I only went and got married

Laura and I got engaged on a Tuscan beach at the end of Summer 2017. Well, that was the plan. Originally, I wanted to have a moonlight stroll across the beach and propose around midnight because I’m a big romantiv fop. However, we got far too drunk on prossecco and Laura had enough of being out and wanted to go back to the hotel to veg our for a bit. This meant drastic action my part so I proposed in a little garden area, where she assumed that I had fallen over rather than gotten down on one knee. Being as drunk as we were, Laura’s memory of the proposal is a bit patchy, so I proposed again the next day on the beach and that shall be how we tell everyone.

Within a couple of months of getting engaged, I started a new job and went straight into buying a new home and selling our house. As that wasn’t enough stress, we started arranging the wedding once we were settled in for a few weeks.

We found our venue and our photographer relatively quickly and then sat about not doing anything for about 4 months, mainly eating crips. After getting our arses into gear, the first thing we sent out to people was our save-the-dates. Then had another month with snacks.

I’m almost completely about 80% certain that sending body parts in the post is legal

We has pretty much agreed the theme at this point – we wanted to have a gothic meets horror meets Victorian wedding, which is something we wanted to get across in the save-the-dates by sending out a severed finger. That’s quite horrory, right?

I hand wrote the tags which I thought would make it feel a bit more rustic, but after maybe the fourth tag I already had hand ache and regretted everything I had ever done with my life. I only forgot to put the date on one tag, so I consider this a blinding result – even though a few people may have had to pay a couple of quid for the privilege of getting one of these as I completely messed up the postage on the first batch,

I’m also happy to report the only three people asked if I had chopped off my nob and sent it on in the post. Everyone else was clever enough to know that mine is much smaller than that, although admittedly it is made out of plastic.

I didn’t realise wax smelled like burning flesh? Mine, specifically

I came up with the design for the invite pretty quickly from sketches and shamelessly ripping off about five other invitations. The main panic when sending off to the printers was that I completely got the time of the wedding wrong, which meant a grovelling call to the venue to push everything forward 30 mins. Sorry for robbing the guests of an extra 30 minutes in bed.

I was really pleased with the invitations, but I wanted a bit more ‘drama’ to them. I placed them in envelopes which folded out and were wax sealed. I made a wax seal with our initials on and spent a couple of evenings sealing the envelopes,  getting off my tits on the fumes and getting third degree burns on my fingers.

You can see more on the invitation and website design here

 I’m every nightmare you’ve ever had. I’m your worst dream come true

Clowns are scary. We wanted horror at our wedding so I figured ‘lets have clowns’.

It turns out that trying to find horror clowns is quite hard. Thankfully, I managed to find an events company that hire out clowns for nightclubs and parties and managed to book them in. I wanted them to greet people once they arrived and then later be sat down if a few peoples seats when they came in to sit down, but they were really massive. I have a large enough arse to fit into a chair, but these guys made me look like I had backside that would belong to a twig or a small rodent.

When they turned up on the morning of the wedding they originally thought it was for ‘Don’t Tell The Bride’ and asked whether Laura knew about it. She knew, my father in law not so much.

They turned out to be a really good touch and set the tone of the day, better still they distracted everyone from looking at my nervous face. The idea was to have them entertain people outside while we were off taking photos after the ceremony, but unfortunately it started raining. The venue allowed them in and they mingled with the rest of the guests.

You can find more information about there at Julia Charles Events 

You know how you hate heights? How about getting married on a cliff?

We got very lucky with the venue. It was only the second place we saw after visiting the Old Kent Barn the week prior. We liked that venue, but it didn’t feel right, maybe a little bit too far away and not enough value for money. Weddings are expenisve at the best of times without coming away feeling you’re not quite getting what you want

Visiting High Rocks the week after, we had a little rummage around the scenery and it ticked so many boxes, especially as our first whimsical idea of getting married was to have it in a cave.

Everyone at the venue was accommodating to our ideas, extremely efficient and took away a lot of the stress that people must go through when organising wedding. I only had two breakdowns in the lead up to the day, and I give them credit for putting me wat ease when I called up in a fluster. They also had a handy sheet of suppliers which got us in touch with our photographer, our florist, our cake maker and supplied our DJ.

I gave it a good go, but I couldn’t quite put the eyeballs in the flowers

Outside of generic houseplants and daffodils, I don’t know a great deal about flowers. I spent a few weeks on Pinterest coming up with ideas for Laura’s approval, and we had a decent set of autumn colours and lots of ivy to brief into the florists.

They offered up a few more ideas – such as berries, cones etc –  and we gave them a free reign to run with with their ideas outside of “lots of ivy”. They embraced it and I couldn’t have been more happy to see them when I arrived at the venue when they were setting up, and were a lot more alert than me when they suggested putting the table candelabras down the aisle.

They even chucked in my world class* pumpkins I carved.

I can’t recommend Colannade Flowers enough.

*not very good

I ask for so little. Just fear me, love me, do as I say and I will be your slave.

We hired a harpist to play some songs while guests were sat patiently waiting for Laura – WHO WAS 15 MINUTES LATE, THANKS – and to play our song on the harp when she entered,

I hadn’t realised, bu I booked for an hour longer than I realised, so I asked her to set up in the main bar to play some music whilst their were giant maurading clowns knocking aroud a bunch of drunks. Trooper!

She turned up about 5 minutes before the first guests arrived, which apart from being extremely punctual it also gave me a massive panic attack at 11.45. (I did say to turn up for then, so I did it to myself.)

She also played the theme from Halloween!

People are only coming for a bit of cake and their tea

The best part of organising the wedding was eating all the cakes. We had a very specific design we found online that we tentatively asked Elsa if she could recreate, and she did it perfectly. With black velvet cake. And marble cake. And white chocolate and raspberry cake. And now I’m annoyed I don’t have any cake in and around my mouth right now.

Let it be cake also accommodated for our gluten free guests by providing some dietry specific cup cakes which I also wanted to scoff. 

Thankfully, we had loads left over so the day after our wedding we managed to have for cake for breakfast. And lunch. And dinner. Considering Laura’s review of the cake was “I like it, I want more” then this was a good thing, despite the impending diabetes we inflincted on ourselves.

The more I think about, the more I’m still annoyed that I’m not eating cake right now.

1) We get married
2) We get drunk

I’m writing this blog seven months after we go married, so already we have proved roughly 70% of guests wrong who didn’t think we’d last six months. I know something they don’t know though – Laura’s severe affliction to home administration. I’m golden.

I turned our wedding website into a photo gallery of the day, but it’s soon to disappear and I’ve moved all the photo’s over here. If you want to look at our silly, smiling faces again, then knock yourself outs. If you’ve had enough of them, then I don’t blame you.

We still look back at our wedding day and hope all the guests had a laugh and went home merry – that was our main aim for the day. My only regret is that I didn’t get to sit down a bit more as I was ready for my pyjamas by about 5pm.

Side note: I am never EVER organising a wedding again.

Laura & Andy

25.10.19