Backdoor weddings

We went to a backdoor wedding recently. No, wait, I don't mean that. I mean a backyard wedding. But that name has sort of stuck for me. When chatting to a British friend, she tongue twisted it into a backdoor wedding, because frankly it's not the sort of phrase Brits get to say very often. First of all we don't have backyards, we have gardens. But more to the point, we don't get married in our backyards or gardens or indeed anywhere other than a place licensed according to the Marriage and Civil Partnerships Regulations.

The Brits are missing out, because a backyard wedding is a lovely thing. Informal, intimate, purely focussed on the two people and their vows, surrounded by friends and family - oh, and maybe a Dudeist priest. TLOML is ordained by the Church of the Big Lebowski and in that capacity can conduct legally binding wedding ceremonies. For real.

It wouldn't happen in England, that's for sure. There, only a minister or a proper, registered registrar can marry a couple.

One of the many lovely things about this backyard wedding was how relaxed it was. We hung out, drinking wine and chatting, until the couple were ready to say their vows, at which point we gathered to watch them exchange vows under a charming chuppah on the lawn.

That also wouldn't happen in England. First of all, there'd be no alcohol in sight. No alcohol or food may be consumed in the room where the ceremony is to take place, for an hour before the ceremony. Not sure if they are afraid of people getting wed without their senses about them, or just crumbs spoiling the vibe or what.

You also can't get married outside, as you need to be wed within a permanent structure. My BFF got married under a cool little gazebo, with guests sitting outside, which was a creative and charming solution. But gazebos that have been recognized by the Home Office are few and far between. And so, as a result, are backyard weddings.

Which is a shame. It was no St George's Chapel, but this backyard ceremony was truly one of the loveliest, most heartfelt and honest weddings I've ever been to. 

Transatlantic Wedding Traditions

I've done these posts in the wrong order I know. But before the Olympics, and before the honeymoon, there was, of course, the wedding. In a true reflection of our union, we aimed to marry the best of American and British wedding traditions.

Holding up the American end was an army of 'groomsmen'. Or ushers, as I and my British crew insisted on calling them. As these pics from Style Me Pretty demonstrate, American weddings tend to feature large wedding parties.

Love the weird crouching poses on this shot

I promise, I picked these pictures at random and they are not unusual. I think in the States if you have fewer than 7 groomsmen, and a matching number of bridesmaids, you look like a bit of a loser. Presumably this is why in American weddings the groomsmen / bridesmaids have to buy their own outfits... Determined not to look like a loser, and blessed as he is with a surfeit of good mates, TLOML had about 25 6 ushers.

In another nod to a brilliant American wedding tradition, we did rehearsal drinks the night before the wedding. This is a genius idea and I think more weddings should include some night-before drinking. Yes, it almost doubles your catering bill, and the number of cute dresses your guests are obliged to wear. But the benefits are huge. It was soooo nice to be able to catch up with people before the wedding, and took lots of pressure off the day itself. On the wedding day no-one wants to bother you with chitchat, as they assume you are too busy tending to your guests/ being bridal. But at the rehearsal drinks everyone has time to chat, and you can hug them without worrying about smudging your full face of 'it'll-look-good-for-the-photos' make up on their best clobber.

And the English traditions? Well, first of all, I had an English number of attendants: 2 grown up ladies, and 2 flower girls. They didn't quite match the usher numbers so we couldn't play any team sports or walk in two-by-two. But they were plenty, in my opinion. We also served an excellent, traditional fruit wedding cake (courtesy of my very talented mother) - none of your fancy modern cupcakes or chocolate fountains for us - and a mountain of stilton.

We also dodged an American bullet by limiting our speeches. I understand it's not uncommon at US weddings to have an open mike policy on speeches. Whilst I'm sure that can bring to light some hilarious anecdotes and charming insights from guests, I hear it can also open the floodgates to a wave of 'We love you guys!', which I suspect gets tedious fast. So we kept our speeches tightly reined in by British etiquette: as they sipped their port (naturally), our guests enjoyed (we hope) brief and amusing speeches from the Father of the Bride, the Groom and the Best Man. 'Nuff said.

We included one other important British wedding tradition. It rained most of the day.

So all in all, I think we had the best of both worlds. And a jolly good time was had by all.

Wedmin - the final furlong

I've been a bit quiet on the blog front lately, and for those of you who miss my regular babblings, I apologise. I've been kept a little busy at BigCorp, which is clearly untenable.

Rather more pressingly, there's the wedmin. These past few weeks it has reached fever pitch. Multiple trying on of many pairs of shoes, various bras and hair clips. And that's just the bridesmaids... Last minute disputes with the organist over the appropriateness of our musical choices. A Red Leicester production issue causing a panicked selection of an alternative hard cheese - and we're still not sure we made the right choice. Phew! It's a mountain of absolute trivia, and it's all so pressingly urgent!

And then there's the seating plan. I'll spare you the details of the debate, but in summary one of us said 'My friends just want to hang out with their friends', and one of us said, 'The English are so insular'. No prizes for guessing who said what...

Being, as we are, two halves of one soul, obviously we resolved that debate fairly quickly. Still, the whole plan took hours to create. It's like a house of cards: move one person and the whole thing collapses. Once it was perfected, we revised and re-perfected it about a dozen more times. Then a couple of guests changed their plans so we revised it again. Finally, I spent a rainy Sunday evening laboriously writing out the place names in my best, albeit still barely legible, handwriting.

I realise I didn't make any of that sound like fun. But actually, it really has been. Planning a great big party with me and The Love of My Life at the centre: what's not to like? Even the chores associated with it keep me smiling.

With just a few days to go till we walk down the aisle, I think I can safely say all the wedmin is fully taken care of. I'd miss it, only I'm about to be kept busy in other ways...  The US contingent are already beginning to arrive and the whirlwind is about to begin.

Wedmin

Now the heaving lifting of our move is done - mainly by TLOML, of course - I can turn my attention to some pressing wedmin.

Like writing to the Westminster Abbey Faculty Office (address: 1, The Sanctuary. Nice isn't it?), and telling them that we did finally secure that bloody visa they asked us to get. After all the kerfuffle I'm tempted to sign off with an angry, scawled 'happy now?!'. But we need their okay to get married in our Alma Mater so we'll keep it polite.

And finding someone who can control my hair, without making me look like a lunatic. Like these crazies who specialise in making hair look like a basket.

Why?

And spending half an hour in VV Rouleaux selecting the perfect shade of yellow grosgrain for the sashes on my flower girls' dresses.

After a trying-on session at NARS I am dreaming of eyeshadow. Literally. Like, long, involved dreams in which many and various shades of eyeshadow are displayed and discussed.

Pure bobbins! Absolute frivolity! And a very welcome break from hassling Virgin Media for an installation date this side of Christmas.

Hopefully, the final chapter of the comic saga that is our visa application

The mountain of paperwork relating to our visa application grows, as the comedy of errors continues. I say it's a comedy because I assume it will have a happy ending. The calm tone of the nice visa official who told me 'You're just missing a couple of documents now' suggested that the end is, at least, in sight.

But first, we need to provide those documents. The 140pp of evidence was not enough. We omitted to provide a copy of the deeds to my parents' home (our official UK residence), and a notarized copy of my passport. Silly us.

I said to the nice visa official, 'I'm sorry we missed those out. To be honest we have struggled to find guidance on the evidence required'. With a sniff, he told me there is ample guidance on the Border Agency website. I looked again. There really isn't. They direct you to the application form, which is apparently packed full of very clear advice on what to provide. Hmm. Unless I'm missing something, this visa form is pretty devoid of guidance on the required evidence. When this is all over I might just write a strongly worded letter to someone in authority about this form.

Meanwhile, we need to get those documents in the post to the nice visa official in NYC. My dad got on the case of the deeds pretty quickly*, and I just had the small matter of providing a notarized copy of my passport.

The thing is, I'm in Rio, and I don't speak the language. Unless broken Spanish and the odd 'obrigada' count. Fortunately I have some very helpful colleagues with a little bit of time on their hands. They made several, inexplicably long phone calls, with much laughter and words like 'Inglesa'  being bandied about. Not sure what was so funny or why it took so long but I'm very grateful for their patience and good humour. We're actually here to work, not take care of my personal admin, you see.

Instead of spending our Friday morning 'shaping our thinking' in front of a whiteboard, we spent it securing the services of a notary. First, we had to get a 'sworn translation' of my passport. The Brazilian notary won't authenticate something not written in Portugese. Even if it is words like 'NAME/ NOM' and 'SEX/ SEXE'. Rules is rules I suppose.

A lovely rotund man named Riccardo translated my passport overnight, for £20, and threw in two calendars. He also provided a curbside service, coming out in his flipflops, shorts and wifebeater to hand me the translation as we waited in our cab. What's more, I got a free a language lesson: when I said 'Molto obrigada', he scolded me, 'Molto is Italian, here in Brazil we say 'moito'. Now that's good value.

Language lesson over, we headed to the notary office, where trade was pretty slow: three notary dudes stood waiting, dot matrix printers and carbon copy pads at the ready. Five minutes and £10 later I had a fuzzy black and white copy of my passport, notarized in Portugese.

New additions to the paper mountain: several pages of my panicky scrawl, the notes from my colleagues' many phone calls to find me a notary, a free calendar, and oh, yes, a couple of pages of bureaucratic necessities.

I think we are nearly there. Crossing everything that this works...

*Would have been quicker if I'd got the address right. I told him to post it to 84 Third Ave, NY NY, not 845. It's a small detail but that's exactly the kind of muppetry that has extended this process. Fortunately I'm too busy being cross with the Border Agency website to kick myself for minor errors.

Permission to wed

TLOML has just applied for his marriage visa. Johnny Foreigners need marriage visas if they are to be allowed to marry one of Her Majesty the Queen's loyal subjects. Quite right too.

 

The marriage visa form is about a hundred pages long and most of the umpteen questions they ask appear to be aimed at mail order spouses. 'Have you met your future spouse?' and 'How many times?' made us chuckle. TLOML's answer to 'Where is your future spouse at the present time?' was 'Looking over my shoulder.' Not sure we needed to be that specific, but it's the truth at least.

Questions like 'How many bedrooms does the house you are moving into have? How many other rooms? How people live there curently? How many people will you move in with?' abound too. I suppose that's how they spot the poor souls who want to squeeze nine relatives into a bedsit.

There isn't a box you can tick to say 'we're just two engaged people, and one of us happens to be a bit foreign'. I mean, we're not getting married for the visa. We're getting the visa so we can get married. So he filled in the forms and tried not to snigger as he did so.

A couple of days later the forms got returned. It seems the passport photo TLOML had enclosed was not up to scratch and we needed to send a different one.

TLOML was out of town so I was in charge of this simple job. Reprinting the photo meant operating his Mac, and changing our printer settings, and feeding photo paper in, which I know isn't that complicated but it was a bit beyond me. Then I had to buy a Money Order to pay the visa people for the extra postage costs they had to incur in returning the unprocessed visa form to us, which in itself meant googling 'what is a money order?' and then standing in line at the post office. Finally I had to FedEx the thing, which required me to print a FedEx label out, which kept printing out weird 'cos of the new photo settings, and then finding a FedEx envelope with an address label pouch on it, which again, is not that complicated but was just beyond my capabilities.

The whole operation took about half a day. And several increasingly tense calls to TLOML for guidance in printer settings, where the photo paper is kept, how the FedEx thing works etc etc. I must say, I don't know how anyone with a full time job and poor internet access can apply for the visa at all. Which presumably is part of the point. Pause to reflect... if I had to apply for a British visa for myself, would I meet the standard? I almost failed at the first hurdle, putting the damn form in the post.

Anyway, it's done now and our fate is in the hands of the good people at the British Consulate. Keep your fingers crossed TLOML gets the visa. For one thing, we've put a deposit down on the venue, and I'd hate to lose it. And since he truly is The Love of My Life I don't think I'll find another groom who's even half as good.

Meanwhile, TLOML has announced to me he would like to be a 'non dom'. Grr. (American readers - non-doms are evil Tory taxdodging jet set types, who avoid paying tax by claiming they are not 'domiciled' in England). In my (left wing, tax-loving) mind that's almost grounds for divorce. But I suppose that's a bit premature...

Did you get a shot of the men's socks?

...must be the concern of every bride and groom on their big day. Right? If not how do you explain the incredible proliferation of photos like these?

These images are pilfered from Style Me Pretty, a website full of galleries of weddings. It's meant to provide inspiration for brides, for everything from dresses and flowers, to cute ways to display table plans and escort cards, and ideas for themed photo booths and table settings.

I look at Style Me Pretty a lot. Which is kinda silly. I already have my dress, and I don't even know what an escort card is - though I'm pretty sure we won't have them. The theme of our wedding will be 'we're getting married', and the look is, um, 'seasonal'. But still, it's good surfing fodder. What can I say, I just like looking at pretty pictures, I guess.

In my daily forays into the land of Style Me Pretty, I have noticed a disturbing trend. Many many photos of men hoiking up their trousers to show off their socks. But why?

Shots like this one (below) have become popular, indeed, an essential part of the photo story of your big day. And I can sort of see why.

After all, you spent a lot of money on your amazing shoes, you love them to death, and yet they are hidden by your big white dress. So you get the photographer to take a photo, so in years to come you can look back and say 'weren't my wedding shoes lovely?'. Personally I don't think it'll be on my list of essential shots, but I do kinda understand it.

But the group ankle shots are just odd.

'Make sure you take a photo of us just from the knees down, won't you? We really need one of just all the beautiful/ quirky/ meaningful shoes all together!'

A foot tat makes for a lovely shot

The finalists from a butterface competition?

Oooh, our footwear is so zany, we're meant to be together!

Oooh, our footwear is so softly sophisticated, we're meant to be together!

It's even worse when the shoes are horrid

Ushers in Converse, so quirky!

These bridesmaids will surely treasure this memento of the day they had to clomp around in cowboy boots when everyone else was wearing strappy sandals - just because the bride and groom once had a nice weekend in Austin, Texas and like Willie Nelson.

'Scuse the pun but I think they have lost perspective.

So, Item #73: Select theme for shoes and socks' is yet another item ticked off the wedmin Things To Do list.

Wedding fever

It must be a sort of fever, that infects people's heads so as they just can't see straight. Otherwise how on earth do you explain the madness?

I'm talking about such craziness as hiring flamingos, which according to Harper's Nick Rhodes did for his wedding in 1984. Blur's Alex James seemingly had a Merrie Olde England theme for his wedding, complete with a performance from a troop of morris dancers. I'm sure his guests were delighted.

The pressure is really on at American weddings, where they seem to go all out. Or maybe I've just been spending too much time on Style Me Pretty? When I read phrases like 'our signature cocktail', 'add some pizzazz' or 'incorporating our love of cats, Vietnamese food and helicopters' I shudder. And yet I keep reading. It is oddly compelling. My advice, if you follow the link: ignore the blurb from wedmin-addled brides, gorge on the pictures for a strictly limited time (2 minutes is plenty), and then take a deep breath and step away from the computer.

Googling for examples for this post, I came across this lunatic's site which suggests a car park theme: 'the officiating judge could dress like a parking lot attendant'. I don't think they are kidding. And this photo of a Peter Pan and Tinkerbell themed wedding:

 And a Hello Kitty themed one:

I could go on...

Even if the theme itself is relatively sane, the very idea of having a theme at all is a bit odd. As a wise friend recently put it, surely the theme is 'we're getting married'? I think that's a big enough concept to carry the event.

At our wedding venue last week we heard of more madness. The Chief Organiser lady told us about a couple who paid a knight in shining armour - aka a dude in fancy dress on a horse - to be present throughout their wedding. Then, with the wry smile of a fellow themed-nuptial sceptic, she advised us that no, even if we asked really nicely, we could not release live butterflies. Apparently one couple really did want to open a container of butterflies as part of their wedding celebration.

Can you think of anything more hideous? Half a box of flying insects fluttering up into your hair and face - the other half left as carcasses on the bottom of the box. Yuck. The very thought of it makes me want to go pffff and do the flappy-handed wasp dance.

Essentially, planning to say yes is mainly about saying no. 'No' to the releasing of wild creatures, 'no' to the staging of elaborate tableaux, and, sorry to disappoint our prospective guests, but 'no' to the knight in shining armour. I have TLOML for that, after all.

Rampant consumerism

Tallinn should have been a shoestring budget break. It is a very inexpensive city. Entrance to BURLESQU, Estonia's only 'burlesque-style', is only a tenner. Don't ask me how I know. I suspect it's the cheapness, rather than the World Heritage site status, that makes it so popular with British stag parties.

Still, true to form, TLOML and I managed to unnecessarily spend a bit of cash. Me on a fabulous scarf with pompoms on it, which the seven year old girl in me could not deny.

And TLOML on a Soviet submarine clock. It's a 24 hour clock because they didn't know if it was day or night down there. We thought it was cool and therefore had to have it.

We avoided the darker depths of those funky old junk shops: it's a slippery slope once you start buying clocks with pictures of Stalin on... and the bottom of that slope is Nazi memorabilia.


Then we went to Oxford to do some light wedmin. And then we began to learn just how incredibly easy it is to make snap decisions which will cost us thousands, when we're talking about a party that's a year away.

'Drinks in this fabulous historic venue will only cost three times as much as that perfectly serviceable bar... shall we...?' 'Well, it is quite fabulous and historic... and after all it is our wedding' Boom! just like that two months' rent vanish into thin air.

'It's really not worth spending money on music, no-one will hear it on the lawns.' 'Unless we hire a 12 piece marching band and get them to parade around!' Boom! And we may get married barefoot so we can pay for the band.

So when we returned to NYC, we embarked on a thrift kick. We launched it by going to the Lobster Place in Chelsea Market to buy fish for dinner.

The Lobster Place is truly my favourite shop in all of Manhattan. They sell all the fresh, smoked and steamed fish and shellfish you could imagine. Including random stuff like that weird dried mullet roe, and little sachets of squid ink. So we felt we were models of restraint...

...but having gone in for a piece of mackerel, we emerged with a dozen little neck clams, a dozen oysters, squid salad, and seaweed. And just like that our simple fish supper became a four course fish extravaganza.

Note to self: saving for the wedding might be easier (less tempting) if we shop at Gristedes instead of Chelsea Market. There's something about madheads talking to themselves in the fresh produce aisle that reins in my desire to splurge on the food.

Wedmin

In a week of catching up I've been asked about wedmin, inevitably, a couple of times every day.

The good news for me and TLOML is that wedmin is being kept to an absolute minimum. The venue was so obvious it chose itself and took a couple of emails to book. We've decided to put off tackling the oversized guestllist for as long as possible (and since we're not getting married till July 2012 that's some way off).

The only other biggie, the kind of thing people can really get exercised about because apparently it takes months, is the wedding dress.

On that, I really got lucky. On a sunny Easter Sunday wander down the High Line into SoHo, TLOML and I saw an interesting looking vintage shop I mused that might be worth a second look one day when he wasn't around. 'Come on', he said, 'We're here, why not look now. And hey, that dress in the window's kind of cool, isn't it?'

So in we went. And that dress in the window was more than cool: it is glamourous, fits like a glove and was 20% off for one day only. Reader, I bought it.

My dress is the one that's missing. If you look closely you can see it in the blue plastic bag I'm holding in the reflection

One more thing to tick off in my bridal planner. Will have to get one first, but once I have, I will tick off 'buy dress'. Hurrah!

It's not like this...

...or this...

...or this.

The slightly lame thing about all of this is that pretty much my favourite thing about the dress is the story of the dress. How jolly fabulous to be able to say 'Oh, I just picked it up in a vintage shop in SoHo, you know...'. This smug feeling's going to last a long long time.