Cerys and I were married in a small ceremony at Winchester Register Office yesterday, followed by lunch at the excellent Water Margin restaurant in North Baddesley.
Weddings are quite stressful, especially if you’re one of the two main participants and you’re organising the whole thing between you. Getting married in secret away from home and telling everyone afterwards is definitely a good plan. We decided not to do that, because it would have annoyed my family; and I guessed that the resultant hassle would be more than the hassle of organising a wedding. I’m less sure of that now.
Here is what I have learnt; what we got spot-on and what we could have done better; perhaps it’s useful to you if you are embarking on a similar venture.
Clothes
Make sure you can move freely, that you won’t get too warm, and that you have your entire outfit from skin to air sorted out well in advance. Remember to pick colours that make you look good. Don’t wear black if you have light skin or white if you have dark skin: either will makes you effectively impossible to photograph well. Our main clothing-related challenge was keeping the cat hair off our outfits.
Rings
Make sure they both fit, and that they’re of sensible materials. The bride’s ring should be a plain band of the same stuff as her engagement ring, so that she can wear both without either damaging the other; it’s nice to try and match the widths of the two rings as well.
The groom’s ring is trickier as there are more choices to be made, and also because the groom is probably not used to wearing rings. I bought a Titanium ring to practice with, which was a good idea as it is a weird feeling the first few days and you don’t want to be fiddling with your hands all the rest of the day. This experience also allows me to tell you that Titanium or anything similarly soft is a poor choice of material as my practice ring is a world of scratches. My real ring is made of Tungsten Carbide, which is safe from being scratched by anything I’m likely to come in contact with.
Event
Think about the weddings you’ve been to and make sure yours has just the bits you like; and of course the legal requisites. We chose to have the ceremony in the Register Office to get the legal bits out of the way and then take everyone for a meal at our favourite restaurant. Neither of us enjoy discos, DJs, buffets, drunkenness, and so forth, so we skipped all that kind of stuff.
Guests
We had limited resources, as I suppose everyone does, which in our case meant having more friends we wanted to invite than we could afford to entertain. I’d certainly rather it was that way around than the other: however, it does mean you have to pick some and leave others. We were limited by our budget and plan to having only 30 guests, which is not very many for two lots of family and two (mostly) disjoint circles of friends; especially considering that most of those friends have partners. Even inviting only close family (direct ancestors and siblings) took us down to 21 guests. We had some friends we felt we couldn’t get married without, the ones we wanted as witnesses, and that left space for just 9 more couples. It’s heartbreakingly difficult to pick which friends to select and which to disappoint; if you know a better way than names in a hat please comment below.
Honeymoon
We got the honeymoon sorted out well in advance, which is a good thing as trying to organise anything else as well as a wedding would be a nightmare. I think we did well to choose a packaged thing where everything is going to be taken care of for us. We’ve got to pack and be ready for the taxi to the airport and that’s it. It should be nice and relaxing.
Photographs
We chose not to have a photographer at our wedding, as we didn’t particularly want someone ordering us and our guests around and generally getting in the way. However, we did want photographs of us in our finery, so we went to a professional’s studio before the ceremony. I think this was a good idea in general, but it probably would have been better to do it on a day other than the day of the ceremony.
Presents
Wedding list services are great if you need a lot of household stuff. We don’t right now, so we asked for John Lewis vouchers against the day we do. The other advantage of vouchers is that your guests can choose how much to give you with finer granularity than they would otherwise have. Some of our guests gave us Queen Elizabeth II vouchers instead, which are always welcome. I think this bit worked well.
Overall
I think our wedding day went very well; none of the things we feared might go wrong in fact went wrong, the restaurant took fabulously good care of us, and a good time was had by all. Thanks to all who attended, and my apologies to those of you we couldn’t invite.
