No Time To Linger…

Posted in Operation Amazing Wedding by

So many thoughts and so little time.  Are you ready for a fast and furious kinda post?

  • Receiving RSVPs back is joyful.
  • Hearing how excited your guests are is joyful.
  • Having your guests tweet you pictures of their cake trials for The Great Wedding Bake Off is joyful.
  • Just generally, so much joy.
Look at these beauts!

Look at these beauts!

  • On the other hand, and at risk of providing too much information, I have never noticed my monthly cycle as much as during the planning of this wedding. There’s the week when I’m feeling so creative it hurts, the week where I GET THINGS DONE, the week where I procrastinate and the week where I do bugger all. Currently going though the procrastinating/bugger all stage, so not an awful lot of wedding updates to report, but an awful lot of questions and ponderings. Such as…
  • What reading for the ceremony??
  • I had high hopes for a reading.  I thought I knew what I wanted: a medium-length piece of modern prose that spoke of companionship and a deeper kind of love, and that balanced a healthy dose of emotion with a hint of cutting humour. But then I discovered that finding something so specific is NIGH ON IMPOSSIBLE.
  • The only thing I’ve found so far is the ‘Love is a temporary madness’ excerpt from Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. I love the length and the sentiment behind it, but it doesn’t have the humour nor the originality I was hoping for.
  • I had a little think about what my ideal wedding reading would be, and came up with something from my favourite comedian and wordsmith, Daniel Kitson. I have a lot of love for that bearded Northerner and thought I’d be able to find and use a sweet, funny and moving extract from one of his one-man shows. Except his transcripts aren’t anywhere. ANYWHERE.
  • So I did what any normal person would do and I found an email address on the internet and I emailed him.
  • He’s not emailed me back, the b*****d.
  • So I’m back to square one on the reading front.  If anyone knows of anything that fits the bill (prose, modern, meaningful and witty), then please do share!
  • I also had ‘write vows’ on the To-Do list for February but have no idea where to start.
  • We’re not going to do the whole write-our-own-separately-and-reveal-all-on-the-day malarkey (although I admire those who do), but the choices we’ve received from Kent Ceremonies are so naff and devoid of meaning, I’ve decided I’d like to write something for us both to say that, again, strikes the right balance between emotion and light relief.
  • Are you writing your vows? Did you write your vows? HELP ME. PLEASE.**
  • On the DIY front, I made the basis for my table plan and it looks a little something like this:
Tate Modern standard, I reckon.

Tate Modern standard, I reckon.

  • I know a picture frame and some randomly carefully-placed ribbon isn’t the height of originality, but years and years ago I cut out this image from an Ideal Home magazine and always wanted to replicate it when I got married.  Just got to work out how to display the names and table numbers on it now…
  • My Hen Do plans seem to be coming along nicely! (Thank you bridesmaids.)  I once talked about a fantasy hen do that involved London, members’ clubs and rooftop pools. Ahem… yeah. In reality I realised that’s never gonna happen; I’m just not that cool.
  • So instead, I ordered (that’s right, I said ‘ordered’) a day and a night away in the county I should have been from and where Paul and I got together… Essex. There will be an assault course, there will be hotel games, there will be dancing in to the early hours and there will most likely be white stilettos.
  • I can’t bloomin’ wait.
  • We’re collecting our rings on Thursday and I’m in the process of filling in the passport form to get my name changed. Momentous things. Yikes.
  • But in other news, the table linen saga rumbles on.
  • I found a whole host of beautiful natural fabrics but the prices were so extortionate (a £1000 cleared deposit? Are you kidding me??) that it’s just not gonna happen. So it looks like we’re going to be making them instead. My poor Mum.

And yes, I know I said that I would never mention *table linen* again, but hey, that’s the joy of writing a blog. I can cross my fingers when making promises I can’t keep, and no-one can see me do it. Mwa ha ha ha ha…

Til next time, folks.

Sama xxx

**Edit: Mere minutes after finishing this post last night, I noticed that the lovely people at A Practical Wedding must have been reading my mind. They’ve only gone and done a post inviting readers to share their handwritten vows! I may have been up way too late last night reading everyone’s answers…

11 thoughts on “No Time To Linger…”

  1. Wow so much joy. This is the best part of wedding planning. Also cake.
    Regarding your reading, you might want to consider the following, form “Everything is illuminated” . We used traditional vows, but I think this reading would be just perfect and it might be on the lines of what you are looking for:

    ——————–
    “The young couple first married on August 5, 1744, when Joseph was eight and Sarah six, and first ended their marriage six days later when Joseph refused to believe, to Sarah’s frustration, that the stars were silver nails in the sky, pinning up the black nightscape. They remarried four days later, when Joseph left a note under the door of Sarah’s parents’ house: I have considered everything you told me, and I do believe that the stars are silver nails.

    They ended their marriage again a year later, when Joseph was nine and Sarah seven, over a quarrel about the nature of the bottom of the river bed. A week later, they were remarried, including this time in their vows that they should love each other until death, regardless of the existence of the riverbed, the temperature of the river bed’s bottom (should it exist), and the possible existence of starfish on the possibly existing riverbed.

    They ended their marriage one hundred and twenty times throughout their lives and each time remarried with a longer list of vows. They were sixty and fifty-eight at their last marriage, only three weeks before Sarah died of heart failure and Joseph drowned himself in the bath. Their marriage contract still hangs over the door of the house they on-and-off shared-nailed to the top post and brushing against the welcome mat:

    “It is with everlasting devotion that we, Joseph and Sarah L, reunite in the indestructible union of matrimony, promising love until death, with the understanding that the stars are silver nails in the sky, regardless of the existence of the bottom of the river, the temperature of this bottom (should it exist) and the possible existence of starfish on the possibly existing riverbed, overlooking what may or may not have been accidental grape juice spills, agreeing to forget that Joseph played sticks and balls with his friends when he promised he would help Sarah thread the needle for the quilt she was sewing, and that Sarah was supposed to give the quilt to Joseph, not his buddy, ignoring the simple fact that Joseph snores like a pig, and that Sarah is no great treat to sleep with either, letting slide certain tendencies of both parties to look too long at members of the opposite sex, not making a fuss over why Joseph is such a slob, leaving his clothes wherever he feels like taking them off, expecting Sarah to pick them up, clean them, and put them in their proper place as he should have, or why Sarah has to be such a pain about the smallest things, such as which way the toilet paper unrolls, or when dinner is five minutes later than she was planning, because, let’s face it, it’s Joseph who’s putting that paper on the roll and dinner on the table, disregarding whether the beet is a better vegetable than the cabbage, putting aside the problems of being fat-headed and chronically unreasonable, trying to erase the memory of a long since expired rose bush that a certain someone was supposed to remember to water when his wife was visiting family, accepting the compromise of the way we have been, the way we are, and the way we will likely be. May we live together in unwavering love and good health. Amen.”
    ——————
    -text from Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran

    Reply

    • Well…we haven’t worked out the finer details yet but inviting guests to bring a baked good which will take the place of dessert. Either me and Paul will judge or get some kind of voting system in place, but prizes to the most creative/prettiest/tastiest etc! Steal away, I stole it from someone else! X

      Reply

  5. Sama, i read “Love is a Temporary Madness” for my best friends at their wedding. I think and hope it worked very well with them and their day. Really nice words x

    Reply

  6. Pingback: The Great Guestbook Debate | The Utter Blog

  7. Hi,
    Have spent a happy while this morning enjoying your utterings!
    This is prob a bit late now, but with reguards the reading problem try Pam Ayres. She has quite a few but we had He Never Leaves The Seat Up which was the perfect mix of heartfelt emotion and humour!
    Mandy xx

    Reply

Leave a comment