(un)Ethical flowers

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

Cake

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!

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

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

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

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

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.