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Weddings are stressful things to organise, as we are discovering. My joking suggestion of “putting some money behind the bar and inviting folk for a knees up” was roundly and rightly dismissed by Frances. Yes, I was really joking, but it appealed to my technical view: What’s the simplest and least stressful sort of party you can arrange? It’s a useful baseline from which to work. The other extreme would have been impossible given Frances is certainly no Bridezilla (a term that still makes me laugh), but an ornate wedding with every tradition duly adhered to, just seems, well, excessive. We’re aiming for simplicity, fun, and with our favourite traditions featured.

But with a limited amount of time, we’ve certainly not invited a stress-free arrangement process on ourselves. We’ve now just over three months before we get married. Invites will be going out soon. We bought the rings yesterday. We have a photographer coming on Saturday morning to go through things. Flowers, cake and, I’ve discovered, hair-dressers, are really all that remain, and they’re almost complete in themselves. Largely though the “important stuff” is booked: Venue, registrar, band. The hotel has a decent bar. Everything else is, I suppose you could say, icing on the cake. With enough people plied with food and suitably large amounts of alcohol, a party should result.

I’ll confess, the hardest thing for me has been working out my part of the guest list. You pretty much want to invite everybody you know, but logistics and venue limitations, not to mention cost, largely get in the way. Given the distance many folk would need to travel (itself something that may affect our numbers), I’m not keen I want to invite folk just for the evening do, although we’d hope people may still use the opportunity to visit a lovely part of Scotland. But it all makes it incredibly hard to work out, and I’ve been deferring it as long as I can. This week is crunch time however, and hopefully everybody will be understanding…

One thing I can assure people of though, there will be no kilt for me. The thought of my knees, much less them being on display in a formal situation was enough to put me (and Frances) off before we even get to the fact that I’m not Scottish. Although that’s rarely a factor that gets in the way for many; we once stayed at a hotel where a French chap paraded around in the complete highland outfit he had purchased (no mean feat), to the amusement of everybody not in his group. Most importantly a kilt ’suits’ some people, but not others. I’m not one it does…

This entry was posted on Monday, January 7th, 2008 at 2:21 pm and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.