Blog neglect

So.

This blog has been woefully neglected over the summer due to my life consisting entirely of working in a restaurant to pay off my debts from spending a year of my degree overseas. Now I'm back at uni and in my final year lo and behold I'm still pretty busy, but wedding progress has still been made! In the last couple of months we have:

1. Booked the register office, Lyme Regis Guildhall.
2. Booked the registrar to perform the ceremony.
3. Got quotes from marquee companies and provisionally set up a marquee (Although not actually booked yet...).
4. Collected about 30 dessert plates and cups and saucers to start us off with crockery for the party.
5. Made ourselves a schedule for the day; at the moment this is how we think the day will go:

• 10.00 Arthur and Kirstie arrive at registry office
• 10.15 ceremony invitees arrive at registry office
• 10.30 marriage ceremony
• 11.00 drinks on the beach
• 2.00-3.00 party guests arrive, sarnies and soft drinks
• 3.00 tree planting and speeches
• 3.45 crack out the bubbly
• 4.00 sit down for food
• ?.?? Arthur and Kirstie serve dessert/cheese
• ?.?? Rave commences

The day is going to be divided into two separate parts. First there'll be the ceremony which only a few people are invited to because the venue is too small, then later in the day we're having a quasi ceremony for everybody followed by a party.

So where we're at is that we've done plenty of planning but not all that much doing. I think we're going to be getting a bit busier in the next few months, hopefully fun busy not stressed busy...

Organising

My mum emailed me the other day to remind me (again) that she still didn't have a guest list or a timetable of how the day is going to work. Clearly our collaborative family and friends DIYing of this wedding isn't going to work if nobody knows what needs doing when, so I thought I should finally get a bit organised and set up some wedding lists and whatnot to share on google docs. I'm really glad I got round to it because we had a lot of question marks on the guest list about which family friends were going to be invited, and also people's surnames, which my mum cleared up straight away by editing the list. So yay for google docs. I think it will also be great for collecting addresses to send invites to, and budgeting.

I hadn't used google docs before but I found it really easy. The only annoying thing was that all the formatting on the documents I uploaded was removed, this may be me being a technological dunce? Other than that it's really user friendly. If you haven't used it before you just click documents on the google page, sign in (or sign up) to google, then you can start uploading or creating documents which you can let selected people view and edit online.

The other bit of possible wedding progress made today was my mum finding these giant numbers, which might be really cool for the tables (if a bit extravagant), but since we're not sure if we're having separate tables or long one's yet we can't really make a table numbering decision. Another option we'd considered for table numbers was having geeky numbers like pi and the speed of light as table numbers, which appeals since we're both geeky numbery people. I think I prefer the pi idea but the giant numbers are quite tempting, especially as they're recycled and we could use them to decorate our house afterwards.

It's nice to have fun things to decide on like this when I get exhausted by fourth year maths, but it's also getting difficult to find any wedding planning time. I can get a bit stressed with life being so busy, so I'm trying to enjoy the fact that Arthur and I can be busy together planning an awesome love-celebratey-party (as it's currently being called) some of the time!

Doing it your way

I somehow stumbled across this yesterday and I thought it was awesome. This couple ran 23 miles of the London marathon, ran off the course to a church, got married, ran back onto the course, completed the marathon, then had drinks in the park to celebrate. Would I do this? Hell no. But it was obviously exactly right for this couple so yay them. I think making your wedding part of a bigger event that is doing good is a brilliant idea, running a marathon is a huge challenge, so completing one together can only make you stronger. The details of this are totally not what we want; church wedding, smart dress, city location etc, but the spirit of it is great, I love it!

My idea of romance

I am obsessed with this song at the moment, I am such a geek. I love maths in-jokes, they make me feel I'm part of a community of equally geeky people, it makes me smile! I totally want to incorporate this into the wedding, I mean come on, what could be more romantic!? I'm not sure Arthur is quite so keen... I'm crossing my fingers that he will suddenly see its true awesomeness though.

Moussaka

The other day I cooked dinner with one of my flatmates and taught him how to make veggie moussaka. Generally I'm not very good at cooking to a recipe, even though it does give more, err, consistent results! I love recipes for giving me new ideas of flavour combinations or for learning a new technique but I've never made moussaka to a recipe. I based the moussaka we made on friday on the way my friend, one of the chefs where I work over the summer, makes it. It was soo DELICIOUS. Like seriously delicious. I was eating it going mmmm mmmm mmmmmmmm, it was good.

We're planning on having veggie moussaka at our wedding (it definitely says something about our priorities that the first thing we decided about our wedding was what we wanted to eat!), so I thought I should actually record what I put in this one so we can recreate it. Then I thought why not share the love, who doesn't want to make a yummy veggie moussaka!? So here goes:

1. Turn the oven on at around 220 degrees C.
   
2. Slice a medium sized aubergine (or eggplant if you're that way inclined) into widthway slices about half a centimetre thick. Place a layer of slices in the bottom of a colander and lightly sprinkle salt over them. Add another layer, add salt, and repeat until all of the slices are in the colander. Then put a plate on top and add a weight like some tins or a bottle of wine to squash the aubergine. This will remove some of the liquid in the aubergine so the slices are tender.
   
3. Chop two small onions (or one big one!), three large cloves of garlic and two sticks of celery.
4. Begin to fry the onions, garlic and celery in olive oil in a stew pot or wok, at a moderate heat so that the onions are browning very gently.
5. While the onions etc are frying roughly chop three portabello mushrooms, into pieces that are chunky but not more that bite sized.
6. Deglaze the pan by adding a good glug of red wine.
7. Add a large (800g) tin of peeled (or chopped) tomatoes, and a small (400g) drained tin of lentils, or if you're organised a comparable quantity of dried lentils that you've pre-cooked.
   
8. Throw in the mushrooms, then crumble a vegetable stock cube into the pan, add black pepper (liberally for me, but whatever you like!), paprika (again, liberally!), a pinch of cayenne pepper and a pinch of brown sugar (or whatever you have, honey is even better actually).
9. While you let the tomatoey pan simmer away you can begin on the topping, first set up a pan to lightly fry the aubergine slices. While this is warming rinse off the slices to remove the salt, then squeeze them in stacks to remove some more liquid. You can then batch fry them until they all have a little bit of colour on both sides. If the tomatoey pan is beginning to look fairly reduced and syrupy delicious you can turn it off.
   
10. Either simultaneously if you're hungry, or once the aubergines are done, you can begin on the white sauce for the topping. Add a knob of butter (I'd say around a heaped dessert spoon if I had to measure it) to a small sauce pan, melt.
11. While continuing to heat the pan cautiously add some plain flour (or sauce flour if you have it) and stir into the butter until it forms a ball that will be rolled around the pan without sticking.
12. Now this is the tricky bit. Add milk to your butter and flour ball, but very very slowly, I mean miniscule bits to start with, and keep stirring all the time, the heat should still be on but not too hot. The idea is to gradually make the ball into a liquid, but if you try to do this too quickly it will go lumpy. If you stop stirring the milk is likely to burn to the bottom of the pan, so just keep stirring!
13. Once your ball is a liquid add a couple more glugs of milk to make it fairly thin, something like the consistency of single cream.
14. Then you can add some grated cheese, two decent handfuls of cheddar does the trick, but parmesan is better if you have it, a mix is of the two is also yummy. If you have mustard adding a little bit at this stage will bring out the flavour of your cheese so you don't need to add as much. When you're grating, grate some extra to go on top of the moussaka.
    
15. Cook the sauce out for a little while, a couple of minutes or so, until it visibly thickens.
16. Now you're ready to assemble your moussaka. First pour the tomatoey mix into a casserole dish. Then layer your aubergine slices on top, don't worry if you have too many or too few, just double them up or spread them out depending on your dilemma. Now pour the cheese sauce on top. Finally sprinkle some cheese to taste on top, and some paprika on top of that if you like.
17. Pop in the oven for around half an hour, we put some potatoes in as well so we could have baked potatoes with our moussaka.
18. Eat, enjoy!

Yum. I'm getting hungry writing about it, a perfect friday night dinner, maybe I'll make it this week as well!

The Naming of Things

I've been mulling over the name changing question for a while now and as often seems to be the case for me the more I think about it the less sure I am. My initial thoughts were something along the lines of "NO. No no no no no. I am not changing my name. No way. It's mine. It's who I am. NO." I think I was initially so opposed to changing my name because I saw it as a visible part of the act of subjugation that marriage used to be for some women. I wasn't willing to lose something, my name, because I was getting married. I thought that marriage should be about strengthening a partnership between two individuals, not turning two people into one. Actually, writing this I'm starting to feel this way again, part of me is screaming out "Don't give an inch! You have to fight for this to be a fair and equal union!". In a wider sense this might be true, women still seem to give more up in a marriage, but I don't think our marriage will be this way, so perhaps my fighting attitude is misplaced here.

Another part of me sees this marriage as creating a new family, and it will feel more like it's our new family if we have the same name, but maybe a new name would be best for a new family? The issue with some kind of combination is that Arthur's family name is already double-barrelled, so we can't just stick our names together and be done with it. If we took my name and half of his then that would feel unfair because he would be loosing a bit of his name and I would only be adding to mine. I thought about putting both of our mum's maiden names together, but as Arthur pointed out that sounds like a cowboy's name...really, it doesn't sound good.

Then there's the traditional I take his name scenario, but I really don't think that's for me. It just has too many connotations of imbalanced gender relations, and it wouldn't fairly represent our marriage. The option I'm leaning towards at the moment is taking my mum's maiden name and the second half of his family name to make a new name. That way we're both giving up our unmarried names to make a new one, but it has elements from both of our families, so there's some history to it. His family name has only been double-barrelled for a couple of generations anyway, and the first part was just a middle name tacked on to sound fancier or something so I don't think he'd be too bothered about loosing it. If we did this we could start the tradition of girls taking the matrilineal name into marriage and boys taking the patrilineal name, which appeals to me. Of course it might not appeal to our children, but at least they would have the option.

In short I don't think I'm really decided yet, I hope it doesn't come down to whatever I feel on the day. I suppose if that's the case I should just keep my name until I'm sure because It's a lot of paperwork to change everything. It's funny that the 'A rose by any other name...' argument doesn't seem to apply here for me. I mean what's in a name really? Not an awful lot, but it feels incredibly important right now. More thought is needed I fear, or perhaps I shouldn't fear, it's motivating some useful relationship thinking after all, and that is an end in itself.

Trusted sources

I stumbled across a link to sign up to receive emails from the 'Rough Guide to Weddings' people on the Rough Guide facebook page today. Now, I really like Rough Guides, I think the writing is well informed, balanced and useful, but the first weddingy email I received really didn't come across that way. I know I didn't have to sign up for said emails so I can't really complain, but I really thought Rough Guides might have something intelligent to say on the matter. Oh no. The very first thing they have to say is this:

"Money matters"

"Love may be free, but weddings cost money - lots of it. Whatever your total budget, here's a likely breakdown of the costs:

• Food & drink: 40%
  
• Music: 8%
• Clothes & rings: 13%
  
• Stationery: 3%
• Photos/video: 12%
  
• Gifts: 3%
• Reception venue: 8%
  
• Ceremony: 3%
• Flowers: 8%
• Transport & parking: 2% "
  

Are they completely mad? Okay, granted, the fact that presumably they got this from some genuine statistics is what is really insane about this. (Um hello? Spending the same amount of money on stationary as on your WEDDING CEREMONY? This is not cool with me.) But what really made me fume was that this is what they chose as the first thing to share with potential customers. They are trying to sell their book, fair enough, but why is it that the only way we seem to be sold things now is through negativity? What might have inclined me to buy their book, or at least see if it was in the Library, is something positive. Some advice that made me feel happy about getting married, not a list of how much money everybody else spends! Our whole consumer culture is based on companies feeding off our insecurities, from cleaning products that imply you might kill your baby if you don't use them to 'anti'-aging creams and just about any cosmetic you care to mention, but I really thought Rough Guides were better than that.

It seems, when it comes to weddings, publishers are like your nearest and dearest; some people/publishers who are usually very sensible and give very sound advice turn into chiffon crazed spendaholics when you mention the 'W' word. Of course I haven't read the book and it could be that it gives very useful advice, but judging by the email I'm going to guess not.

I suppose the only thing to do is take pleasure in the fact that so far our 'stationary' costs are £7.99 on a box of 100 penguin book cover postcards which we're going to use as invites, and I think that will be it. So based on their table our wedding is going to cost £266.33. Awesome!

Staying healthy

I've let myself get ill this week by over filling my schedule and forgoing sleep to try and get things done. I really need to not do this in the run up to the wedding, I wonder if people having to call their wedding's off because they're ill is a surprisingly common occurance?

Vision

Yesterday I let myself skive off revising for a test I have coming up by composing a wedding mood board. I got really excited sharing it with Arth over skype because we had such a clear vision of how we were going to make this day true to us that it felt like we were there already. Getting a vision of marrying in my head that really makes me happy has been something of a battle for me, so arriving at this point has made me want to write about how I got here. I say ‘I’ because I think I have been the crazy one in this process, the one who got lost in the middle, and now Arth and I are back together in sane wedding planning land I want to dissect my craziness.

I think it’s important to explain at this stage, mostly so I don’t come across as entirely crazy, that our engagement is looong. I got the opportunity to go and study in New Zealand for a year which pretty much removed the possibility of getting married in either of the first two summers after we got engaged. We knew we wanted to get married in the summer so we could be outside, so we’ve ended up with what will be a two and a half year engagement. Not so long in the grand scheme of things but it seems like a long time when you really want to get married RIGHT NOW!

Despite the fact that when we got engaged it was more than two years until the date we’d decided on part of me wanted to start planning this wedding from day one. Actually, more accurately, about 3 months before we officially got engaged which was when I think we’d decided that this was IT. Now I am not a weddingy person. I have said surprisingly recently that marriage is just a piece of paper, I have never planned my dream wedding in my head, I was always the groom when my sister and I dressed up to play weddings. This meant it came as something of a shock to me that not only did I want to get married, but I was actually thinking about dresses and flowers and colours, things I’d have previously scoffed at. The first few months I definitely got sucked in by the wedding industry, I was trying to keep true to myself but this was expressed in a very stilted manner. I was imagining bridesmaids in different shades of the same colour (gasp), a tea length wedding dress instead of a gown (god forbid), you get the picture. I was knocked completely off kilter by the plethora of people out there trying to sell you what a wedding ‘should be’ . While I had entered into the commitment to marry with a very untraditional vision of what our marriage will be, I was suddenly entertaining a surprisingly traditional view of how we would marry. What I didn’t manage in those first few months was to really think about this day reflecting what marrying meant to us, to consider how I felt about marrying as the guiding force behind my imaginings rather than a pretty picture that somebody somewhere was trying to sell.

Cue the blogosphere. Reading blogs written by sane people really helped bring me back down to earth (as I’ve mentioned), and that, combined with Arthur being much more level headed than me, has allowed me to find sane wedding planning mode. You know, the one where you focus on actually getting married and you remember you’ve never cared about shoes/salt and pepper shakers that would make cute cake toppers/what colour clothes your friends wear/whatever else you’re obsessing over this much before, so why now? I suppose it makes no sense to end a post with a moodboard in it, something that is very visual and superficial (and actually includes afore mentioned cake toppers), saying I’m in sane wedding planning mode. I’m looking at the moodboard as a way of explaining our vision to interested parties, I think it captures what we want from the day and hopefully it will help people to ‘get it’. Getting the images organised has let me get an overall feel for my ideas without focusing on particular details that we MUST have. Who knows, but it makes me smile.

Expectations

The smiley day we got engaged

I've called this blog an unexpected wedding because the fact that planning a wedding was not in my plan has really influenced how the process has gone for me (so far). At first the fact that all this wedding malarkey is a mystery to me meant that I felt very insecure about the whole thing. Faced by the overwhelming volume of nasty commercial wedding propaganda I unwittingly found myself absorbing, my first instinct was to call the whole thing off, seriously. It took a few scary late night 'are we really going to do this' conversations with my betrothed and some tears before I realised that it was the wedding I wanted to back out of, not the marriage. My other half has been much more sensible about the whole thing than me, and much better at thinking about getting married in the context of what our marriage will be, not what other people's are.

The other thing that has brought me back on the straight and narrow as far as wedding sanity is concerned is reading other peoples blogs, which is why I'm sharing this, though I'm not sure I'm a voice of reason just yet. Reading words of wisdom from people who care about their marriages more than their weddings and about having fun more than matching their bridesmaids to their napkins or whatever we're all supposed to be doing, has really helped. I've also got inspiration from seeing how other people did their real weddings, and I've ended up feeling that it is possible to celebrate our love without making a spectacle of it.

After the dust has settled on my temporary wedding induced insanity I've come to appreciate my lack of expectations about this wedding. Though having no starting point left me a bit lost at first, now that I've finally remembered what we really want it means that I can choose my own expectations. We're choosing to expect a day surrounded by the people we love where people can have fun, share food and catch up. Of course now that we've got our expectations it's quickly becoming apparent that our families have other ideas, but at least we know what we want. That's step one.

How we met

Arthur and I met when we both signed up for a charity hitchhike to Paris, his friend couldn't go on the same weekend he could so we ended up getting paired together. We got stuck in Dover and then Dunkerque but made it to Paris in just over 26 hours (We live in Bath, UK). A couple of weeks later we went on a date, and within three months we were talking marriage. Two years later we're in the process of planning our wedding, although I'm on the other side of the world studying this year, so things are hard sometimes. Our relationship has surprised both of us, neither of us had marriage in mind, but almost as soon as we met we knew we wanted it. I'm not where I expected I'd be, but I'm so happy, and glad.