July 09Posted by Mikki Mon, July 20, 2009 10:42:29The weekend before last, we went to Tewkesbury Medieval Fair and now I want to get into medieval re-enactment because all the costumes are really cool. Plus there was plenty of roast pig and real ale, which always helps to make the day – and a brilliant substance known as Crabbies alcoholic ginger beer which I am happy to plug because it is a genius idea.
Unfortunately it seems to me that medieval peasants wore far too much linen (creases too much) and wool (itchy) even if they did have some very cool swords, glassware, drinking horns and other quaffing implements. Still I am sure that given today’s technology it’s entirely possible to re-create the look without the itchiness or the lice.
Happily there were no witch burnings. In fact I think that a fair percentage of the population was witchy so there would have been plenty of fuel for the fires, if rather a lot of protest.
And we have now definitely, completely finished the wedding planning as we’ve been down to Puckrup Hall to sample the things they’re going to put on the buffet and found that they are all very much to our taste. Especially the desserts. In fact it was all a lot nicer than I’d expected and I am now rather looking forward to it, although I fear we will be light on guests – I can’t believe the drop-out rate! And I have not heard from a single one of my siblings, which is deeply, deeply annoying. Oh well, I am sure it will be lovely after all.
Pleasingly the house wine was also up to scratch. Someone from work (who shall remain nameless) managed to put the wind up me by, when I mentioned where we were having the reception, looking at me pityingly and saying “Oh well perhaps the food’s improved”. Huh. She is not renowned for her tact and diplomacy and did not, surprisingly, actually mean to be offensive. And I am pleased to say that she was either very right (i.e. the food HAS improved) or completely wrong (i.e. there was never anything wrong with it in the first place).
And here is definitely the time to put a big plug in to the people (www.coffeecups.co.uk) who are supplying our wedding favours. They turned up in super quick time, are lovely, and the casualties that did not survive the tender attentions of Fed Ex were refunded promptly and without any fuss. Given the drop out rate from the reception we will have quite a lot of spares anyway so I certainly didn’t have any problem with half a dozen breakages…
July 09Posted by Mikki Mon, July 13, 2009 11:58:00Well – after whinging that I never got to see my fiancé because he had been kidnapped by work, I shall now be seeing a surfeit of him for some time to come, as he will be joining the ranks of the studenty. The weekend has been spent vacillating between buying a bike and buying a Jaguar in preparation for the start of term and the return of the company vehicle to his soon-to-be-ex employers.
It’s a big step, but a very exciting one. I was lucky in that I got to choose my career path and always enjoyed it (that’s a bit of a tragic admission, enjoying accountancy). Dray’s always worked hard and been successful, but has never really dreamed of being a logistics manager – it just sort of happened that way.
So now I guess is the time for him to take the plunge and try a career he’s always wanted to do! I feel really privileged that we can afford for him to take a year out and refocus on what he wants. We both spend too much time at work to be doing something that we hate, or that sucks up all our energy. And there has to be a payoff for all those years of saving and being careful. My principle is that if he can succeed in logistics which very much did not float his boat, how much more success is likely doing something that he actually enjoys? He could be the next Simon Cowell, only hopefully less smug.
Fantastically he only has to work until the shutdown starts, which is just around the corner, and then he is free as a bird for the whole summer. Well, I say free as a bird. He is as free as a bird that has to do loads of decorating and prepare a music room.
In other news we have now got our wedding favours although quite a lot of them arrived broken which is rather annoying. They are pretty cool! Can I just be the one to say that 120 champagne flutes take up much more room than I originally thought. We might have to find somewhere else to store them than the kitchen, especially since the cat keeps jumping on the boxes. However we might have over-catered somewhat since we haven’t had all that many RSVP’s so I wonder if anyone will be coming at all? Perhaps we should just have a super-lavish but very select party for the ones who DID bother to reply. Huh
June 09Posted by Mikki Thu, July 02, 2009 17:03:59It has been some time since I’ve blogged anything – for a start, now that the wedding panic is over, there’s nothing to blog – but also because we’ve somewhat been overtaken by real life (which sucks)
In recent weeks Dray has been working 80 hour weeks, thereby earning, in my reckoning, slightly less than he would do by getting a job in Tescos. So if we want to plan anything or discuss anything I more or less have to leave him a note. Now I know that the groom’s involvement traditionally ends the moment he gets up off one knee, and that he hands everything over to his willing bride who organises the whole lot from the picture she has carried in her head since the age of 16, pausing only to ask if there is anyone he would like to invite and can he transfer some money please.
But when it gets to the stage where you cannot even nail your husband-to-be for long enough to ask if the guest list is OK, and when he cannot even nip out of work for a few minutes to pick up ten dozen personalised champagne flutes, you can’t help but wonder if life has gone a little crazy.
Sometimes I think that all the people I have visited – the Hilton wedding co-ordinator, the registrar, the photographer, the company supplying the favours (etc etc) believe that it is a fantasy and there is no husband to be. Only the people supplying Dray’s suit (who must have seen him when he tried it on) and the cheese supplier (who gave him some cheesy samples) really believe that he exists. Sometimes I doubt it myself, although my lunch still gets made for me so there MUST be someone else on the premises and if it’s a burglar, it’s a very considerate one.
Surely there must be more to life than work? I don’t mind supporting Dray in his quest for bigger and better things in his career. But I do object to supporting his employer who is unable to sort out their own issues. They are asking the families of their employees to make up for their own shortcomings. That strikes me as a bit pants.
Now admittedly I did at one point have a job which asked a lot of the people around me, namely when I was travelling for 3 weeks out of 4. But at least there was no pretence up-front – in fact they asked me at the interview whether I thought that would be OK (which it would have been at the time, since I was single). But I have never had an employer who believed that work should be the primary relationship in my life and if I managed to squeeze in any others, then well done me – as long as they didn’t interfere with work. That’s the point at which things have gone a little crazy.
Ah well. Maybe we will win the lottery.
June 09Posted by Mikki Mon, June 22, 2009 14:58:13Why oh why does the cat have to be so stupid? They think they are clever and should be ruling the world, and then you find that they are so stupid that they forget to turn round in their litter box, instead opting to stick their arse out of the door and crap all over the kitchen floor instead. As if she does not cause enough mess by shedding hair.
I don’t understand this. The cat weighs 5 kilos and is a foot high at the shoulder. And yet she can, on a daily basis, cover 15 square metres of kitchen in hair to a depth of about an inch. This considering that you never even see her move off the top of the fridge. I suspect dark forces at work.
Either that or she has learned to shed hair voluntarily so that people don’t pick her up for a cuddle because they don’t want hair all over them. Now that WOULD be a clever trick.
In other news, I need to write a grovelling apology to everyone because our wedding invites were clearly one or two microns over the allotted 5mm thickness and so have fallen foul of the new Royal Mail pricing structure. Tut. Some people have kind and loving postmen who have refused to bow to their evil overlords and stiff the unsuspecting public for a quid a time in admin fees for the sake of 8p of underpaid postage. Others have been less lucky. Particularly I object to the sticker which says that the reason for the stupidly large admin fee is “revenue protection”. I wouldn’t mind if I could refuse to pay it on the grounds of “household income protection”.
I have now also got my wedding dress back and tried it on. Though it was not at its best after having spent several weeks in a cardboard box, it still looks alright to me and it certainly fits a lot better. Flashing my tits at the reception was never going to add to the atmosphere.
The nice man at the registry office has shown me the room in which we will marry. This was kind, but I don’t know what we were supposed to do if we’d taken one look and decided it wasn’t very nice. Nip in with a paintbrush, presumably, and give it a once-over with something less institutional. Perhaps more importantly, I now know where to park so that I don’t have to walk several miles through the Council Offices’ car park with a meringuey dress on, quite possibly in the rain at that.
Wedding favours are now on order from another nice man and we’ve ordered some extras to take to Canada with us. I was very impressed with the service – sent him a very very vague design and within about half an hour received a little virtual reality mock up along with an offer to chuck in some presentation boxes to make them easier to transport to Canada. AND a 3-week turnaround time unlike most things to do with weddings which seem to take months if not years. Brilliant.
Cheeses are now also booked and florists sponge has arrived to decorate them once they are stacked up like a cake. I still don’t quite know how one is supposed to make cheese look prettier but I am ready for the challenge. I think.
Menus are planned and tastings organised (it’s the wine that worries me) although we have yet to make the final decision on arrival nibbles. When I went into the hotel to discuss this, it was full of French people who were heading off on a vintage red double decker bus to some posh wedding somewhere. I am glad that there are hardly any French people coming to our wedding as they all looked thin and elegant and effortlessly glamorous. As I am none of these things (except, arguably, thin) I do not need to hang around with people who are.
Compare and contrast elegant French ladies with their English counterparts and you could weep for the lack of style in the country as a whole. Worcester for some reason seems to be overrun with teenage girls, most of whom are unable to choose clothes that suit their body shape or maintain anything other than the sort of posture that makes chiropractors simultaneously throw up their hands in despair and gleefully think of the money to be made when time takes its toll.
I know that noticing this makes me automatically old, but I don’t care. And I still maintain my theory that everyone who works designing clothing for teenage girls is really an embittered single thirtysomething who knows that the only way she will be able to compete with all the pretty young things is to make them look as ridiculous as possible. Although a fair few of the thritysomethings seem to join in too.
Perhaps I am no one to talk since most of my weekends are spent dressed in jeans and aged, saggy T shirts, and most of my weekdays are spent dressed in anything which doesn’t take too much ironing. And the hems have come down on a lot of them. And all of my time is spent dressed in something that you can wear with comfy shoes. French women would not even stoop to wear these things as gardening clothes. I don't know how they do it, though I wish I did.
Anyway I digress. The point I think is that we have now officially planned a wedding. Even if we do nothing more now than write cheques (and there will be plenty of that), the wedding will now take place with all allotted things. It has taken just a shade over 2 months. I am glad we did not have a long engagement as I would in that case have felt compelled to unorganise everything and reorganise it again.
I will refrain at this point from dropping into a rant about how stupid it is to chase perfection which is what we’d have been tempted to do if we had more time to fret about whether everything was perfect. I don’t mean by the way that we settled for “oh that’ll do, who cares anyway”. I mean that the pursuit for perfection is a sure-fire way to become discontent with what you have, and what we have is a wedding that should allow us to have plenty of time with the people we most care about, and hopefully allow them to have a good day.
June 09Posted by Mikki Tue, June 16, 2009 12:34:49On Saturday we visited what might very well be the coolest museum in England – the museum of mechanical music which is tucked away in a small picturesque Cotswolds village (Northleach). It is actually really the workshop of a chap who has been restoring mechanical music things for the past 49 years and who will happily give tours and demonstrations of the fruits of his labours. And frankly if I had spent however long it takes to insert 10,000 pins in to a cylinder for a music box, I’d want as many people as possible to see it, too.
The history of mechanical music is a lot more interesting than it sounds. It’s not just music boxes and wind up birds – they have huge 6ft tall machines with massive metal discs that are the precursor to jukeboxes and graced the corners of 1920’s cafés. There are reproducing pianos that play the works of the masters, recorded onto paper rolls, and barrel organs in varying degrees of loudness. The reproducing piano is an absolute marvel – not just a recording of some famous pianist but a recording that allows the piano to play itself as though he were sitting at it. It’s pretty neat, and I’m not even all that into music. Dray was in a happy place. I could listen to ghosts play the piano for hours, but I think if he had one of those he’d never leave the house.
We also went into a shop run by the person with the worst bargaining skills in all of England.
ME: Can I have one of those mobiles please, the one with the planets?
MAN IN SHOP: I’ll knock a fiver off the price for you
Not that I object, you understand, to anyone who wants to give me price reductions, but it seems a little unusual to offer a reduction to someone so obviously keen to part with their cash. I must make a mental note that if we see his CV in our Commercial department, we should just politely say no.
The point of all this levity was that if we went out on Saturday and did Fun Things we would be motivated to work on the house on Sunday. Unfortunately it didn’t quite work like that. For a start, task of the day was gardening. And for another thing it was lovely and sunny.
I didn’t realise quite how much I hate gardening. It’s just such a damn faff. I like nature. I don’t mind it growing all over the place, even though it doesn’t look great. It looks better than the bald scarred landscape that’s there now, mind you. Like the strimming – there are only a few square metres to do. The strimming itself took minutes. But to do the strimming you have to go through a lengthy faff that looks something like this:
1) Hunt strimmer out of garage. Realise it is out of fuel
2) Hunt out instruction book to tell you what oil/ petrol mix you need. Realise that this needs mixing
3) Hunt mixing bottle and 2-stroke oil out of garage. Realise that you have nothing to carry the fuel in and both cars are diesel anyway
4) Buy new jerry can, go to supermarket, buy petrol. Bugger about mixing fuel and filling tank. Try to start strimmer, realise that it does not start.
5) Take apart strimmer, realise that there is only about a foot of line left on it
6) Hunt strimmer line out of garage, read through instructions on how to rethread it. Bugger about for some more minutes trying to put some line on the damn thing. Try to start it again, realise that it still does not start
7) Back to the instruction manual, eventually realise that the throttle line is unhooked. Fix it.
Then and only then can you start it for the 5 minutes needed to strim the front lawn. And then you can start the same faff all over again for the hedge cutters. This is why Dray did most of the gardening whilst I cleared out the garage so that at least we would be able to find the oil, screwdriver, jerry can, strimmer line and all sorts of other bits and pieces needed for the endeavour. I confined my gardening efforts to pegging down weed control fabric in the hope that, having killed things once, they would not have the temerity to grow back again.
Container gardens are the way forward.
June 09Posted by Mikki Fri, June 12, 2009 16:05:56How exciting – I’ve sent the invites! All of them – even the foreign ones where I cocked up the postage and have had to put 400 stamps on each one. And my dress, altered by a lovely lady in Burbage, is in the hands of one of my friends who lives nearby and to whom I owe a pint for his courier services. Dray and my father are even as I upload, looking at morning suits, and hopefully even renting some. I have finalised Things with Karen The Wedding Co Ordinator, and arranged to take paperwork to the registry office.
I’m starting to think that maybe it’s all coming together. As they say in the A Team – I love it when a plan comes together.
Unfortunately work is still rather crazy, to the extent that I have had to send Dray an e-mail meeting request inviting him to the kick off meeting for the Hache Inc/ Hammersley Ltd merger talks. Perhaps I should have put a detailed agenda on there as well. It’s amazing how time creeps on without us really noticing it – we made great progress in the first couple of weeks, and then went on holiday and promptly did bugger all for the week leading up to it, the week we were away and since we got back. I guess going on holiday really DOES take your mind off things.
There was a slight hitch last weekend when I logged on to our wedding list site to add in the all-important potato ricer and pineapple slicer, only to discover that the site had disappeared completely and no news of what had happened to it. Visions of insolvency and general hassle floated before my eyes, though it wouldn’t have been all that bad really as they just hold a wishlist, not take any money off anyone. Happily I had asked Rachel to be the giftlist co-ordinator and in a move little short of genius, she had taken a copy of it including all the links and everything. Rachel is basically brilliant. A hero if you will. She suffers chronic illness and is often in a lot of pain which severely limits what she can do – and yet is still more organised and with-it than I am. If only there were a cure she would be president, I am sure of it.
We (well Dray actually) have also found a lovely poem for the registry office. This is the German version – the million dollar question is, should I ask my dad to read it out in German or shall I be kind and give him a translation????
Was es ist
Es ist Unsinn
sagt die Vernunft
Es ist was es ist
sagt die Liebe
Es ist Unglück
sagt die Berechnung
Es ist nichts als Schmerz
sagt die Angst
Es ist aussichtslos
sagt die Einsicht
Es ist was es ist
sagt die Liebe
Es ist lächerlich
sagt der Stolz
Es ist leichtsinnig
sagt die Vorsicht
Es ist unmöglich
sagt die Erfahrung
Es ist was es ist
sagt die Liebe
June 09Posted by Mikki Fri, June 05, 2009 13:45:09So… back from the joys of holiday to the monotonous pants of work. I am not sure I am in favour, but it does at least pay the bills
Thailand is basically a nice place, even though many authorities (including the guide book) agree that Pattaya would be better for an amount of bulldozing. One of Dray’s friends asked if we were going to “an unspoiled bit” but since, by definition, an unspoiled bit is a bit with no tourists in it, the answer was almost certainly going to be no.
We flew over with Jet Airways which is an Indian airline and, I can honestly say, one of the weirdest airlines I’ve flown with. Initial impressions are great. The online check-in is great. The bag drop is great. The luggage allowances are great. You get on the plane and the seats are big and comfortable and generally great. And then the in-flight “service” starts and it all goes to pot. It’s as though they had recruited a bunch of people who had never flown before, but were hanging round the front of Mumbai airport looking shifty – and then hadn’t bothered to train them in anything whatsoever. The lady on the outward flight took half an hour to serve meals to 4 rows of seats. If she couldn’t find the one she was after, she would stop everything, call the back of the cabin, wait for the meal, serve it, then start on the drinks for that person… repeat ad nauseum. It didn’t seem to have occurred to her to carry on serving anything or anyone else whilst she was waiting. The guy next to us asked her for a vodka and tomato juice and a mineral water. First she gave him a glass containing a bit of all three. Then she gave him a vodka and mineral water and a tomato juice. Then we explained it again “No… one glass containing tomato juice and vodka and a second glass containing water”. “Oh”, she said, clearly relieved to have had this pointed out to her, “I thought it was a new kind of cocktail”.
Tut. It was just as well that the service was entertaining, as the TV’s in the back of the seats didn’t work so we really needed something to watch.
The hotel was also nice, if overrun with small lizards and Russians. I am starting to think that our holidays are being haunted by Russians but that is because the last time we took a break it was to Sharm el Sheikh which is well beloved of Russians for reasons I can’t entirely fathom, although like Pattaya it is cheap, sunny and garish so perhaps that’s it. I was going to say that the food in the two places is nothing at all similar, although you can get a decent plate of Borscht in both so perhaps I am wrong. We didn’t bother with the Borscht though, preferring to opt for street vendors and freaky snacks from the corner shop. Dray’s particular favourite was an ice lolly that was coconut flavoured on the outside, and green bean flavoured in the middle. Mine was purple in the middle so maybe it was beetroot or something (or borscht, to cater for the Russians)
We also decided to treat ourselves to the seafood extravaganza at one of the restaurants in town. Happily we plumped for the meal for one, with a small side curry, as it was somewhat larger than the typical haul of a Spanish fishing fleet. Bloody nice though. IN fact we started out asking for recommendations for restaurants and then coming to realise that it didn’t matter really as it was all going to be fantastic wherever you went. The only downside of Thai cuisine is that they don’t do cheese, which is akin to torture after a week and I would have been importing it if I lived there.
The other typical Thai experience that you cannot avoid is the Thai massage. Anywhere you go you will be regaled with cries of “Massaaaaa” from beautiful lithe Thai girls. Dray was quite excited by the prospect initially so we finally succumbed, only for him to be led to his cubicle by a ladyboy. Hahahahahahahaha. Who, instead of stroking lovingly and relaxingly at his sunburned flesh, pummelled, bruised and stretched him until he begged for mercy (well almost). I got the lovely Thai lady, though that wasn’t what I thought of her as she tried to press her fingers through my spine into my kidneys.
We also decided to go out to the Tiger Zoo which initially we thought was some kind of loving caring tiger sanctuary (and anyway we were tempted by the advertising that said “see beautiful lady covered in scorpions!” “See pig feeding tiger!” .Sadly it seemed to be some kind of tiger battery farm with lots of tiger cubs looking very unhappy (if very cute) and not a lot of reassurance that they would grow up to lead happy, fulfilled lives in a jungle (or wherever it is that tigers live). In fact the tiger show was kind of worrying – tigers jumping through fiery hoops and that manner of thing. Dray wanted to heckle by shouting “Siegfried and Roy” very loudly but I was not sure whether Thai tigers would know about them.
It’s not that I think that caged animals automatically must be suffering – though I appreciate that they don’t make a rational decision based on the availability of free food and infant mortality rates – but that I know perfectly well how amenable house cats are to the suggestion of training and I can’t therefore think that you get tigers to jump through fire by being kind and loving to them.
Having said that, the Scorpion Queen was brilliant. Just genius. When we went in to the spooky scorpion cave, she was nowhere to be seen and we did at first wonder whether she had been carried off by scorpions to be crowned in their underground lair. But actually she was just having a cigarette break in a comfy chair (still with scorpions attached). On sighting punters, she leaped from her chair, went over to the place where she is supposed to reside as Scorpion Queen, smiled whilst we took the obligatory photo and slunk back off to her chair for a rest. The scorpions remained unmoved by the experience, in fact we are really only taking her word for it that they were scorpions and not, for example, sticky raisins or something. I think she takes off the whole scorpion infested t-shirt in the evenings and pops it back on whole the next morning. I only wonder how she puts it through the washing machine.
May 09Posted by Mikki Thu, May 21, 2009 09:39:43I suppose we could have known it really. Despite the tender attentions of a good twenty metres of gaffer tape and a packet of tent pegs, the plastic “greenhouse” once more strewed itself across the garden on Sunday, much to my annoyance as I had a hangover and could not, therefore, be arsed to go and pick it all up. I have still not managed to break it down enough to bin it, which is even more irritating – it’s too flimsy to stay up if there is a high wind, but too robust to allow me to stamp on all the bits and bin them. Dammit.
Thus is my flirtation with gardening over for the year, and weed control fabric with a layer of cardboard underneath it is now stapled firmly across the back lawn in the hope that this will at the very least kill the grass. Soon we will also have to do something about the front, too, as it is a constant source of wonder to me that the postman can still get up the front path to deliver any mail. Obviously they breed ‘em hardy in Worcestershire.
So:
The cat dug up most of the garlic and slept on the rest of it (and it was a bit of a half-arsed effort anyway representing, as it did, some stuff that was merrily growing by itself on the back of the cellar door)
The aubergines blew over with the greenhouse in the first breeze and the tomatoes in the second (although I suspect they were dead anyway because I forgot to water them as soon as they were gone from the kitchen windowsill)
The potatoes are going strong at the moment but I suspect they will be short on actual potatoes because I kept forgetting to top up the soil in the bag, and I haven’t fed them for yonks.
The Amazing Collapsing Greenhouse squashed the rhubarb.
This never happened in the Good life.
Anyway, in other news I have finally, after much soul searching and no small amount of faffing about, ordered the wedding invites and printed all the inserts for them. It was at this point that I realised there was a massive instruction list for any hapless guests who might be foolish enough to think that this is some kind of informal affair. In fact it has turned into some kind of military operation with all the manoeuvres printed on posh paper in a nice font. And woe betide anyone who messes with any of the plans.
It is clear that I have been affected more deeply than I thought by all the detailed questions sent by the registry office, invitation designers, hotel, seamstress and gawd knows who else and turned it into two pages of FAQ’s on all you could wish to know except whether or not to wear a hat. That at least is down to individual choice.
Sometimes it strikes me that weddings are a lot like American fast food. They all start with a version of “when you have it your way it just tastes better” (or in wedding terms, it’s the most important day of your left and you should have what you want). You, the customer, quickly realise however that what you really have is a lot of useless choice about things you don’t really know or care about, whilst being sold something slightly disappointing from a menu – quite a short menu of things that you weren’t sure you really wanted in the first place.
There is such huge pressure on you to buy things you neither want nor need with the transparent excuse that this will help to make your day special and you are somehow letting down either yourself or your guests if you don’t do it. There is also the equally pathetic excuse that you will only get one shot at this and it’s important to get it right. Now in my book, if you’re only going to do something once, the important thing is to decide what must be right, what would be nice if it were right, and what therefore is left over for everything else – and not take anyone else’s word for it.
But it seems that the Evil Wedding Industry tries its best to steer you away from making your own priority list, and tries instead to convince you that they, being infinitely more experienced in weddings than you, have the list down already and lo and behold, whatever they are selling at the time is right up there at the top of it.
There is an unspoken reproach that we’re making things deliberately difficult by not having bridesmaids, a best man, a wedding car, wedding colours at the reception, chair covers, flowers, a proper cake, a church ceremony or at least some sort of “proper” (for which read “expensive”) civil ceremony or (strangely, but mentioned by a number of people) posh wedding shoes. How, they all cry, is anyone to sell us things to co-ordinate with all the other things, if we persist in not having all the other things?
Well the answer is simple – as far as possible we are going with suppliers whose main business is not weddings. This proves a little difficult when it comes to subjects like wedding dresses although even there I managed to find someone whose actual business was selling to wedding dress shops rather than to the public – but I am here to tell you it works great for cakes (ask a cheese wholesaler) and wedding favours (ask a merchandising company)
Of course the danger with the Evil Wedding Industry telling you that you need all this Stuff to make your day perfect, you start to believe that the reverse logic must be true, viz: Perfect Stuff equals Perfect Day therefore Stuff going wrong equals ruined day. This strikes me as even more stupid, unfair and emotionally blackmailing but it’s really just fallout from selling you their priority list instead of helping you develop your own.
You are on a bit of a loser really, since you can guarantee that most things that are not on your priority list will be on someone’s, somewhere down the line, and they will do their absolute utmost to convince you that if you don’t take their advice your whole day will be ruined and you will never get a chance to go back and do it again. More than once I’ve found myself suckered down this path only to go away afterwards and thing “hang on… but I don’t really care… where did this come from?!”
I find it very hard to go back to people and say “yeah, I know you’re trying to sell us this, and I know I was all enthusiastic about it a couple of days ago but I’ve reconsidered and I don’t want it now”. Even harder when some of the enthusiastic salespeople are friends and family who are not selling a product, but selling their own dreams, hopes and feelings about what the day will be like. Obviously I am too English and need to drop into German mode for a while. Practice in front of a mirror: “Nein!”
If most prospective brides and grooms feel like this about their wedding day (and a straw poll in the office indicates that they do), why are we still perpetuating this? Rise up and cast off your shackles, I say. You have nothing to lose but the Evil Wedding Industry.
