We’re back from our honeymoon now. I’ll try and get round to blogging about it properly later, with pictures, if you’re really lucky.

We wanted to include all our friends, male and female, all at once, so we had a joint Hen and Stag Night, which we called a Hag Night.

We went for beers in the Mitre, then sushi at Teri-Aki (mine had no less than 7 ingredients, it said on the menu!), then beers at the Pickerel, then beers at the Mitre. There was no carnage, just a nice evening and a catch-up with people I haven’t seen for ages. I didn’t get to talk to everyone, though, but it was nice that they all came.

Last night, I got my wedding dress. I’ve also got a veil and a tiara. It’s all fab and possibly a tad over the top, but I love it, and that’s what matters.

Oh, and what C thinks when he finally sees me in it all! He’s currently banned from the cat’s bedroom, where I’m storing it all. The cat’s banned as well. Her bed’s now outside the door.

I had a drink after putting it in the car, and who should be in the bar but two of the experts from Antiques Roadshow/Bargain Hunt/other BBC antiques programs! I have no idea of their names, and I didn’t have the (Dutch) courage to go up to them and say anything, so we just whispered about them.

So, I have a dress fitting on Tuesday, and I’m told I need my wedding underwear and my wedding shoes for it, so they can adjust the bust and the length as necessary. So I went out today (awfully crowded in the shops. Is it the January sales? Is it Saturday? Oh, yes and yes. That’ll explain that then) to look for wedding shoes in the Grafton Centre. I thought Debenhams would sell them. They didn’t, although they did have bridesmaid dresses (no shoes to go with them either) and fancy hats (too many fancy hats), so you would have thought they’d have some suitable shoes, but they didn’t. I looked in all the normal shoe shops, but they just have shiny gold or silver ones, with or without sparkly bits which you can keep, thank you very much. And let’s not even look at how high the heels are!

I went to BHS, not expecting them to have any, but they did, on the first floor! The flat ballet pump style ones were too flat, even for me. The heeled ones weren’t too ludicrously high, so I popped a particularly pointy pair on my feet, in my correct size, not expecting them to go on because I have wide feet and so I have to go up a size normally to get the right width fitting, but then they’re too long, but go on they did, and they weren’t too horrendously tight, until I’d had them on a while, when they became quite nasty, so I tried on another similar pair, which were a little better, but still a bit too pointy. I don’t have pointy-shoe-shaped feet, you see, from never being allowed pointy shoes when I was younger, like everyone else wore. There was a pair, a plainer pair - the two I tried on were a little sparkly, but not too horrendous, and they certainly weren’t silver sparkly. More tastefully sparkly. Anyway, I digress. Where was I? Oh yes. There was a plainer pair, which were more square-toed, which were much more comfortable than the other two. I can walk in them, just about, and they were a lot less than I thought they’d cost, so I thought I might get them. Another bride-to-be was also trying on these shoes. She was also dithering and having trouble finding somewhere selling shoes. She said she’d heard Robert Sayle were good, so I asked the till girl to put the shoes behind the counter for me while I went to Robert Sayle; she acquiesced. Robert Sayle didn’t have any wedding shoes at all, but I did bump into Duncan, and we had a nice chat, so it wasn’t a totally wasted trip. I went back to BHS, and purchased the shoes there and then.

Good old BHS, I say.

It was fairly traumatic this year. Nana died the week before, so we had to go up for her funeral just before Christmas. We played Spot the Relative, which was useful, as I found out who some of the ones on the wedding invitation list that I didn’t know were.

Came back down again for Christmas itself and to see Puss, who we’d left to her own devices with lots of food and water and a litter tray, which she only uses when we’re away. She prefers to go out to do her business, which is fine by us.

Henry sounded particularly unwell (the exhaust, going by the noise) during the latter part of the journey up north, so I rang the doctor’s and arranged to take him in on the Wednesday after Christmas. On the way back down, I was just accelerating away from a roundabout on the A1, when I heard a different sort of noise. A metal-trailing-on-tarmac sort of noise. This sounded bad, so I pulled up onto the hard shoulder, got up and looked underneath the car. Yup, that would explain it: the exhaust pipe was hanging off.

One expensive phone call later, and the AA man came along and patched Henry up enough to take him home, then to the doctor’s, when they reopened. That wasn’t cheap, either. Still, it could have been worse: there was one car which was going to be sent to the scrap yard because the new part it needed was worth more than the car itself (a Mitsubishi Lancer) and one car which was worth the same amount as the new head gasket it needed plus other work and a tow to London. I wonder what its owner decided to do in the end.

On the Thursday, we went back up north to visit the families, starting with mine, then up to Scotland, then back to mine. The journey up to Scotland was to be the Grand Meeting of the In-laws, in a pub in Alnwick, which is roughly half way between the two sets. It wasn’t as bad as I was expecting it to be. C’s brother wasn’t there, though, as he’d elected not to visit his parents this Christmas. Can’t imagine why.

The cat came with us as far as my mam’s, and stayed with her while we were in Scotland. She did her usual interminable miaowing all the way up and all the way back down again that drives C up the wall so. Henry behaved himself, though.
New Year’s Eve saw us back at home, doing absolutely nothing special to celebrate it. Now, C’s back at work, and everything’s getting back to as normal as it can be.

A bloke rang me up and apologised profusely about the shoddy service we’d got from the venue I dissed earlier. He promised to be better. He said he’d send out some information to us immediately. This arrived the next day, so I was really quite pleased with that. We went up to see them at the weekend. When I said “posh” before, I was clearly not referring to the surrounding area; the venue itself seems fine. And we saw evidence that they can set the place up for a wedding, so we have decided, given the lack of alternatives, to go with them after all.

Call us foolish, but a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Maybe we should take out wedding insurance, just in case…

So, if you’re on the guest list, and we have your address, you might be receiving an invitation soon.

(more…)

For the reception, we decided on somewhere in Durham, because it is prettier than Sunderland.  We looked at all the usual sorts of places, but they were much too expensive, so we thought that a pub might be nice instead.  None of the pubs in the city centre seem to have function rooms, which rules them out.  So we resorted to Plan B.

Plan B was to have it in Sunderland.  I even found a posh (for Sunderland) venue on the Internet, but this place has all the competency of a goldfish playing golf in the desert:

1. I filled in their online form, requesting they send a wedding brochure.  A week or so later, there was not even an email to confirm anybody had even seen my request.
2. My fiancé filled in the form, just to see what would happen.  Nothing happened.
3. I discovered they had a listing in an online national venue-finding site, so I filled that site’s form in to request a brochure, and I got a phone call from ‘Sam’ at the venue itself.  Ignoring the previous lack of contact (although I was still a bit annoyed about it), we discussed what we wanted (that would make more sense if English had inclusive and exclusive 3pl pronouns) and she said it was all fine; she quoted me a price, which I thought seemed fairly reasonable, considering it’s a wedding reception.  She provisionally booked the date and said she’d post a brochure.
4. A week or two later, there was still no brochure, so I rang them up on the 2nd October, a Monday.  ‘Bev’ answered, so I asked for Sam.  Bev told me Sam didn’t work there anymore.  Nice of someone to keep Sam’s clients, for want of a better word, informed of developments.  This was not boding well at all.
5. Bev said she’d post a brochure to me and I thought I’d better ask her to confirm the booking was still made.  She said she’d ring me back.  How long does it take to check on the computer, I thought?  Nearly 10 minutes, it turns out.
6. On Wednesday, the 4th - the day I was to go to Uni and register for my PhD, there was no brochure, and I hadn’t received that phone call.  I rang Bev up, bright and early; she said she’d posted the brochure on Tuesday, the third.  Ok, I thought, maybe it’ll come tomorrow.  I asked about the booking.  She said she’d check for me now.  *sigh*  I was sure she was supposed to have done this on Monday.  She had computer problems.  I would have thought that at 9.30 a.m. the computer would be up and running ok, but of course not.  I heard her restart it, complete with Microsoft Windows chimes; we discussed what I’d discussed with Sam, to kill time.  She said it would be ok, and that she’d send out a menu.  Then the computer woke up, she found the diary and the correct date, and said it was indeed still provisionally booked.  Well, that’s something, I thought.
7. On Friday 6th, the brochure arrived, postmarked the 5th, so either the post takes two days to get from their post-room (or whatever) to the Post Office, or Bev was lying.
8. The menu hasn’t arrived yet.

Funnily enough, I don’t think we’ll be confirming that booking…