Saturday 9 August 2008

Something has to go right sometime

Well, wedding in 7 weeks and still no venue. From having been insanely stressed about it I have now reached a strange calm stage - I'm not sure if this is some kind of Zen acceptance that something will work out, one way or another, or whether I'm just in a state of past-hysterical denial. Either way I'm sure it'll all be FINE (maybe). Obviously by now lots of places are booked up (who are all these people getting hitched in September? I thought everyone was meant to do this in June) and unfortunately on that day Lancashire Cricket Club already has 3 weddings and 2 parties booked, so OA and his England-supporting best man won't be able to trade speech insults in view of the pitch, but I think I've now reached the stage of thinking - shall we say - creatively.
I've now finished washing the last of the oak & elder champagne bottles which were covered in shards of glass from those muppets at Amtrak smashing a bunch of them. So my diminutive living room is now full of cardboard boxes, partly clearing-out stuff to take to the Wesley for my colleague Finn and partly cases of Scottish bubbly.
And as of yesterday I have the rings. Again, for a combination of ethics and cost, we've gone for second hand. Both very plain gold bands, they came from a jeweller in central Manchester, Arthur Kay on the corner of St Ann's Square, well known for its big old sign (I guess there since it was set up in 1897) proclaiming that they sell wedding bands by weight only. No longer entirely true, but for delightfully reasonable prices we now have a standard gold band for OA and a lovely little rose gold band, hallmarked Birmingham 1871, for me. And for a similar price or less than it would have cost to get something from Argos...
And the REALLY important bit is proceeding nicely, ie the honeymoon. Train tickets ahoy - we've now at least got them sorted between Manchester and Madrid and back, although it's amazing to find that tickets like those for the Paris-Madrid sleepers are already booking up now - hopefully a sign that people are taking up train instead of air travel within Europe. The Morocco plan has probably fallen by the wayside; I would want to rush around Morocco looking at STUFF and indulging my latent archaeologist's tendency to want to stare intently at bits of tile and sandy bricks and bits of discoloured earth, trying to find out their radiocarbon date or what civilisation put them there. OA is not a big fan of this kind of stuff. So, tied as we are to starting in south-western Spain by other commitments, it looks like more of a Spain/Portugal job, with lots of opportunities for lying around being very lazy, reading fat books, eating lovely food and drinking nice local wine. I haven't yet sussed out how to book tickets for the Seville-Faro bus (although I'm sure further investigation on the wonderful Seat61.com will enlighten me), but I do know that there is a sleeper back from Lisbon to Madrid, and OA speaks Portuguese from his volunteering days in Angola and Mozambique, so if necessary he'll be drafted in on that.
So. Wedding music. Am I allowed Leonard Cohen's Song of the French Partisan, or is that too political/depressing?

 
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