get Guy a ring – why? Probably because he was never fond of jewellery, but he wanted to get me a ring – as an honour to his promise – and I was to preoccupied reeling from the shock of the proposal…

Initially I hadn’t been sure about diamonds, but that was what we kept seeing, and eventually their sparkliness captured me. We looked at several single-stone rings, but they looked so very different on my finger, and seemed to protrude hugely! I’m a practical woman, and it was clear I would need a more practical ring.

We found my ring in H Samuels – end of the line and 5 sizes too big for me. It is 9ct white gold, and I loved the three diamonds in it: it was different, but not too different, and I’ve always preferred interesting settings and finer detail.

This is the closest commercial image I could find:

And this is the real thing (this picture was taken after our marriage, obviously, as you have a sneak preview of our wedding rings – but there more is yet to tell):

It took a while for me to actually get my ring, because of it being resized, but as soon as I got it, I did what any geeky solid state chemist would do – went down to Single Crystal and mounted it on a diffractometer.

And so I actually have “evidence” that the diamond in my ring is really diamond!

Recipe for Chocolate Dipping Sauce

Using a rolling pin, crush one 100g bar of plain chocolate, still packaged. Open the package and empty into a pyrex measuring jug. Boil ~3 cups full of water and pour into a deep pan. Stand the measuring jug in the pan over the heat so that the water comes about halfway up the side. Add 1 rounded dessert spoonful of margarine or butter. Stir as the chocolate melts.

Dip another dessert spoon in the boiling water for about 20 seconds and then use the hot spoon to add 2 or 3 big dessert spoonfuls of golden syrup. The hot spoon should mean the syrup glides off easily.

When the mixture is smooth and uniform, leave to cool. The sauce is good hot or cold: whilst it thickens on cooling, it should not set (unless you haven’t added enough golden syrup) and can always be reheated.