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.

Manchester Evening News tips for an ethical wedding

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

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...

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...