Our church is very green...

Some of the reasons why our recent family wedding was a bit complicated.

1. The bride lives in London while the wedding is in Edinburgh. The bridesmaids live in 1) London 2) Cambridge 3) Edinburgh.

2. The bride didn’t like any dress available in Edinburgh or London so one was made by a dressmaker in Edinburgh. (Let me remind you that the bride lives in London.) It’s not that she’s difficult, but she wanted a non-strapless, non-plunging dress, which doesn’t seem to exist in shops.

3. One of the bridesmaids, Daughter 1, was pregnant for most of the lead-up to the wedding so her dress had to be made, shortly before the wedding, in material to match, as far as possible, the other bridesmaids’ dresses.

4. The groom, an actor, was in Edinburgh for much of the previous month, busy doing improvised musicals, so therefore nowhere near the bride.

5. The bride works in a 3-person architecture practice, one of whom (the boss) is hardly ever in the office. She therefore single-handedly designed a restaurant which opened the week of the wedding and also a shoe museum. Thus she was in the office till 9 o’clock most evenings.

6. She was nonetheless a perfectionist regarding to the artistic details of the wedding stationery.

7. She therefore designed the invitations, drawing (on the computer, using a special architect’s program for drawing things) a leaf pattern to be used (with elegant variations) on every single related piece of paper: thank-you letters, place cards, menus, table plan… all of which had to be printed out. In aqua ink. On our computers. On special paper. Mainly in the day or two before the wedding. With the assistance of cats.

8. This included having badges with fun facts about everyone pinned to the back of the place cards (which each, of course, had the person’s photo on them, culled from various sources.) This, for 100+ people, requires a lot of organisation.

9. As for Daughter 1’s wedding, I arranged the flowers in the church and for the reception. This had to be done on the evening before. The church is a fourteen-mile round trip from our house. I just had to pray that they didn’t collapse overnight. (They didn’t. Above, flowers in the font. Below, flowers on a stand.)

10. As for Daughter 1’s wedding, Daughter 2 and best-friend-bridesmaid made the bouquets on the morning of the wedding. This was all quite fun but really quite messy.

11. They also decorated the cake on the morning of the wedding. I think some girls visit the beautician on such an occasion. Ours dealt with rose thorns and discussed the exact shades of ribbons for the cake.

12. There were quite a few people around the place, all needing to be fed. Which was nice. But also quite time-consuming. Which is why I couldn’t go to the church to arrange the flowers till the customers had all dispersed. Flower arranging started at 9.30 pm.

13. I’m sure I could think of some other little facts – the time that Mr Life and I spent picking some of the pink bits out of the table confetti because the proportion of pink and aqua wasn’t quite right comes to mind, for example – but I expect you’ve heard enough about the wedding for now. I’ll show more pictures once you’ve recovered from this post. If you're very lucky.


(Photos by my big brother. Thank you, bro. I didn't actually take any pictures of the flowers.)