The Ethical Wedding

Fairtrade beauty products

2009-11-17T00:21:00.002Z

Between various events I've been to and articles I've researched recently, I've come across an encouraging number of initiatives bringing ethical ingredients to beauty products.
One of the most exciting of these is organic certified Somali incense, being used in the gorgeous-smelling frankincense range from Neal's Yard Remedies. The frankincense is a tree resin gathered by the women from semi-nomadic pastoral tribes, whose families mainly depend on their livestock - cows, goats and camels - to make a living. Despite the long-running unrest in Somalia, wholesalers have managed to get accreditation for frankincense gathered by women from the Samburu people. More information from here and here.
The second project that caught my notice was from Tropical Wholefoods which, as its name suggests, usually sells dried fruit and nuts. But as a by-product of this, it has started sourcing from its dried apricot growers in the Gilgit area of Northern Pakistan other parts of the apricot, with Fairtrade certified crushed apricot stone hulls going to Boots for Fairtrade body scrubs, and apricot kernel oil again heading for Neals Yard's lovely products. And, of course, most of this comes from parts of the fruit that would normally go to waste.

Originally posted at Manchester Massages

Another good eco-weddings article

2009-08-10T19:07:00.002+01:00

Via a wander round the internet links generated by my latest internet social networking fad, the lovely SheWrites, I came across this neat little article from an LA green living website, which has a good list of tips, especially on less-considered aspects of the wedding like how to research what you might (or might not) want to do in the first place...

Ruby battles

2009-07-31T17:31:00.003+01:00

I wrote about rubies - specifically the horrors behind the mining of Burmese gems - last year, but today another story about ethical issues in ruby mining came my way.
An outline of the Free Greenland Ruby campaign is as follows:

A legal war is waging in Greenland as the native Inuit Greenlanders fight for their rights to prospect for the ruby through small-scale, responsible mining just as their ancestors have done for centuries.
On 16th August 2007, native Inuit Greenlanders were arrested for mining ruby. True North Gems (TNG), a Canadian mining company, informed on the Inuit to the local police who were told by The Bureau for Minerals and Petroleum (BMP) to stop them prospecting for ruby - even though this violated the Danish Government's own Mineral Code and the UN Declaration of Human & Indigenous Rights.
Soon after, there was a clamp down across the island on the rights of indigenous people to mine. Mr. Lars Lund Sorensen, the head of a division at the Minerals Office at the time, said:
"We don’t want your sort of people having access to this kind of wealth."
The BMP then set about hiring lawyers who would twist interpretations of Danish laws to cover up their behaviour and protect the interests of TNG. They even instructed the Crown Prosecution Service to prosecute local people but offered to drop charges against miners if they signed paperwork stating they will not mine again. Where this bribe was refused, they issued fines.

The campaign is being promoted in the UK by Greg Valerio of Cred ethical jewellers, and there's a petition on the campaign website.

Carbon offset weddings. Ho hum.

2009-04-21T09:57:00.005+01:00

Several months ago I received this email from a very nice sounding women introducing another carbon offset calculator, this time for weddings, and offering me the opportunity to be an affiliate for the scheme.

"I'd like to introduce Brighter Planet; we help people and businesses reduce and offset their carbon footprint. We have developed a simple carbon offset calculator for weddings that is fully embeddable, and will be featured on The Green Bride Guide's new website. Our affiliate program (through LinkShare) would automatically pay you a commission when people visiting http://theethicalwedding.blogspot.com/use the calculator and offset their wedding. You can see our calculator at the bottom of this page: http://brighterplanet.com/products/event_offsetting
Please let me know if you're interested and we can easily set this up, and help your couples make an ethical AND climate-friendly commitment to the future."

Now, there are dozens of different carbon footprint and offset calculators out there now, although this one may indeed have a USP in being wedding-specific. The problem is, of course, not in the generally well-meaning people setting some of these little enterprises up, but in the broader concept and practice of carbon offsetting itself. There are the ideological objections - that planting trees or paying for technological developments in Majority World countries doesn't challenge the fundamental necessity that we re-think our own ways of living. And there are the objections in practice - that many of the projects being paid for are at best well-meaning but vague and at worst deeply corrupt and destructive. There have been monoculture forests planted on stolen land in Mexico, hydro dams that go to power factories and smelters that just churn out more consumer crap for our wasteful society, and fraudulent double-counting of carbon credits that mean that a lot of money goes into a few pockets and bugger all happens to help the environment.
For a more comprehensive critique of, and information on, the problem see Dan Welch's report for Ethical Consumer.
Needless to say, I won't be signing up for the affiliate scheme, but I have put in the link above in case anyone out there does want to use this service.

Ethical Wedding stories

2009-03-25T11:58:00.002Z

Yes, I know I've been shamefully poor at posting all that background material that was meant to go up ages ago. Events, dear boy, events. But just quickly, here is a link to OA and my wedding story on Katie Fewings' Ethical Weddings website, along with lots of case studies of other ethical weddings to inform and inspire.

Ethical Weddings Fair

2009-02-03T11:55:00.002Z

This is just a quick mention of the Eco Chic Wedding and Home Show 2009, being run in Birmingham (at least it's not in bloody London, like practically everything else on the universe. Sorry, I'm bitter at my so-called union, the NUJ, whose women's conference was announced in London at less than a month's notice, making it prohibitively expensive for anyone outside the South-East. Typical).
Anyway, I've never been to one of these big consumer shows, and the part of me that thinks that generally speaking less is more is very scared by the whole idea of them. But on the basis that people do want to buy nice things for their weddings, and it's better that those things are made fairly and in more environmentally sustainable ways, I guess I'm giving it a bit of a plug. So it's on Sunday 8th March, and details and booking information can be found here.

2008-12-13T12:30:00.005Z

2008-12-13T12:27:00.004Z

Info on ethical weddings, eco-weddings, green weddings...

2008-11-16T13:50:00.003Z

Over the eighteen months or so I've been planning our wedding and writing this blog, I've come across innumerable articles, websites and groups offering insights, advice and perspectives on how to plan weddings and how to introduce ethics into that process.
This post tries to list some of those I found most useful.
Firstly, there are loads of articles just giving advice on some of the main issues to keep an eye out for. Friends of the Earth's lifestyle section's feature lists specific bits of the wedding process – like rings, presents, confetti and honeymoons – where ethical options are easy to find. Not strictly about ethics, the 'Planning a Wedding' page of the Guardian's money website is useful because it has lots of features on the eye-popping cost of many weddings and how to cut it – which often means reducing consumption and consumerism as well, which is definitely a good thing. Wales Online did a general feature on eco-weddings, as did ethical shopping website Getethical.com and Hippyshopper.com has a number of features on ways of making your big day a bit more environmentally friendly or doing some good in majority world countries alongside having a wonderful time yourself. Most mainstream wedding sites or magazines have been fairly clueless on the idea that a wedding might be about more than spending as much money as you possibly can on the biggest frock ever, but Bridalwave.tv did have a small article with some handy links.
Interview articles can be a great help, because they often include real-life accounts of how people went about finding and sourcing ethical supplies for their weddings. Grown Up Green interviewed Katie and Jamie Fewings of the Ethical Wedding directory, while their website has whole collection of 'real ethical weddings' to take inspiration from. I'm also going to flag up my own interviews for a Big Issue Cymru feature on green weddings. And there are some good blogs out there giving individual accounts of planning ethical weddings, including A Low Impact Wedding, the collection of blogs on ethicalweddings.com, My Ethical Wedding and GreatGreenWedding.com. Having a quick search on hosts like Blogspot and Wordpress will find up-to-date and new blogs.
Katie Fewings' Ethicalweddings.com website is also a terrific and increasingly comprehensive range of links and features on everything from wooden rings to making your own wedding favours, green venues to organic chocolate cakes....

Bicycle weddings (1)

2008-11-09T21:08:00.004Z

A while back I posted requests for stories about weddings that incorporated bikes on various Facebook bicycling groups. I've got a bunch of fun tales stashed somewhere that I need to post, but here's a very belated one that just came in from a gentleman called Albert:
"I had a post ride coffee with a guy in Tucson, Arizona who told me he had his wedding midway through a ride. He, his bride and the wedding party (minister included) began their ride at the foot of Mount Lemmon in Tucson. Approximately 26 miles later at the summit (7-8,000 foot elevation gain) they exchanged their vows. Their cycling jerseys were custom made as tux and dress. Their rings? Titanium of course. Very dangerous by the way as trauma and swelling of the finger necessitates removal of the ring. Well, with a titanium ring? That means removal of the finger as well. But I digress."

The Honeymoon is Over (pt 2: food)

2008-10-31T18:28:00.006Z

Aaagh yes, food. Spain, Portugal and France not being famous for the veggie-friendliness of their cuisine. Although OA and I are not currently the most observant of veggies and have been known to lapse into what OA refers to an fish-n-chipocrisy.
Actually, almost any decent-sized city in any of these countries shouldn't present too much of a problem (although I wouldn't fancy trying to be vegan on a trip like this). Granted, we ate quite a lot of felafel. And granted, most of it wasn't particularly great felafel, particularly the undercooked monstrosity served by a sniggering would-be thief at a place called something like Asteria on the tourist-trap Rue de la Huchette in Paris, and that at Al-Andalus in Granada, where the felafels were re-heated in a microwave and where the guy putting the pitas together said, when I pointed out that he'd just ladled mayonaise sauce instead of humus all over everything, "I'm just a waiter not a chef." Which raises the questions of a) why he was doing the cooking then and b) why this place is recommended in the Lonely Planet guide - the answer to that being the Granada and Cordoba sections of the Lonely Planet guide to Andalucia are bobbins...
But when we weren't eating cheap on dodgy felafel or on various types of cheese and/or spinach pastries in various bakeries, we had some lovely food and drink in various small restaurants along the way.
First up was Restaurante Arrayanes in Granada, just off the main street of teashops in the touristy bit of the picturesque old quarter of the Albayzin. Run by a Moroccan Berber called Mustafa who seems to switch between half a dozen different languages with no visible effort, it has a small veggie offering, but the vegetarian cous cous and the Middle Eastern starters were superb (as were the fish kebabs, for the sinners amongst us).
Another good place to eat in Granada, whose name I unfortunately failed to take down, was the first bar/restaurant on the Campo del Principe in the Realejo if you are coming up from Calle Molinos. A number of eateries in Granada do a bizarre but lovely dish consisting of tempura-style slices of aubergine, crisp-fried and then drizzled with dark honey or something like pomegranate molasses. This place also did a great, if slightly weird, spinach pie with pineapple in it.
Restaurante Ruta del Azafran also did some great salads, as well as offering a great view of the Alhambra from its position as one of a row of tapas bars and restaurants on the Paseo de los Tristes. But more importantly for me (sinning again) it introduced me to the lovely Granada wines of the Bodega Barranco Oscuro - gorgeous rich ripe reds which unfortunately I have yet to find a UK stockist for. If I'd known that I'd have lugged more than one measly bottle home with me (or made OA lug a couple instead).
On to Cordoba, which was frankly and depressingly a bit of a tourist trap despite the breathtaking beauty of the Mesquita (as long as you go first thing in the morning when it's free and tour groups aren't allowed in - but the rubbish Lonely Planet won't tell you that, or not anywhere you'd notice it) but where there were lots of places selling tortilla de patatas - Spanish omelette - to keep any empty corners of stomach well filled.
Seville, however, was just great. I could stay there for weeks and just eat. And the writer of this section of the guidebook did seem to have actually visited some of the places she was talking about so some of the recommendations actually existed/bore some resemblance to the descriptions.
Firstly, for bog-standard but filling pizza in a touristy but very charming setting (a renovated hammam) was Restaurante San Marco, in the heart of the tourist district of Barrio de Santa Cruz. For excellent pizza and pasta but lousy (rude, by turns brusque and slow) service, Ristorante Cosa Nostra on Calle del Betis, a picturesque street with a number of bars where you can have a pre- or post- dinner drink watching the bats catching midges over the mighty river Guadalquivir.
And for fab Cuban food with delightful service, Habanita, on a tiny side street called Callejon Golfo on the Centro area of town. This place knows its vegan from its vegetarian and needy vegans could indeed eat different and very reasonably-priced and delicious things there every meal for about a week, if they needed. The most interesting bit of the menu was the Cuban food, which included standards like fried yucca and (very good) black beans with rice, but also featured some fantastic savoury banana balls in tomato sauce (we ordered a second dish of these, and got an extra one for our enthusiasm). But un-Latino-mooded veggies could go for a range of tofu, vegetable or seitan casseroles, pies and bakes.
And now I've run out of steam, so I'll do Lisbon, Madrid and Paris another day...

The Honeymoon is Over (pt 1: transport)

2008-10-27T09:09:00.003Z

Well, the attempt at a (reasonably) low-impact honeymoon is done, with varying degrees of success.
My number one Top Tip for trans-European train travel is now Break The Journey Each Way. Ie, if you don't leave in the south of England and therefore can't hop on a morning Eurostar, leaving lots of time to catch your sleeper on to Italy, Spain etc, then the precariousness of train times can make it well worthwhile factoring some extra give into your itineraries, whether it's a night in London or Paris.
The sorry tale behind this bitter comment is partly due to the Eurotunnel fire in September, which is of course a pretty extraordinary circumstance. Also, being a Strange Person who started off her honeymoon sans new husband and with a friend, going on a writing course, I was tied into more pressing timetables than on most holidays. But when someone decided to end their life by jumping onto the fast live rail between Watford and Harrow & Wealdstone stations, holding us up for two hours, I was somewhat split between sorrow that somebody needed to finish it this way, pity for the poor train drivers who have to live with their memories of suicides, and cuticle-chewing, hair-pulling stress at the knowledge that we were going to miss not only our Eurostar to Paris but also the connecting sleeper down to Madrid. And that waiting for a train to Madrid next morning was going to mean that we missed the start of the writing course. And the Eurostar staff at St Pancras could have more polite and helpful too...
So, ashamed and angry as I am to admit it, we ended up on plane to Malaga next morning, followed by a bus up to Granada. And I promised myself that I will never put myself in that situation again.
Getting around Andalucia by coach and train was a joy, and an illustration of how punctual and comfortable well-run public transport can be. The train system, in particular, was a delight, especially the contrast between the amount of legroom available on Spanish trains compared with the battery-chicken conditions of the vile Virgin Pendolino. Booking coaches from the UK via Alsa, a subsidiary of National Express, was a doddle, and the advance-purchase machines for their tickets in most Spanish coach stations were also easy to use. Renfe, the Spanish train network, was less user-friendly for advance purchases, but helpful advice is available on www.seat61.com.
The overnight coach from Lisbon to Madrid, booked via Eurolines, was ok and surprisingly comfortable. And the sleeper from Madrid up to Paris, with tickets bought direct from SNCF after RailEurope's website decided to be awkward, was extremely comfortable for short-arsed me, although OA's height was a bit much for the berths. We met a great family from Aberdeen who were doing the through journey from the south of Spain to the north of Scotland in one go, and having done a similar trek between Aberdeen and Italy the previous year were impressively sanguine about it - and gave two fingers to people who claim that distance train travel with kids is impossible. Although obviously it helps when your son is happy to sit and read or actually have conversations with people around him, rather than drive fellow passengers up the wall with nasty noisy bits of technology. Fortunately we'd got a couple of days in Paris on the way home, so there were no nail-biting moments about whether we'd catch our trains (just horror at the continued inadequacy of the facilities and staffing at the Eurostar terminal at Gare du Nord, where the vast queues nearly left OA standing on the platform watching the train vanish England-wards).

(un)Ethical flowers

2008-09-23T09:20:00.002+01:00

Article on labour rights abuses in the flower industry - but with some links to ethical suppliers, whether fair trade or local/organic.

Cake

2008-09-18T10:39:00.003+01:00

Who needs some big stodgy fruitcake covered in sickly icing when you can walk into On the Eighth Day, Manchester's venerable ethical food co-operative, and order 110 chocolate brownies (vegan ones, so that they can serve as pudding for the poor vegans who won't be getting their hands on the chocolate torte from the main meal)?
'Nuff said.

Venue ahoy!

2008-09-16T11:52:00.005+01:00

Well, we have a venue, which is a profound relief. Actually we've had a venue for a bit, but I've not had time to get on this blog, what with work and more work and trying to organise a wedding and cope with Mr Climate Change (the groom's) various plans and plots (see, for instance, www.onlyplanet.info).
So, having looked through the many nice places that pop up on a Google search for things like wedding venue + Manchester, a few miserable days were spent finding that most people book these places up months, if not years, in advance. Add to that the fact that most of them charge eye-watering amounts just for the venue, before you even get onto the food, and the prospects were lookign a bit depressing. Various people made various kind suggestions, most of which drew a blank (too busy, too small, too... meatie).
This, however, illustrates the power of the Google search term. Knock the word 'wedding' out and suddenly whole new horizons opened up. And I was reminded of Manchester Bridge Club. Which might sound a bit posh and fusty, but which we'd used for benefit events before, for the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture and Windows for Peace. It's affordable, the right size, has a cash bar so I don't need to faff around thinking about drinks and glasses for the evening, and doesn't do catering so I can keep the independent, veggie-friendly, ethical caterers I'd started out with.
Breathe a long sigh of relief...
And now I also have a lovely double-decker bus, courtesy of Oxford Road stalwarts Finglands, to carry everyone from the registry office to the reception, hopefully deterring a few cars from the city centre.
Now, cake.

Something has to go right sometime

2008-08-09T09:32:00.003+01:00

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?

Fizz fuss

2008-07-11T12:17:00.003+01:00

Well, the fizz is here - a very generous gift from Helen, my Dad's wife.
As I said some month ago here, it's come from Cairn o'Mhor, who make marvellous Scottish fruit wines - not just the thick, sweet dark fruit wines, but lovely dry bubbly oak & elder - a locally-produced, interesting alternative to champagne and with lots of lovely overtones of the British countryside.
Getting it across all that picturesque British landscape, however, involves the wonderful world of delivery companies. Now, this is where I cease to be able to engage with the ethics and just get stressed about which companies are most likely to lose/break my stuff. In my fairly extensive experience of online shopping, DPD are great, and actually have that rare thing, an online tracking system that works. Home Delivery Network aren't bad. I've never had stuff from UPS, I think, and hope this remains true as both it and the horribly chaotic DHL have fairly dire corporate ethical records as well.
But unfortunately Cairn O'Mhor use Amtrak, which is without doubt the worst of the pack. They give you 2 shots at being in (because obviously we're still in the 1950s and a good little housewife is always home) and then they charge you for any subsequent deliveries. The other option is that you can go and collect it from their depot - which, in the case of Manchester is out in an industrial estate on the very far outskirts of the city. So, obviously you have to have a car - especially if you're lugging 4 cases of wine. And if you want it redelivering, you, the intended recipient of the parcel, can whistle for it - for some bizarre reason the sender has to arrange this. So more hassle for the poor lovely and very helpful Donna at Cairn o'Mhor.
But, after a merry-go-round of phone calls and emails, the wine is here - with 2 bottles broken, all the other boxes soaked, and interesting little cuts appearing on my arm and hand. The boxes are all in my (very small) living room, with various makeshift protection devices to make sure the cats don't clamber all over them and get covered in glass snicks too.
Maybe I need to go and open one of those bottles, just for a little taste...

Bah humbug

2008-06-26T15:45:00.004+01:00

Obviously, with a nice caterer and a daftly cheap and lovely dress and everything looking like it was well on the way to being sorted, something had to go wrong. No, the groom hasn't high-tailed it back to the Antipodes, which I suppose I must be thankful for. But OA and I no longer have a venue for anything but the minimal little 20-minute bit at the registry office.
Of course, the registry office bit is the most important and significant bit and all that - but it was also the easiest to organise. And now, thanks to Birch Community Centre's architects and their unpredictable ways with wet concrete, I need to find a new hall, function room or whatever it is, within our meagre budget, ideally with a kitchen that the caterers can use and even more ideally with a cash bar. And none of the ones I can think of are returning my calls...
Gretna has never looked so appealing.

More green weddings in the press

2008-06-03T19:17:00.003+01:00

Just a quick one - here's an article did for Big Issue Cymru at the start of 2008, with interviews and quotes from Rebecca and Hugh Whately (as featured here in January 2008) and also from Katie Fewings, founder of EthicalWeddings.com.

Manchester Evening News tips for an ethical wedding

2008-04-27T15:54:00.004+01:00

My local paper, the Manchester Evening News, ran a green weddings piece - see the post below. Here's the 'top tips' and 'eco-chic made easy' sections which weren't reproduced in the main article.

Top tips to going ethical on your big day
- go green with your accessories, like charm bracelets from [Fair Trade retailer] Traidcraft
- Green gifts [like a photo frame, also from Traidcraft] can be chic as well as sustainable
- Eat, drink and be merry - with a healthy conscience - with a Fairtrade wine mixed case from Traidcraft
- Instead of favours on the tables, why not do something different and donate the money through Oxfam's Unwrapped - the money you spend on sweets for each guest could pay for a goat for a nomadic family

Eco-chic made easy for brides
Liz Taylor (yes, really) of TLC has these top tips to getting a bit of eco chic as you walk up the aisle:
- stay local - choose a venue as close to home as possible to reduce car travel;
- send invitations by email - or printed locally on recycled card using vegetable-based inks;
- source food and drink locally where possible - also look at local brews or high-quality English wine instead of champagne [for some suggestions, see the Fizz section of this blog];
- go vintage with your wedding dress to tick that recycled box;
- get guests to join in the green theme by getting the train to the venue instead of driving.

On this last point, OA and I are trying to make it easier for guests to get to our wedding by public transport. One of the ways we're doing that is to hire a double-decker bus to get everyone from the registry office in Manchester city centre out to the community centre where we're having the reception - so no-one has an excuse to bring a car to get from one to the other (although we figure it's only fair to make exceptions for my 93-year-old Gran and the aunt and uncle bringing her from North Wales, and one set of friends who have two children under 3 to transport... we're nothing if not reasonable ;-))

Green brides in the press

2008-04-27T15:49:00.002+01:00

This is something that I need to do a proper trawl of, but the number of articles about green weddings seems to be growing at a rate of knots. Even the notoriously eco-sceptic Manchester Evenings News has managed to run one. The online version misses out the tips section, which is a pity because it's quite good, but there's nothing in it that isn't somewhere in this blog...

The extra benefits of wedding presents...

2008-04-07T21:49:00.004+01:00

Well, the side benefits of ethical weddings are lovely sometimes...
I finally managed to get as far as sending out our invitations the other day, and got a very quick response from OA's second cousin Diana, who sent a very generous cheque with instructions to spend part of it on our honeymoon and part on one of the charities we picked for donations instead of gifts, from those who felt so inclined. This was the Freedom Theatre in Jenin, a city in the North of the West Bank which has been very hard hit by the Israeli military occupation. The Theatre, which was founded by an Israeli woman called Arna, provides an amazing outlet for young people living in the refugee camp of Jenin to express themselves and learn artistic and multimedia skills.
Having visited the Freedom Theatre last January and been very impressed and moved by the young people who showed us round and let us look in on rehearsals, it occurred to me that it might be nice for them to know that we'd done this, and the lovely message I got back included these words:
"Dear Sarah, thank you very much for this wonderful and unexpected sign of solidarity and support. And our united congratulations on your upcoming marriage!"
Which gives me a warmer glow and a tearier eye than any toaster is likely to manage...

Pants!

2008-04-04T12:37:00.006+01:00

Looks like more and more ethical companies are getting in on the wedding theme. Latest are the lovely GreenKnickers. Having worked their way through global warming pants that change colour with your body heat, suggestive slogans about organics, and padded cycling knickers, they're now introducing special Wedding knickers which incorporate your something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue, all into one pair of pants. Their knickers are beautifully made and very comfy, although several of my pairs are still in their boxes coz somehow they seem too nice to wear. The wedding knickers are available at the end of April, but you can reserve a pair via info@greenknickers.org.

Shoes!

2008-03-29T16:07:00.003Z

Having acquired my ridiculously low-budget wedding dress, a common response from my mates (especially Women of the Female Persuasion) has been along the lines of: "well that means you can spend loads on the shoes then!"
And a new range from Izzy Lane makes that very tempting. This little ethical, vegetarian company, based in Yorkshire, started off making classically chic tweedy suits and knits, mainly from wool sourced from a flock of rescued sheep. But this year they've branched out into shoes, all Vegetarian Society approved and handmade by a 'traditional cobbler in the East End of London.' There's leather-look ones and some quite traditionally wedding-y cream coloured ones in linen or Fairtrade organic cotton canvas. Yummm...

Honeymoons and cycle rickshaws

2008-02-22T18:45:00.005Z

On the theme of low CO2 weddings that involve cycle rickshaws, I came across a great picture on www.lowflyzone.org of a couple being whisked off on a none-flying honeymoon (destination unspecified) by a very smartly dressed cyclist... Lowflyzone.org promotes alternatives to flying and you can use it to sign up to a pledge not to fly, which has 2 different levels - no flying at all ('Gold') and no recreational flying, for those who might not be able to get out of it for work ('silver'). Somewhere further down this blog I've already talked about our plans for a honeymoon in Morocco, travelling by train, but I've got to put in a quick plug for Venice, since it's such a romantic destination and flying there is just madness... there is no way to arrive in Venice that beats the sleeper from Paris, pulling in across the lagoon in the morning after dawn rising as you approach through the countryside of Northern Italy...

The dress!

2008-02-06T18:11:00.001Z

Haha! In a stroke of ridiculous good luck, I've managed to prove the point that an ethical wedding needn't be an expensive one. Indeed, it's just gotten very, very affordable in at least one respect. Totally by chance, I've found my dress, and it cost a tenner in a second-hand shop on Oldham St in Manchester...
I was never really a candidate for traditional white. Firstly, I'm surprised enough to find myself getting married in the first place, and envisaging myself in the full white works is just further than my imagination can stretch. Secondly, I really don't look that good in white. Thirdly, it would be mildly fraudulent...
I'm not inherently opposed to white wedding dresses. My mate Liz (interviewed below), had a gorgeous one that fit her kind of classic, 50s style fantastically. But at five foot nothing and a half, I need to be careful with styles that might make me look even shorter than I am (especially when Overgrown Antipodean is six foot four and we already look like we're from different species and will have the daftest wedding photos anyway). So any of your frothy white numbers would be out, since they do tend to make people my height look like a snowdrift. And so many meringues are just reallt quite horrible - especially, however, the 80s-style peach satin one I walked past in, I think, Bride Be Lovely a few weeks back.
There are, of course, some great ethical wedding dress makers nowadays, especially Conscious Elegance, www.consciouselegance.com, which does a range of classic wedding gowns, made to measure from environmentally sound fabrics. Or there are places like Oxfam, which sells wedding dresses for charity - a bit hit or miss, as they're dependent on donations, but there was an absolutely gorgeous antique one on their website recently for a ridiculously reasonable price (go to the website, click on 'shop' and then search the 'women's' section). Or ethical designer companies like Enamore or Ciel do lovely frocks for a less traditional look.
So, without risking Bad Luck (this whole wedding thing has made me bizarrely superstitious), we have a lovely little fitted dress, simple cut, in a kind of patterned satiny finish and a warm goldish shade that is very forgiving on my fair-to-washed-out sort of complexion. It's the kind of thing that will look classy for the day but I can still dance in it in the evening, and it will make a great party frock thereafter.
And all for a tenner...

Grub's up

2008-02-03T14:43:00.001Z

Well, Operation Wedding has commenced in earnest now. I've been happily toodling along in 'I'm getting married next year, that's ages away' mode. Now I'm in 'Ohmigod I'm getting married in September, and now it's February, I'd better actually organise something!' mode. And it's amazing how early stuff gets booked up...
So, with some of the registry office, legalistic bits on the go, I've at least now got my caterers booked, and am somewhere close to a venue. The caterers, though, I'm pretty pleased with. OA and I decided pretty early on that we want a vegetarian meal, as although we're not the world's strictest veggies we're certainly not too happy about the idea of spending money on meat for our guests when it's something that for various resource-use and cruelty reasons we're not comfortable with in an industrialised society (for more info on the resource impacts of producing meat on a large scale, including pollution and contributions to climate change, see www.vegsoc.org).
Green Plate, a small Manchester catering company, fit the bill very nicely. They're not exclusively vegetarian, so if we decide that asking my 90-odd year old Gran to eat something that's not only vegetarian but probably North African/Mediterranean in style, when she's never even eaten a curry before, might be too much, then we can still ask for a small ham salad. They're aware of issues like local sourcing and organics, but also of price, which means that if we've got room in the budget we can ask them to include more organic and fair trade food, whilst knowing that even if we have to keep the budget tight they'll be looking out for this kind of thing. And they're based only a mile or two away and run a cafe in a local health centre, which means that feel like they're on our turf. Which is nice.
Now I'm really looking forward to getting those menus...

Burma's rubies

2008-02-02T19:01:00.003Z

The scandal over 'blood diamonds' and the link between diamond mining and trading and bloody wars in Africa, including those where young children are used as cannon fodder, provoked at least some reaction from the international community. The Kimberley Process may be an inadequate response, and some of the biggest suppliers of diamonds to the world market may still be finding ways to get round ethical standards, but at least people are starting to know that they need to ask questions about where gems are from.
Human Rights Watch now also has a good backgrounder on rubies, the majority of which come from the famously repressive regime of Burma. Some big name companies have already stated that they won't use Burmese rubies. More information from Human Rights Watch's website at http://hrw.org/english/docs/2008/01/11/burma17729.htm

Interview #2: Liz O'Neill

2008-02-01T22:27:00.001Z

Liz O'Neill is head of communications at the Vegetarian Society. She and husband Joe, a teacher, were married in July 2002.

“Our desire to have an ethical wedding started with the fact that I was vegetarian and Joe is a strict vegan,” says Liz, “so we wanted to have good food that met with our ethical beliefs. And then it just made sense to approach other parts of the wedding so that it reflected how we felt about the world.

“Out guests covered a really wide spread of ages and interests, from some who very much agreed with us politically and socially to others who didn't really know about our beliefs. But afterwards, lots of people said it was a really good wedding in that it totally reflected who we are as people and as a couple, instead of just being like everybody else's wedding days.”

As well as sourcing almost entirely vegan food from a small vegetarian restaurant in Chorlton, Manchester, Liz applied environmental and fair trade ideas to the rest of the wedding.

“One of the hardest things was the flowers. I went into so many florists and was just met with blanks stares or even one place which laughed at me when I asked about local or fair trade flowers – I think awareness of the issues has increased loads since then, but a lot of places just didn't have a clue five or six years ago. Lots of people assumed that because I wanted things to be ethical I was looking for a hippy look, when actually we wanted something quite classic – modern and urban, but very smart too. People kept offering me grasses!

“But eventually I found a place in Buxton where the woman was interested in helping to source them, and she did a great job – she even dropped them off herself on the way to visit her mum!”

Another issue that Joe and Liz felt strongly about was waste. “I'm always upset by all of those little table decorations and favours and things you get at weddings, which mostly must end up in the bin,” says Liz.

One of Liz's solutions was to ask friends and several local restaurants to save the cobalt-blue bottles that companies like Ty Nant sell mineral water in, and Neal's Yard toiletries are packaged in. They were used to make striking vases for fresh flowers on each table at the reception. Liz made many of the table decorations herself, using ribbons and materials from craft shops.

Joe is also a very keen cyclist, so the couple had a cycle rickshaw to carry them from the church to their reception.

Liz's dress came from a small boutique and was made by a European designer, while Joe had a suit made at a local tailor in Nottingham, where he was living at the time. “Neither place was particularly super-ethical,” says Liz, “but they were the kind of independent local businesses that we felt it was important to support, and they provided us with just what we wanted.”

And following a Roman Catholic church service, Liz and Joe's reception was held at a local community centre. “We really enjoyed, and felt strongly about, celebrating our wedding somewhere that was local to us and where we were part of a community, rather than going somewhere in another part of the country where we didn't have any connections. It was a very affordable venue, too – in the end we were able to provide all the drinks as well as food, outfits, flowers, venue etc for less than £10,000.”

Liz's main recommendation is just to take each stage of the wedding planning process as it comes, and then to think about what the alternatives might be. “If you just view it as lots of single jobs and find a way of doing each one of them as you want it, it suddenly seems much more manageable,” she says.

Interview with Rebecca & Hugo Whately

2008-01-07T08:51:00.003Z

Here is the first of my interview posts - conversations with people who've had green or ethical weddings and who have ideas and tips for those of use still in the planning phases!

Rebecca and Hugo Whately

We decided to get married about 18 months before the wedding and we really struggled about how to do it. We didn't know how we wanted to get married – we knew we didn't want to get married in a church and we were quite put off by a lot of things that we traditional about the traditional wedding and wedding industry, so it took us about 6 months of thinking about how to do it – whether we wanted a big wedding and lots of people.

And one of our concerns about having a big wedding was the environmental impact of having that many people travel and huge amounts of food. Coincidentally, Hugo found Daphne and Penrhos on the internet, and my family already knew about Penrhos, so it seemed an ideal place for us to get married. We met Daphne and really liked her and we really like the kind of thing she did at Penrhos [Penrhos is a converted mediaeval manor farm in the Welsh Borders, with a pioneering organic restaurant and interests local food. They offer a full range of wedding facilities and help with planning green weddings.]

For both of us food is really important, we're both really appreciate good food but also food that's sourced locally and organically and seasonally, which Daphne does.

So that was a brilliant start really, and once we'd decided to have it at Penrhos we pretty much just trusted Daphne, because I didn't have any clear ideas the way some people do of how I wanted it to be, so we trusted her to sort it out. I didn't have an image in my head of some huge day – my partner Hugo actually did more organisation than I did, I'm usually really put off by big events and that meant that I wasn't the middle of organising it all so I could actually be quite calm and had an amazing day.

So Daphne sorted out a lot of it, like the food, and it was really nice because everyone could stay at Penrhos – we had about a hundred people with all our families and Daphne was really flexible and sorted it out with the local farmer so that people who weren't staying in the building could camp in one of his fields next door, which was great.

She was really brilliant at really taking on as much as we wanted her to take on but being flexible on things like having lots of our friends camping in the field next door.

We also made the invitations ourselves and wrote them out.

Ethical dresses, suits and rings?

For the clothing it was really amazing, once of my friends offered to make my dress. The material wasn't sourced really environmentally, I suppose – it came from a fabric shop on the Edgeware Road in London, and my friend over the year made my dress with the added challenge that over the year it had to change shape because during the year I became pregnant so the design needed to be changed for that.

And Hugo had a pair of linen trousers from years ago and he got a waistcoat and shirt from Green Fibres.

The rings – Daphne did a printout of things like local bands and local jewellers and flowers and we used that a lot – so actually we used a local jeweller in Worcestershire, we went for a weekend with him up there and made our own rings and he was this incredible character and had this incredible studio in the countryside which looked over the countryside, and he was there to make sure there weren't any disasters and to make sure we ended up with a ring each! And he sourced the white gold for us in the jewellery quarter in Birmingham.

Weddings lists

We ummed and aaahed about the idea of a wedding list. We didn't particularly like the idea of a wedding list and the over-consumption of the whole wedding industry and the wastefulness of it in some ways and going with the usual rituals just for the sake of it, so we tried to be a bit... [Hugo in background – 'spending for spending's sake'] so in the end we had a wedding list with Green Fibres and got some bedding from there, and then there's a little traditional shop round the corner from us which is run by a couple and does kitchenware and garden things, and they were great, so it was just those two things.

Local flowers

And then flowers- a friend of Daphne's tries to do flowers in a more ethical, local way and grows a lot in her garden and grows wild flowers and herbs and we didn't get any of the flowers from abroad, it was all flowers grown locally. and a friend of mine made my bouquet from her garden.

Cost?

It cost less than £10,000 for a hundred people and that included paying for people to stay the night at Penrhos and for people to camp, and we paid for all the drinks in the evening, and that included everyone staying overnight in the building or camping and then having a big breakfast the next day together. It was really lovely – having been someone who was quite phobic of big parties and bringing all these different people together it actually turned out to be a really incredible day.

Mum and Dad made the wedding cake and Hugo's brothers did the music – basically Daphne did everything we wanted her to and then we could add things on like that.

And the food was incredible – I think people sometimes have the idea that if it's going to be organic food it's going to be a bit bleurgh, but it was really beautifully cooked and delicious.

Advice?

I think it's quite good at each step to think about how to do it and thinking about whether there's an alternative way. So we didn't really sit down and plan it but because we were engaged well before we got married we had plenty of time to think about it, so we could do the invitations and you can easily do those yourself, and thinking about everything from flowers to wedding lists. Particularly now it's not so difficult, there are lots of people who offer alternative services and also i think people who are coming to the wedding like friends and family, we didn't want to be really sanctimonious about it, not everyone agrees with us completely, so it was about having a really incredible day without trying to push a particular political or ethical stance, but at the same time it just had that feel to it.

Hugo: we wanted to get married but we didn't like weddings!

A lot of people find finding the venue difficult, so finding a venue where everything was like that was great and they could organise so much of it and then we could just do the bits we wanted – that was perfect. People who usually go to church weddings said they were surprised by how moving the ceremony could be without being in a church – we passed the rings round, we got married inside this tiny little room and then went outside and passed the rings round to everyone held them and it kind of included everyone in the ceremony.

Honeymoon

And then we went for our honeymoon on an eco-retreat in Wales, in this incredibly luxurious blissful teepee with a fire and lots of rugs, outside Machynlleth, four miles down a dirt track.

Green honeymoons

2007-12-19T20:35:00.001Z

This beautiful cold, clear winter weather may be lovely but it's getting a bit nippy, and my thoughts are turning to contemplating our honeymoon as a means of escaping whatever weather next autumn chooses to throw at Manchester.

This being an eco-wedding, flying will not be an option. Although some environmental writers – like my friend and colleague Simon Birch - argue that the benefits of eco-tourism to some countries makes flying there justifiable, the threat of climate change is just too big a shadow for OA and I to be comfortable with hopping on a plane for pleasure.

If we were being really good, of course, we'd be staying in the UK. I've visited some wonderful parts of Britain, with the beautiful southern coast of Dumfries and Galloway really standing out as somewhere with spectacular scenery, lovely picturesque towns like Kirkcudbright and Wigtown, affordable accommodation and (vitally important if you're me) great food like the organic, fair trade ice-cream at Cream O'Galloway, bread and cakes from Wigwam Bakery, amazing hot-smoked, locally-caught salmon at Marrbury Smokehouse and whisky from Scotland's most southerly distillery at Bladnoch.

But the move of Eurostar to St Pancras makes getting to Europe and beyond without flying so much easier. Not that the journey down from Euston to Waterloo was a massive trial (except when the Tube screwed up YET AGAIN), but just popping down the road to the very splendid new St Pancras International is such a doddle. It's great! And at some point I do want to try that enormous champagne bar by the Eurostar terminal, even if that makes me a vain and shallow human being.

Anyway, OA and I did a trial trip to Italy by train last spring, and somewhat caught the bug. I had a bit more luxury when it came to time, but OA had s standard public-sector two week holiday to take. We got the Eurostar to Paris, spent an overnight there to break the trip, and then caught a sleeper to Venice. Drawing into S Lucia station on the bridge over the lagoon in the morning sun was a truly resplendent way to arrive in such a beautiful city. Three days there, and then another train – a mid-afternoon hop – down to Florence for another four days, then an hour or so back up to Bologna for another couple of days.

Train travel, apart from the environmental benefits, is immeasurably more relaxed than flying, and with the masses of advice, experience, itineraries and timetables available from the lovely Mark Smith of Seat61.com, it's now pretty easy.

So, honeymoon time. We're off to Morocco. Primarily by train, although this grand plan will involve me having to get on a ferry from Spain. This doesn't make me very happy, big water-wuss that I am, but can't really be helped if I want to get to all those wonderful places and their magical names... I shall, of course, be using Seat61 for my travel advice and bookings. Finding places to stay will be the next bit of this project; some of the little independent guesthouses listed on Responsibletravel.com look pretty wonderful, as do some of the hiking and biking tours, but if anyone out there has recommendations they will be gratefully received...

Getting around...

2007-11-20T22:05:00.001Z

One of the less interesting bits of a wedding day is, I guess, the transport. Traditional limos and horse drawn carriages really don't do it for me, although I suppose the latter probably have the virtue of being low-carbon. Manchester has a company which rents out gigantic pink stretch humvees, which have to be - on petrol consumption, militarism and aesthetic grounds - the most horrible vehicles in existence.
On an ethical weddings websearch I came across one company which has put the trend for hybrid cars like the Toyota Prius and Honda Insight as an eco-measure together with the demand for low-impact weddings, and is renting out Prius cars under the brand of www.ecoweddingcar.co.uk.
I really don't like cars, though. I expect there are people out there who've managed to incorporate bikes into their weddings (are you out there? Come and tell me about it!). I quite fancy the idea of emulating my friend Georgie. She had a truly fabulous little wedding - just her lovely new husband and a couple of close friends as witnesses, at the registry office, and then they hopped on a big red London bus and went off to have afternoon tea at the Ritz. How classy is that? I, however, am a generally coarser type of gal with more of a rabble to accommodate. The idea of loading everyone on the 142 up Oxford Road does rather appeal (although it would potentially involve handing bus fares to the evil Stagecoach with their homophobic chairman Brian Souter, who donated half a million to the campaign against the repeal of Clause 28.)
So, if it's far enough away maybe we'll just have to hope it's not a day of traditional Manchester rain and wait for a Finglands bus. Or if (as is seeming increasingly unlikely) I manage to get my number 1 choice of venue, we'll be going for the ultimate eco-option and just making everyone walk round the corner from the registry office...

Where oh where?

2007-11-08T21:25:00.003Z

Last year I did a report for Ethical Consumer magazine on the British hotel sector, and everything I turned up then put me off having any bit of my wedding in a standard hotel function suite, which seems to be one of the standard places for having a wedding reception. The hotel industry in general (along with the restaurant industry, which I'm researching at the moment) was just stunning in its poor grasp of basic ideas of corporate responsibility, an industry whose idea of addressing its environmental impact in an era of impending ecological doom goes, in the vast majority of cases, no further than asking guests to use their towels more than one day on the trot. And that's without going into the toe-curling horribleness of the working conditions in this notoriously poorly paid and casualised market, which is of course dependent on the labour of hundreds or thousands of exploited illegal or precarious immigrants. See www.londoncitizens.org.uk for their Living Wage campaign, and The Guardian's article about their hospitality sector campaign for some really depressing individual stories – http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2006/apr/29/careers.work
One of the problems with avoiding horrible hotel chains is that you can't always spot them immediately. While some hotels, such as Hilton and Radisson, use their brand names as a major selling point, the current fashion for 'individual, authentic, boutique' hotels means that there is also a subset of quite nice looking-places that spend lots of marketing money pretending to be all those things and then turn out to be owned by a set of generic scumbags.
Of course, hotels are just one option, and a pretty expensive one at that. As I will probably mention a bunch of times in the coming ten months, about the first thing my colleague Jenny said to me when I announced that I was getting married was: don't tell anyone who's selling you anything that it's for a wedding – they'll just double the price. And wedding suites are no exception. Apparently the fashionable place for big weddings in Manchester at the moment is the beautiful atrium space at City Art Gallery, but I can only assume that the price of that would be somewhere in a different galaxy from what I'm looking at, and to be honest I think I'd feel like a bit of a nana using a place that grand.
My mate Liz overcame this by basically renting the local church hall, and doing by all accounts a gorgeous job of decorating it – she put out an appeal for those lovely cobalt-blue Ty Nant mineral water bottles months before, and had them on each table with flowers in. My friend Sarah did a similar thing for her hippy wedding ten years ago – ceremony in an apple orchard under an umbrella followed by a proper knees up in a village hall, well away from any neighbours who were going to want the band to be quiet at midnight or one or three a.m. Jenny's big back garden, hidden behind an ordinary looking urban semi, came in very handy for a buffet in what used to be the stable and lots of space to mill about and talk to the chickens. Good thing it didn't rain. Anything outdoorsy is obviously OFF the agenda for Manchester in September...
This kind of thing can work well depending on how much organising time you have. My inclination is to find some way of doing as little organising as possible, but that's currently proving difficult. Liz is bloody marvellous at organising things – it's her job, in some respects – and even she hired a kind of on-site administrator for the day, so that she wouldn't have to handle anything that went All Wrong with the venue or the caterers or the transport. I haven't asked her what she did about cleaning up the church hall afterwards, though. And what about drinking and dancing? A Church of England booklet my sister told me about on how to do weddings on a budget suggests a bring-a-bottle approach to avoid the cost of huge amounts of booze, which is one option. I quite fancy the idea of somewhere that has a cash bar, so I don't have to think about that much.
So, unlike the posts up to now, I don't have an answer to this one yet. I suppose I should have anticipated the fact that even little nice not-for-profit bar venues in the town centre would be booked out a year in advance. But they are, or at least threaten to be. So I'm still looking.

Rings II

2007-11-06T19:30:00.001Z

Cool! People have started getting in touch about more ethical suppliers and places where you can find beautiful, quality items for weddings and all the shenanigans that go with them. So here is Polly Withecombe Jewellery, www.pollywithecombejewellery.com, with information about another source of ethical gold and some lovely rings. As Polly points out, there is still no proper labelling or certification that consumers can use with confidence to identify ethical gold or gems, so it's good to see that artisan manufacturers are looking hard for proper ethical approaches to this sector.

Fizz

2007-10-21T13:56:00.004+01:00

I'm blatantly cherry-picking here. Not what I write about, necessarily, but what I concentrate on planning for. And the things I'm planning for are the things I like and/or know stuff about, regardless of their place in the hierarchy of priorities.
Heaven knows I have nearly a year to sort this stuff out – so why am I think about the fizz first?
Well, it's probably to do with the fact that I like wine, and I've recently been discovering British wines. Also, I've just read Barbara Kingsolver's magnificent Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, the account of her family's efforts to spend a year eating only food produced within their county. No mean feat in a temperate zone when the family includes a pre-teen and a teenage girl, neither of them creatures known for their openness to new food experiences. So with the allotment and all that, I'm quite into my local food at the moment.
So my first thoughts on the fizz front were English wines. The climate of the south of England is beautifully suited to producing nice dry white sparkling wines, and there are quite a few from vineyards and producers such as Three Choirs (www.threechoirs.com), Ridgeview (www.ridgeview.co.uk) and organic pioneers Sedlescombe (www.englishorganicwine.co.uk). English fizz has topped some international sparkling wine tasting competitions, putting some noses out of joint in more established regions of France and Spain. And in terms of affordability there's a range of prices from around eight quid a bottle to twenty, or thereabouts. I've had some of the very lovely prizewinning Ridgeview Bloomsbury, but that was because it was in my Wine Society English taster case and it's a bit out of my price range really.
So on a press trip to the very, very wonderful Cream O'Galloway organic farm and ice cream producers in (No! Wait for it!) Galloway, I was very happy to be introduced to Cairn O'Mohr fruit wines, made by the sister and brother-in-law of Cream O'Galloway co-founder David Finlay. Now I associate fruit wines with being a bit thick and gloopy and sweet – maybe nice for the occasional warming drink but not much else. But Cairn O'Mhor's elder and oakleaf fizz is a very drinkable dryish sparkling wine, made with ingredients from the Perthshire countryside and ordered via www.cairnomohr.co.uk. Which I will be doing, several cases of, in some months' time.
Be warned, though – don't read Ron's blog on the Cairn O'Mhor website while eating biscuits. The rants about his neighbours and many of the other people he comes across in life may induce chokings and coughings that might impact on the likelihood of your being around to get married at all...

The Ring, pt 1

2007-10-20T17:56:00.004+01:00

Surprised as I was to find myself Quite Fancying the idea of getting married, I was even more surprised to find myself Quite Fancying the idea of having an engagement ring. I'm not really a big jewellery person, and the idea of wearing any item of bling that costs more than about 10p makes me nervous, in case I either lose it or someone else takes into their heads to relieve me of it.
Anyway, having decided I wanted one of these, I had to find one I liked. Overgrown Antipodean had very sensibly not done the down-on-one-knee-with-a-rock thing – I'm far too pernickety for buying me jewellery on spec to be a safe option.
Did I mention also that this wedding is happening on a serious budget? Estimates for the cost of the average UK wedding range from £12,000 - £20,000. Not so long ago you could buy a house in my neighbourhood for that. Certainly spending that on a single day, even a (hopefully!) once-in-a-lifetime one, seems kinda obscene. And anyway, OA and I would rather chew our ring fingers off than start getting in hock for this...
So a traditional diamond was probably never going to be an option. In addition to cost issues, I'm still highly sceptical about most diamonds. Many people will by now have heard of the issue of blood diamonds – those gems mined in conflict zones in Africa and then sold to fund further warfare. Most mainstream jewellers in the UK now sport claims that they are conflict-diamond-free and sell gems that are approved under the Kimberley Process (www.kimberleyprocess.com), an industry and international government initiative which was supposed to eliminate the danger that new diamonds would likely be tainted with the blood of millions of people caught up in a number of very dirty wars.
Despite the claims of big diamond merchants like De Beers (and most diamonds you come across anywhere in the world), the Kimberley Process is far from a guarantee that a diamond will come from a source that has not involved human and environmental exploitation. One example is the recent eviction from their traditional lands of a number of Kalahari Bushmen by the government of Botswana so that diamond mining could take place there. People who had lived as roaming hunters and gatherers for centuries were forced into 'resettlement camps' with high levels of violence, alcoholism and HIV, and made dependent on aid rations by being prevented from hunting and gathering food in their usual way. Not a bloody civil war, but a major infringement of human rights, and not covered by the Kimberley Process. For more detailed criticisms, see Global Witness' pages at www.globalwitness.org/pages/en/the_kimberley_process.html and information on the PR campaigns run by big diamond companies at www.spinwatch.org/content/view/3359/9/
The problems don't stop with diamonds. Many other gems are mined in similar ways and with similar ethical problems, although there are a small number of ethical gems projects which are being started up, although many are still in their infancy.
And gold is another big problem. Gold mining is often accompanies by terrific human rights abuses and environmental degradation. In Guatemala and Honduras, for example, anti-mine activists from environmental groups and indigenous peoples have been threatened in some cases murdered by gold companies from North America, and local people evicted so that precious metals on their land can be exploited. Similar tales come from countries as far apart as Indonesia and Guyana.
As well as human rights abuses, most modern gold mining is a hugely polluting affair. Movies and history books might have inculcated images of ragged prospectors panning rivers for gold, but the reality of most gold production now is very different. Tons and tons of rock are mined by heavy machinery, crushed, and mixed with highly toxic cyanide solutions in order to separate gold and silver from the stone. The gold – perhaps only a few ounces per ton of rock – is filtered out. This leaves gallons of toxic cyanide sludge, called tailings, which is stored in lakes called 'tailings ponds,' as there is pretty much no cost-effective way of processing it. At a number of mines around the world – from Guyana or Romania to the Philippines and Ghana - the dams that hold these ponds in have burst, causing massive pollution which kills fish, animals, plants and often people. For more information see www.minesandcommunities.org or www.nodirtygold.org.
Despite these tales of doom and gloom there is some hope for the ethical engagement ring seeker with a bit of cash to burn. The Green Gold project in Colombia provides a small source of artisanal gold (remember those gold-panning scenes? This is where it still happens) which is used by some jewellers, while others use recycled metal from second-hand jewellery. Second-hand gems might also be considered, and at least one British jeweller is looking into diamond sources in Canada. This whole issue will be re-explored when the time comes to try and find some ethical, affordable wedding rings, but until then possible sources of ethical new engagement rings are April Doubleday in Cornwall (www.aprildoubleday.com) or Cred in Chichester and at stockists around the UK (www.credjewellery.com). Both also do mail order. In the USA, www.greenkarat.com will remake old rings to your specifications and www.ethicalmetalsmiths.org will try and connect you up with ethical jewellers who can meet your requirements.
So what did I do? Well, having decided that I'd reserve my major ring-hunting efforts (and budget) for wedding rings, I just sort of kept an eye out in the windows of second-hand jewellers. I came across one or two possibilities that didn't quite hit the mark, until in a spot of serendipity, waiting for a late friend, I came across something in a small shop in the god-awful heap of South London concrete I grew up in. Three garnets in pinkish (ie nice cheap, impure 9-carat) gold, it was made in 1906 in Chester – the year my beloved house was built and not far from Sunny Manchester where that house is. Perfect. Of course it needed resizing, so it's currently in the possession of my mum. I hope she's keeping it safe...

The genesis of the Ethical Wedding

2007-10-20T16:23:00.001+01:00

I was never really one of those girls who was too fussed about getting married. I certainly never dreamed about big white dresses - I'm too short and untidy for that kind of thing; I'd just end up looking like a meringue that had been dragged through a hedge backwards. And my innate cynicism meant that I spent most of my teens and twenties making sweeping statements about marriage as An Institution of The Capitalist State. I may have been right.
So when Overgrown Antipodean, my boyfriend and cohabitee, popped the question in a way that was more romantic than I ever though he was capable of being, I had to start thinking quickly. When you get engaged, EVERYONE wants to know what you're planning, and 'Ummmm.... it seems like quite a long way away...???' doesn't seem to be an acceptable answer.
And then of course there's the fact that I've spent most of my professional life researching all the evil and unpleasant things that capitalism, corporations and consumerism have wrought on the world. If I'm going to have a really special day on my Big Day, then a chain hotel suite, rings of questionable origin, foodservice company meals, industrially-grown flowers and the tidal wave of overpriced tat, manufactured in China by underpaid and overworked ununionised labour, that an entire industry really wants to sell you are not getting a look-in. Not if I can help it.
This blog will, at least on current intentions, be the record of how I try to avoid all this, and still have what I hope will be a lovely wedding day, and hopefully a way of sharing ideas and horrors with other women trying to do it differently...