Current mood:

hopeful

Going to the chapel?
Well I’m feeling a little more up to it now.

A brief precise of the wedding plans so far, some cover already here, some not:

We got engaged in June last year and the little fluffy cloud carried us for a few weeks before it occurred to us that that meant we had to organise a wedding. My sister is getting married this April and had already set the date, so we realised we had to leave a reasonable gap and therefore started planning in a reasonably relaxed fashion.

For me this meant months of work trawling the internet, yellow pages, recommendations of friends and family etc in order to secure as many brochures for venues as possible and draw up a list of possible venues. H2B was issued with a list of phone numbers and information was acquired, then armed with more brochures than you can shake a stick at, we went to my parents and drew up a short list.

We then visited the short list. I shall draw a veil over the depressingly samey nature of almost all the venues with their cookie cutter wedding receptions (of course you can have it any way you like – well as long as it’s the same as we always do it. But you can choose between pink and mauve. *shudders*). But there was one place. It was a hall. Just that – an empty shell with heating, lighting and toilets and at last I could see it. A blank canvass meant infinite possibilities, to everyone else it meant an inordinate amount of work – but I was happy to do that. So then I had to convince H2B who finally saw the vision, and though slightly phased by the work, became convinced. Next came the larger hurdle of my mother – but finally we got over that.

Meanwhile I had been scouting churches and drawn up a short list there, then discovered that H2Bs parents were married in a local church, so this escalated it way out in the lead, and luckily it was in the same place as the venue. We were ecstatic! So after six weeks of persuasion and months of investigation, I contacted the venue to book a date. It was at this stage that they suddenly remembered the full refit they were planning that would close them for 3 months, slap bang in the period we wanted to get married in.

To say I was gutted was an understatement. ‘Wedding’ became a dirty word and I withdrew from the whole process. About two months later (men!) it dawned on H2B and a few others that nothing seemed to be happening about the wedding and they realised I had downed tools. So I was coaxed round and agreed to start planning again – only _after_ Christmas.

Well after Christmas became after new year which became after the event. But we started up again. Two weekends ago went to visit a pub that has the size we need, at a price we can manage (I hesitate to say afford!), and they seem to genuinely be up for a debate about how things happen, when, what it looks like etc. And he’s in the right region. And he’s free in the right time. And (And this was the big one with H2B and the parents) someone else sets it up, takes it down and tidies up afterwards. So it looks like we have found us a reception venue. Yay.

So then we go to contact the church – and it turns out their minister has just left –and it takes a rather long time to get a new one. So we went to visit to find out what we should do on Sunday and got a phone number – that turns out to be out of use. So I was beginning to think someone was trying to tell us something. But we found an email address for the friends of the church and they have replied and sent it on to a man they say can help. So we might just be starting to get somewhere. Maybe….