Pea Shooters and Curtain Material: The 'Perfect' Wedding

Today is our 15th Anniversary.  In many ways this has flown by and I can remember July 25th 1998 like it was yesterday! But on the other hand, so much has happened in those years and we have both grown and changed so much as well.  We are completely different people really. The pictures show what people around us saw at the time, but I didn't: we were SO young! But here we are 15 years later, still happy, still married, still in love.

At the time I had just graduated from University, literally a few days before the wedding, in fact. I was about to go on for one more year of study; teacher training. Andrew had worked for 2 years. During the time that I was doing my final exams, we were completing the wedding details and also buying our first house. So for the actual wedding, we had no big savings account or massive budget.

In Ireland today, despite the recession, the austerity measures and all the accompanying woes and misery, the average cost of a wedding has actually risen! This is according to a 2012 article I read, which puts the number at 21000-ish Euro. Twenty One Grand? Wow!  The 3 biggest costs are generally the venue, the honeymoon and the wedding party's clothes, at over 6 grand, over 3 grand and over 2 grand respectively. Not unrelated to this is the fact that the average age to get married in Ireland at the moment is in fact 33, a full ten years older than Andrew was at our wedding. This may account for some of these figures - I guess you can do a lot of saving in those extra years! I should say at this point, that I would absolutely not criticise how anyone chose to spend their money or what they wanted their dream day to include. It's a day people plan for so long and it is a unique occasion for every couple. 

Over twenty thousand Euro though, that is a LOT of money. Having said that, if you go on to Pinterest and do a search for Weddings, there are an unbelievable amount of ways to get through 21 grand and more, easily! Embellished Vintage Heels anyone? Or a Rustic Distressed Chalkboard Sign for $100 telling people to grab a drink while they wait for the couple? Personalised Wine Sets as the Wedding Favours? This is just the tiniest glimpse of the multitude of ideas on Pinterest - google Pinterest Weddings when you have some time to spare, like 5 hours.

Many of the ideas are actually very cute and some of them are cost saving ones also.  But they are often hugely elaborate as well: ideas for cute photos with your bridesmaids (of which there generally seem to be at least 6 in the pictures) before the wedding, customising the bridal shower, super creative and unique invitations. Of course, none of these things are necessarily silly or bad!  And some of them are brilliant and very fun ideas. But the pressure to have this perfect day and capture all these perfect moments, with perfect hair, just seems immense.  If I was a bride-to-be now, I think I would find Pinterest overwhelming and very intimidating. 

In our case, we didn't have a bean. We hadn't been living together yet and any money we did have was going towards the house really. I don't remember exactly what it all cost and who paid what, but I do know we cut a few corners and spent as little as possible.

So, the dress and the suit: The best man wore his own suit. Andy got a suit from M and S. We got my sister's bridesmaid dress on sale in Debenhams, for about 20 pounds, if memory serves and I guess she wore her own shoes.

I was in Germany for the third year of my degree when I got engaged. At the end of the summer term, my parents picked me up and we drove to Switzerland to visit a friend. I hadn't yet really thought much about the logistics or cost of getting a dress, apart from the usual daydreaming and sketching that every woman, if she is being honest, will tell you she has done since she was 6. I was chatting to our hostess and she told me she had bought material for curtains in Thailand, but it hadn't turned out to be right for the purpose. Perhaps I would like to have the material for my wedding dress?

Um, curtain material for my wedding dress? I stayed polite and said that was very kind and I would love to see it. Well, she appeared with a roll of cream raw silk and just gave me the whole lot. It was stunning! Once I was back in England for my final year, I found a dressmaker, drew her a basic sketch and the whole thing was done for 200 pounds sterling. Mind you, I did have to argue with the dressmaker, who wanted me to wear a hoop and who wasn't at all pleased when I had her take out a whole layer of petticoats.  She might have been happier working for the dressmaker in My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding...

The car: Andrew's fiesta was the carriage for the day!  Not very glamorous, but completely fine!  Andrew's uncle was the photographer; he did a fantastic job. And the pictures were taken in his Grandma's beautiful garden.

The cake: my Mum made it!  And iced it, and decorated it with flowers, which we got alongside my bouquet on the Wedding Day. It looked amazing - and she loved doing it! Especially as she had been in a different country for most of the lead up, so this was a way for her to be a big part of the day in the end.

Our main costs were the venue, the food, the DJ and the flowers. One important cost was also the peashooters.  Yes, really. We had been to a few charity balls together and they always had these colourful tubes on the table and pint glasses full of small balls.  Andrew was eager to have these at our wedding, and they were loads of fun! It took some people a while to work out what they were for, but once they did, all hell broke lose! In the end my Dad had to stand up and get people to stop so the food could be served. Friends of my parents mentioned this to me the other week as a memory they have of the day, so it made an impression! Mind you, I don't think I've seen this on Pinterest...

It was a great day. Not a picture perfect, super glamorous, Pinterest worthy day perhaps, but a very very happy one! We were absolutely blessed with the weather, the service was lovely, the speeches were witty, the food was nice... And then: the honeymoon. Friends of my parents offered us their little cottage in Yorkshire, for free.  It was such a perfect gift from them and we had a wonderful week.

So I look back on a happy day. I don't think it could have been any happier, had we spent an extra 15 grand on it! And here we are 15 years later and ultimately it doesn't matter what car we drove or whether I really did have a dress made of curtain material - none of those things make for a happy marriage in the end. That comes through love, communication, trust and effort. And while we didn't have a massive wedding budget, so far, we've never been short of any of those assets.

How Many Times?

Came across this on Pinterest yesterday and, apart from the dubious use of the word 'awesome', I completely agree.  Except I think that '5th time' is quite a conservative number to choose!  50th?

I have a friend who absolutely cannot get her head around the fact that I reread books.  She very very rarely revisits a book she has read.  She tends not even to keep them - well, why would you?  She and her sisters give them to each other and then pass them on.  She is totally baffled by the idea that you would read a book again, once you already know what happens.

I can't fully understand why this is so odd to her.  I have never NOT reread!  All kids read their favourite books over and over again - usually they know them off by heart!  In fact my parents have a recording of me 'reading' the Christmas Story to my Dad when I was about 2 and a half.  It was my absolute favourite and I demanded it every night apparently.  Maybe that's where it started!

I find when I first read a new book, I fly through it - especially if it is gripping and the plot unfolds unexpectedly.  I expect I do read too quickly that first time around, just to find out what happens.  So re reading makes sense in that context and I go back and rediscover or notice new things the second time around.

The bit that my friend really finds odd is that I have several authors or books that I reread endlessly, probably annually if not more often.  These are the 3 authors I probably read most frequently: Brookmyre, Heyer and Rowling.

The 3 couldn't be more different really. Georgette Heyer writes historical fiction, mostly set in the Regency in London or Bath  Her plots don't tend to be terribly complex, but her use of language and her historical accuracy and detail are just spellbinding.  Her characters are also generally very likeable and I love sinking into her books.  These really are comfort reads and I know them so well!  When a new Arrow edition was released of them, I spotted several errors in one book and wrote to the publishers.  They sent me the corrected version and a load of free books too!  One reviewer wrote: 'I have read her books to ragged shreds' - I have too, as evidenced below.  Many of the books were my Mums, but most of them are now falling to bits, by sheer overuse. I feel as though you could set me down in Bath in 1815 and I would know exactly how to speak, dress, where to go etc. It's a wonderful world to fall into and my ultimate comfort read is These Old Shades.  

 Brookmyre on the other hand writes stinging Scottish satire - full of biting one liners, blood, gore and no-holds-barred language. Some of his books can be quite political - they are always funny, full of cliff hangers and quite outrageous. The thing he does actually have in common with Heyer is his characters.  He has been compared to Carl Hiassen in terms of his satirical writing, but I have always found Hiassen's characters to be slightly too bizarre to relate to or really root for. Brookmyre on the other hand paints portraits of people who are real, conflicted, flawed and loving. The best example of this comes in the first Brookmyre I read: A Big Boy Did It And Ran Away; the books starts with Simon Darcourt's contemptuous dismissal of all things suburban and middle class.  Reading this can make you feel a bit defensive and, well, suburban and middle class.  But as the book progresses, the character of Raymond Ash comes into it and his relationship with his family is warm and feels true and realistic.  Before this sounds too slushy, this is to the background of a terrorist plot to blow up a hydroelectric power station, foiled by 2 school boys, an English teacher and a female police officer.

Hilarious in places, biting in others and with a cute twist at the end. 

 Harry Potter  was the third series in that picture of books I reread often.  I genuinely do read all 7 HP books at least once a year.  I LOVE them. They are just so clever and satisfying in their construction.  I love the way insignificant events in book 2 come back to have huge repercussions in book 6, or the details of the magical world.  I remember reading each new book as it came out, almost worried that it wouldn't live up to the previous ones - but this was never the case.  Take away the magic, the spells, the broomsticks and you are left with a boy who wants a family and I find that JK Rowling never lets the setting of the books overpower the characters. So I am always happy to return to the world of Hogwarts and never find the stories getting old.  In the words of alan Rickman: "When I’m 80 years old and sitting in my rocking chair, I’ll be reading Harry Potter. And my family will say to me, 'After all this time?' And I will say, 'Always.'" If he's not sick of it, after starring in all 7 films then clearly I have barely scraped the surface of my potential enjoyment of it...

A new contender for rereading is the Hunger Games Trilogy.  Very compelling, quite dark and violent, but powerful.  Another 'different world',which reminded me of Nazism, North Korea and Rome all at once.  Sounds very gloomy, but, again, it's the characters that add the warmth.


The final group of books I would add to thisis Steig Larsson's Trilogy, The Girl With...   Those books blew me away and I love the fact that one was a thriller, one was more of a detective novel and the third was a spy novel. Yet all with the same characters and the unfolding story of Lisbeth Salander. Brilliant...


In writing this it seems as though it's not so much revisiting the plots as meeting with favourite characters that pulls me into these books time and again. I don't see why I would ever stop wanting to come back to them over the years ahead. 
If you haven't read these books: do!  And then read them again.