Wedding II

We set off from London on the Thursday before the wedding with more things than I thought possible packed into M's Dad's car, including but not limited to boxes and boxes of crockery, wine, a picnic hamper and a barbecue to take on our honeymoon. M and I spent our last night together as single people crammed into the bottom bunk of a tiny bunk bed set at the cottages his parents had rented for the weekend.

And then it was the day before the wedding. We drove together to the wedding reception venue to meet the marquee men who were supposed to be erecting the marquee. Only there was no-one there. The place looked beautiful in the misty rain, but not exactly what we had been hoping for.

As we waited for the boys from the marquee company my flowers arrived. Sadly I did not have a camera to hand so I never got an image of the 100 white peonies all lying together in a box. We decanted them into a large bin of water, where they smelt gorgeous and I opened the first of many cards and presents we were handed that day: a photograph showing me at the first wedding I attended {my aunt and godmother's} and a beautiful calligraphy print featuring some of the words from the reading she would be doing during the service the next day.

Eventually the marquee boys arrived and after some hitches involving problems which would have been solved by carrying out a site visit {eventually we realised that the marquee was never going to look like our quoted plan and so accepted an on-the-spot solution which although didn't ruin the day, wasn't quite what we had in mind} and some more involving vans and mud and then tractors, the marquees went up. Despite these issues and the fact our schedule was now 2 hours out, we managed to keep calm and did what all British people do in times of strife and rain: made cups of tea.

It was then off to the supermarket to purchase all the soft drinks and beer for the reception; a supermarket sweep style race round the nearest Sainsbury's {being on a boycott of Tesco since the hen party fiasco} which we drove back to the reception venue and loaded into the marquee just in time for afternoon tea with all of our combined families, hosted by my grandparents. If it sounds like a mad rush, it really was. We had to be at the chapel for a rehearsal at 5pm and had hoped to get much of the table set up done before the rehearsal.

Yet at 4pm, the marquee had only just finished going up and the tables and chairs were still in stacks on the floor, dirty. Unwilling to forfeit the family get together/tea party we opted to leave the sorting out and we all piled upstairs into the holiday cottages to drink tea and eat 'granny sponge' and, for the grannies and grandpas, meet for the very first time.

{All images by Alex, my sister's boyfriend}