The other side

Dancing by ourselves...

Just a quick note to dip my toes back in the blogging water post wedding (I was going to say post marriage but that sounds like it's over already...).  I suppose I left it this long to get some perspective so I could have a go at being the wise owl I always want to be about stuff... hopefully that wont prevent me from write crazy happy joyful posts too!

Anyway. The wedding.

The wedding was emotional and beautiful and enriching and the best party I've ever been to.  It was also a bit stressful, we didn't get enough sleep the night before and everything got a little tense at least once.  In short it was everything we'd hoped for and more, but there are a few things we could have planned or handled better.  For a while after the wedding I was so overjoyed with how it had gone, and so fed up with thinking about the details, that I didn't want to write about it at all.  Now, with a bit of time behind us, I'm looking forward to the opportunity to pick over things a bit.  Hopefully I can share some lessons from the less than ideal bits (once I've mused a bit about what those lessons are...), and also share some of the joy that was in our day.

P.S. being married is so much better than getting married, I love the other side.

The seating plan (oh my)

Image via i love value village and goodwill

I'm fast discovering that seating plans are hard.  We decided to have allocated seats so people don't have that awkward oh god where do I sit canteen moment, and to try and encourage people who haven't met before to mix a bit more, but I'm finding it a bit of a struggle.  I thought we had a pretty good first draft down, but suffice to say that it wasn't acceptable to all involved.  Now I'm in the process of reshuffling everything and it all looks a mess again.  Ho hum.  Arthur and I are trying to do this together, and with help, but I guess you can't please everyone...  On the one hand I don't want to micro-manage people, but on the other hand I want the plan to enhance people's fun not detract from it, which means thinking pretty hard about what will and wont work.

We're ten days away now, and my impatience is getting a bit out of hand I think. I've just had enough of planning, I really have.  I'll be so glad not to have to look at another wedding related list or spreadsheet again.  Am I being incredibly ungrateful?  Probably, but I just want to be married now.  I'm kind of over the wedding, hopefully my enthusiasm will be rekindled when I can put the lists down and start baking and whatnot.  Maybe I should just get on with the lists so I can put them down earlier?  I think I need to stop thinking everything wedding related is supposed to be fun, seating plans just aren't (hats off to you of you disagree!).

To do.

Image via Shanalogic

Did I mention we're getting married in 30 days? Aaaaaah! So much left to do:

1. Write the ceremony (this is the big one).
2. Organise hay bales for guests to sit on during ceremony, and generally lounge on (kind of like some of the ones here).
3. Find Arthur some trousers to wear (!).
4. Find Arthur some shoes to wear.
5. Find and buy beer.
6. Find and buy soft drinks.
7. Collect deposits from people for our Friday night meal, the day before the wedding (everyone is paying for their own meal but we have to pay the restaurant a £10 per head deposit one week before).
8. Make A LOT of paper garlands, like the ones I liked here. (more to come about these)
9. Find 30ish more cups and saucers for coffee and 50ish more dinner plates (we're buying very cheap retro crockery for the wedding meal, again more to come on this!)
10. Make music playlists for: before the ceremony, during the meal, before the band plays, in the band's break and after the band plays.
11. Find out where (near Lyme Regis) we can pick our own berries for pudding at the wedding meal.
12. Pull together some props for our home made photo booth (yay!).
13. Make signs, e.g. listing the menu, directing people to toilets/ photo booth/ cold drinks etc.
14. Write our programme including whats happening during the ceremony and general info about the day.
15. Buy paper for the programmes.
16. Print the programmes.
17. Work out where we can get locally grown flowers from near Lyme Regis.
18. Make a seating plan.
19. Draw/ print up a large seating plan for the day.
20. Write out the name place cards (we're using luggage tags).
21. Figure out who needs picking up from the train station and when, and who's going to do this
22. Taste and buy some local Bath cheeses for the cheese board (we're having our main meal at 4.30pm, so we're having cheese later on in case people get hungry)
    

Okay, maybe that's not too bad. These are just the things we have to do; our families have been amazing and volunteered to take over all sorts of bits and pieces. My sister is making us a postbox for our guestbook type setup (more to come!), Arthur's dad is sorting out wine for us, my dad is figuring out a photo booth set-up, my mum is making bridesmaid dresses, and buying all sorts of bit and pieces we need, Arthur's mum is growing us lots of herbs to put on the tables etc etc. Amazing.

This is, however, only the things we need to do before we actually go down 'to site' the Monday before the wedding, the 'Things to do once we get there' list hasn't even been written yet... So it still feels like there's plenty to do (plus I'm in the middle of the minor task of sitting my uni finals...).

Best get on with it!

Balloons!

Image via Ethical Superstore

Sometimes making ethical choices for the wedding can seem difficult, it often limits our options and makes things more expensive than we expected. Balloons were one thing I had been struggling with ethically; I wasn't sure what sort of chemicals went into producing them or how biodegradable they were etc. That said we definitely wanted balloons to decorate the marquee we're having the party in (although apparently balloons at weddings is very poor etiquette, pah!), because it's a party and I like balloons at parties! We just wanted ordinary balloons that you blow up by hand (by mouth?) in assorted colours, but I had sort of given up on finding any that I could feel good about ethically. Then at the weekend these appeared in an email from Ethical Superstore, an online ethically awesome shop I get things from occasionally. They were biodegradable, and made from sustainably grown fairly traided rubber. Hurray! And at £1.99 for 25 they were hardly any more expensive than cheap balloons from possibly-suspect-websites-with-snappy-balloon-related-domain-names. Double hurray!

So we bought a few packets and they arrived this morning, and on the back of the box there's a little blurb about their fair trade scheme:

Image via Ethical Superstore

Reading that really made me smile, and now when I look at the balloons decorating our wedding party I'll think of this. It just made me so glad that we were going to the effort of making good choices, even on small things, and it's spurred me on to find the energy (and willpower) to keep doing so.

Something to Declare

Image from Donnylad

A few months ago Arthur and I went to declare our marriage, something you have to do in the UK unless you get married in the Church of England. It basically involves going to your local register office (in our case Bath Guildhall), confirming when and where your marriage or civil partnership will take place, as well as some details about yourselves. Once you've done this you can't change the location of the marriage/civil partnership without declaring it again. And the declaration costs £67, joke. Once you've registered all of your details they're displayed for 17 days, ostensibly in case somebody wants to object.

I did think the whole process was designed to rip people off just that little bit more, and partly I still do; how can a 20 minute appointment, printing 3 copies of the declaration and posting two of them cost £67??? However, I realised at the appointment that making everyone declare their marriage is a good way to highlight forced marriage and 'sham' marriages, and that's got to be a positive. Thinking about it I s'pose I'm not exactly against 'sham' marriages - which are usually for immigration purposes - I think if people are desparate enough to get the right to live and work in the E.U that they're willing to marry someone for it, then they probably have pretty compelling reasons. But it doesn't do marriage any favours as an institution, and people really shouldn't be forced into a corner like that - RAAH immigration law anger.

Back to the point: requiring that people who want to get married or partnered go to individual appointments where they confirm some basic details about their partner seems a little odd when you're in a genuine relationship - but I can see why they do it. So far so good, but there was something that happened at the appointment that wasn't so cool. Firstly the registrar asked us who was paying and we said Arthur was (because it's a joint account anyway, and I had to rush to uni after my portion of the interview so he would be staying afterwards to pay). Her reaction was 'start as you mean to go on' seriously, direct quote. But we just laughed it off, maybe she was totally joking, like 'hahaha we used to think marriage was like this, haven't we moved on'. I kind of got the impression that she was a reasonably nice person, but had to do a reasonably backwards old fashioned job, hmmm. So that sucked, but not too much. What really bothered me was this exchange:

Registrar: Do you want to put your father's name on the declaration?
Me: umm why? err, what just my dad's? Not my mum's as well?
Registrar: No, just your dad's, it goes back to when women were property.
Me: laughs nervously. Do I have to, can't I put both of their names? Or my mum's?
Registrar: No. You could leave it blank but then it will look like you don't know who your father is.
Long awkward pause.
Me: Oh, well I don't want to offend my Dad. I suppose I can put his name on.

What was I thinking??? This is plain wrong, yeah I don't want to offend my dad, but he probably would never have known, and it's just wrong! So I was annoyed with myself afterwards, but then when I spoke to Arthur about it I was even more annoyed, because he hadn't been pressured at all. The registrar had just said 'you can put your dad's name on the declaration if you want' and then, here's the really annoying bit, she said 'you don't have to, or you could put anybody else's name, a guardian for example.' Whaaaat? Not cool. Really not cool.

Ugh, I don't really know what the positive outcome of all of this is. Maybe that it's over. I knew marriage law in the UK was old and outdated, but I really didn't expect it to hit me in the face like this. I'm left wondering if the registrar was a nice person being beleaguered by the unpleasant requirements of her job, or if she was some kind of scary bigot not doing her job properly. Who knows, but the whole thing was pretty sour for me. I'm trying not to let things like this affect my feelings about the whole marriage thing. I have to keep telling myself this is OUR marriage, it will be about what WE want it to be about. It's between the two of us, nobody else. But it's hard, there's so much historical baggage, I do sometimes feel that stepping into the shadow of it I'll be overwhelmed.

Planting a tree

We're planting a tree at the end of our ceremony (more to come on the ceremony), and last weekend we fixed a location for said tree, and what type of tree it will be. It's going to be a Cedar of Lebanon (like in the picture), and it's going to be planted at the end of Arthur's parent's garden, so it will be quite a big feature in the view from the house (once it grows a bit!). It's really lovely to think of it growing for hundreds of years and people getting enjoyment out of it. Hopefully our marriage will last a lifetime, but the tree will last even longer. I'm really looking forward to spending a quiet moment planting it and reflecting on its longevity right after we seal our commitment to each other. Much as some people might think it's a cliché, I think it will be really beautiful.

The F word (Feminism that is)

(or family!)

I've just read this on 2000 dollar wedding, and it resonated with me so much. I really relate to being torn between the ideas you develope growing up of what success means as a woman, and what it turns out you really want for yourself. Right up until I met Arthur I had no plans to ever get married, I imagined my self finding happiness through work, travel and my independence. I wasn't against having a family, it just didn't seem like something I would do. Oooh how that's changed.

I've just about come to terms with wanting to be a wife, after some strife, but that's not all of it. Now I've met the person I want to spend the rest of my life with, and that I'm madly in love with, I feel like I really want to have children NOW. I know, it's terrifying, I've gone utterly mad. I'm 23. I haven't even graduated yet. Dangerously, I think Arthur's gone equally mad. Don't get me wrong, some people are totally in the right place to have children early. There's nothing intrinsically mad about wanting children in your early twenties, or earlier, but it's just so far from what I expected from myself.

There are two streams of thought going on in my brain about this, usually simultaneously. In a way I'm really excited about having a family, and just really happy that we've found each other and we're going to do this together. On the other hand I feel really torn. I know it's not the sensible thing to jump into having children when we have no money, no permanent home, and not so steady jobs. I also feel a little bit bad for wanting children so soon. I (whisper this) feel like I should really make a 'success' of my life first, and show that I can do more than just be a mother. I know it's awful, what on earth do I mean 'just be a mother', I mean really. But on the other hand I really want to just have babies! The other thing is that there's so many things we want to do that will be much harder once we have children; travel, moving about, who knows... So many thoughts, so little order!

But the urge to have children just isn't rational. I s'pose you could even talk about some kind of evolutionary imperative argument. It's very strange feeling something so strongly that I don't rationally want (right now). Even less rationally there's a little voice in the back of my head saying, 'what if you wait and then you can't have children?'. I think I genuinely have a phobia of infertility, and that's making me want to start trying soon, in case it takes much longer than we might think. Odd. Odd. Odd.

It's sometimes hard to reconcile these traditional female roles of wife and (hopefully) mother with what I've thought of as my identity, and I'm fairly sure that's what's causing these yoyo thought processes. I s'pose you could say I'm a pretty staunch feminist after all. But clearly there's something in me that wants to be those people, and have those things too. Beating myself up about isn't going to help though, I think I need to just be okay with wanting it both ways. And maybe I can have it both ways, who knows. People are rarely as easily put into boxes as we'd like them to be, including ourselves. I might want to see myself as a (tongue in cheek) independent woman, but independence can be lonely, and I suppose I'm only just learning that I'm a family kind of person too.

It's interesting discovering new parts of myself, and going through the process of getting married has prompted a lot of this self discovery. As much as I sometimes feel a bit angsty about the whole thing it's still exciting moving into a different stage of my life, what ever that stage holds.

Garlandy goodness

We're thinking of having some kind of garlandy buntingy things to decorate the marquee at the wedding. To help us make this happen my mum got on the search for some options for us and found this site which has some awesome garlands, she liked this one:

Image from uponafold.com.au

It's very cute, but a bit pink and girly for us, my favourite one was this one:

Image from uponafold.com.au

They're definitely too expensive for the scale were doing though, and unfortunately for us they're based in Australia, but they do have some lovely stuff. I've fallen in love with this mobile:

Image from uponafold.com.au

Once I'd started thinking about bunting I went on a bit of a hunt to see if we could find a more affordable solution, or some inspiration for something we could make ourselves. My first port of call was Folksy, where I found loads of really pretty options, this is my favourite:

Image from Bookity on Folksy

But again everything I found was too expensive to buy and too labour intensive to make. After exhausting Folksy I had a look on Etsy and found this:

Image from dragonflies on Etsy

This is definitely my favourite of the lot, nice and simple. There are lots of other lovely garlands in this shop as well, but since it's on Etsy it's in the states, so loads of nasty airmiles. Plus this is still out of our budget for the amount we need. But I think this seems makeable?

I had an idea from the start that we would make some kind of bunting out of newspaper. We have plenty of it lying around and it would be a good use for it, so I thought why not try and make something like this with it. I was thinking the labour intensive bit would be cutting out the circles, but then I realised that these circles are really perfect, so there must be a tool you can get to do it for you. A quick google-ing session and it turns out there is! Hurray! So I just need to work out how I can get my hands on a 'circle punch' and give it a go, I'll keep you posted!

Expecting too much

I've just got my exam results back for my second to last semester and they really weren't so great. I'm partly annoyed at myself for not doing better, but I'm mostly just disappointed. I had started to imagine what it would feel like to get my degree results and get a first, and how happy I'd be, and now that I know that's not a possibility I feel like I've lost something.

I've been trying to dissect why I'm feeling this, how I can feel better about it, and how I can avoid setting myself up for disappointment. This got me thinking about whether I have unrealistic expectations of our wedding day, and whether I'm just setting myself up for disappointment with that as well.

In general I don't think I have too many specific expectations, which is a good thing, but then I thought of one HUGE expectation I have: that it's not going to rain. I realised that all our planning, and all of my imaginings, feature a lovely sunny day. Ooops.

Our wedding is in Dorset, not renowned for it's dry weather, and although it is summer rain is still pretty likely. I think we need to spend a bit of time thinking of back up plans, as well as just imagining a rainy wedding day. Thinking about it I'm not actually that bothered by the idea of rain, I mean it's not ideal but it's not the end of the world either. But that's just it, it's not that the rain itself would be disastrous, it's the loss of the sunny day I'd imagined that would upset me. I'm definitely prone to getting needlessly upset about things that really aren't that bad, just because I had a better outcome so clear and fixed in my mind.

So this is what I need to try and avoid, not 'bad' things happening, but holding rigidly fixed ideas of how things will go. I certainly don't want to advocate doom-and-gloom thinking about your wedding day, but in this case a bit of 'worst case scenario' (I mean really? It's just a bit of rain!) thinking might be the best innoculation to a whole load of unnecessary disappointment.

Equal Love

image from equallove.org.uk

Marriage law in the UK at the moment is in a funny in between stage of progress; same sex couples can be legally joined but in a separate institution to heterosexual couples. Separate but equal isn't really equal to me, and some people who feel the same are currently pursuing a case in the European courts to open both institutions to both same sex and heterosexual couples. A couple of days ago a story also broke that the government were soon to announce some reforms to marriage law, no announcement's been made yet but it sounds promising.

Anyway, recently it seems like some progress has been made, so fingers crossed things will move forward. But a few months ago Arthur and I had to reach a decision about whether we could reconcile getting married given that some people are excluded from the institution... and it was an incredibly difficult decision to make. We eventually decided that we wanted to be joined legally, even if it wasn't in the open fair institution we wanted, and even though there was something a little bit painful in propping up a system that we disagree with. Because it was such a hard decision to make, and because our feelings about it will colour our wedding, we decided to explain our feelings and our decision to our guests on our wedding website. Somehow it just felt better for everyone to understand why we might not be quite as joyful as we'd like on our wedding day. Here's our manifesto:

Our Ceremony

We will be holding our marriage ceremony in the garden, having signed our marriage into being earlier in the day at the local register office. There are a some practical reasons why we are not holding the legal marriage ceremony as part of the celebrations. Firstly, the register office is far too small to fit all of our lovely family and friends into. Secondly, we want to hold our ceremony in the open air, and to be able to plant a tree as part of this.

Our choice to separate the legal marriage from our celebrations is also one based on our feelings towards marriage law in this country.

There is currently a bid going through the European courts to open both Civil Marriage to same sex couples and Civil Partnership to heterosexual couples. As supporters of this campaign, the Equal Love campaign, we don’t feel a register office is an appropriate place of celebration for us. This feeling is compounded by the signage which must currently be displayed in all register offices by law. Personally we would prefer a Civil Partnership to a Civil Marriage as we feel this better reflects the way we see our relationship.

The main difference between Civil Marriage and Civil Partnership is in the name and the wording of the ceremony, and we’re not entirely comfortable with the wording of the Civil Marriage ceremony. We thought long and hard about whether we could happily get married with these things considered, and it was a difficult decision to make. In the end we came to the conclusion that only a ‘marriage’ ceremony conducted in our own words would be an appropriate celebration of our love and commitment. We also decided that as we cannot know how long it will be until Civil Partnership is available to us we’d rather be legally joined as husband and wife than not at all.

This ceremony in our own words is the ceremony we have chosen to share with you, our community of family and friends. Your support is important to our partnership, and it’s your presence when we state our vows to each other which will seal the commitments we make. We hope you’ll be as happy to be part of this ceremony as we are to share it with you.

It's funny how just sharing how we feel rather than keeping it under wraps makes everything feel a bit better. It's possible that when this announcement comes out we'll find a civil partnership will be an option soon, and that would be great, but if not I feel much happier knowing people understand what this marriage means to us.

The invites are out!

So we've finally got the invitations in the post!

We bought penguin and puffin postcards from amazon for £14 to make the invites, and we've used less than half of them. The rest of the postcards we're going to use as a sort of guestbook, the idea is that people will sit down and write us a postcard at a little table at the wedding party and then post it into a little postbox that we're making. We'll then put the postcards into a photo album with clear sleeves so you'll be able to see both sides of each card, which should make a nice bright record of our day. And hopefully people will enjoy writing us a postcard!

So this is how we the invites went:

First we laid out all of the cards so we could see them all and choose one for each guest, this is half of the postcards:


We stuck each persons name on their card on a post-it note:



Then we addressed them and stuck stamps on them, or stamped and addressed an envelope for the ones going overseas. We got the addresses collected by sharing a spreadsheet with our parents over google docs, so they added all the addresses they knew and we just had to find the remaining ones.





Once we'd done that we used a stamp we got from vistaprint to stamp on the main invite details. The stamp actually wasn't as great as we'd hoped since it ran a bit, but it did save us a lot of time. Then we just wrote greetings and any little messages we wanted on the cards and we were done. Here's our stamp:



So that's another big tick on the to-do list! And because we chose postcards it was nearly as green as physical post can be - minimum space and weight used. If we'd used recycled postcards it would have been better, but we also chose them based on price and looking nice and £14 for 200 different really awesome postcards of book covers was kind of a done deal.

I think the decision to send out paper invites at all kind of sprung from the fact that I really like getting post because it's a bit of a novelty these days, can you get that same kind of feeling from a web invite I wonder? There's definitely plenty of websites with invite options around, and if you're committed to making the greenest choice possible I think that has to be it.

Magic slippers

1. ASOS (v) 2. Newlook (v) 3. Office 4. Office 5. ASOS 6. Office 7. Office (v) 8. Topshop

Presenting: a selection of lovely comfy looking potential wedding shoes for your consideration. If you're pernickety about not wearing leather like me, there is still a fair amount out there (see those marked (v)!), as well as some good dedicated shops like Vegetarian Shoes amongst others. That said, I do sometimes wish I could just buy a pair of shoes without worrying about whether they're leather or not. I have fallen in love with the turquoise ones bottom left for example, but alas they're made of suede.

The shoes I'll actually be wearing to wed my beloved are the two tone brogues top left, I bought them in the summer and they're really comfy, and generally awesome. The options did befuddle me somewhat though. The thing is, once you've made a decision, even about something relatively minor like a pair of shoes, it's soooo nice not to have to think about it anymore. Is it just me that really doesn't enjoy shopping as much as I sometimes convince myself I do? I have a tendency to give up attempting to buy something if presented with too much choice, honestly, this happened in the biscuit aisle of Sainsbury's the other day. I really am a terrible shopper, so it's a miracle I have any shoes at all. And they're a tick on the ever expanding wedding to-do-list, hurrah!

Balance

So, I have a bit of a confession to make: It appears I'm not very good at this work-life balance thing, as evidenced in my not posting for a virtual eternity. (I put this in the 'life' column by the way!)

I don't see the sense in whining to lovely people of the blogosphere who want to be uplifted, not dragged down with me, but I think a bit of honesty is in order. These last few months have been hard. Really hard. Not in a tragic life altering way, for which I am grateful, but in an every day grind you down sort of way. Apparently organising a wedding whilst trying to complete the masters year of a maths degree, tutor students, and live in a house with a criminally insane cat aint so easy. I really struggled to keep up with things, I tried writing more schedules, but there just weren't enough hours in the day. So of course my manic 'must not fail' attitude was to JUST WORK HARDER. But there's a limit to just how hard anyone can work, and just how busy anyone can be. Don't get me wrong, I am certain that my work load pales in comparison to some people's, but for me this was HARD.

Long story short, I was very busy with work, so I let play go by the wayside. And I include in play things like organising socials for the vegetarian society at uni, and of course this poor neglected blog. But, quelle surprise, people need play, and no play makes me less than upbeat. Some hard thinking ensued, the sort of 'I can't carry on like this, what am I going to change?' hard thinking. Which unsurprisingly, was also HARD.

Now here's the positive. What I am going to change is to start valuing the things that I enjoy more, rather than jumping to the conclusion that anything enjoyable is inherently less 'good' than something less enjoyable. I've re-realised that life is all about the fun things really. And the best fun things are the long term fun things, you know the projects you enjoy doing but also give you a real sense of achievement. So I'm vowing to take time for projects like that, and that means more blogging, so keep tuned!