Well, we’ve seen the last of one of our two Best Men - Martin - until the day before the wedding now, which is a bit of a strange thing to realise as it makes the wedding seem much sooner than it is! He’s off back to America soon and his next plane back to the UK lands early in the morning on 2 September.

Yesterday went pretty smoothly, with he and Mark getting measured up in Burton, Bluewater, for their light grey suits. They weren’t used to people placing orders so far in advance but we explained about Martin so they understood :)

The unfashionable state of the colours we wanted, which I mentioned in my previous post, is in danger of defeating us. We’re starting to contemplate swapping the colours over, so the bridesmaids are in my-suit-purple blouses and the best men are in Edith’s-dress-blue shirts, but we’ll make our final decision on that this weekend, depending on what we find during our bridesmaids’ shopping trip in Aberdeen. We noted Mark and Martin’s shirt sizes (why are they given in neck circumferences? surely there have to be more important measurements, like chest girth or stomach bulge?), so we can just buy them whatever shirts necessary ourselves now.

So, who will end up in which colour? I’m sure you’re all on the edges of your computer seats, fingers poised over the Refresh buttons, just waiting for an update. It may not be a cliffhanger quite on the scale of Who Killed Mr. Burns?, but I’m sure I’ve seen worse on Neighbours, and I believe this dlog has a similar audience size to the current EastEnders one, so it’ll do for now.

There are so many suits involved in this wedding; how many more bad suit jokes can we make headings out of, I wonder.

Happy Easter, by the way.

On Saturday we took a trip to Essex - Billericay to be precise - to what we were informed has won a plethora of awards along the lines of Best Shop That Makes Suits And Stuff In The Country. This is a reassuring fact, because I intend to spend something in the middle of the three-figure range of pounds on a tailor-made suit from this shop. No ordinary suit will it be, either: it’s a lovely shade of purple :D

The shop staff were very helpful and as luck would have it they had the constituent parts of purple suits in some sizes not too dissimilar to my own there for me to try on. Originally they tried to talk me into a long-jacketed suit, but when I tried this on I felt as if I were in a hall of mirrors looking at a warped reflection in which my torso had been vertically stretched and my legs squashed, so I soon switched back to my original plan of a standard three-button job.

The suits were lovely quality, and it was so pleasing to go into a men’s tailor’s shop which wasn’t lined in grey, navy and black suits; while this had a small section covering these, the bulk of its content was a near-rainbow of clothing, including yellow, orange, light blue and lilac suits, and terrifyingly luminous lime green and pink shirt-and-tie sets. Fantastic.

After leaving the shop (to which I’ll return for measuring once I’ve lost a bit more weight :)), we called in at Ikea on the way back and noted down a few things to be added to the wedding list when Edith gets a moment.

Also to be added to the list is the lawnmower we picked up from the B&Q adjacent to Ikea, which I’m sad to say I’ll be using later today.

We also called in at Lakeside itself, and a clothing shop in the retail park, to continue the frustrating hunt for coordinating clothes that Edith mentioned in her recent post. It really does seem that the colours we’ve chosen for our wedding are hopelessly unfashionable, and I hadn’t realised just how dictated by fashion the shops’ available stock really is until now - it’s quite shocking. That said, unfashionable places such as Marks and Spencer, and the one place with a genuinely large range of shirt colours, Thomas Nash at Debenhams, should just about sort us out with the things we need. Speaking of which, now it’s time to call as many nearby Debenhams shops as it takes to find one with two purple shirts with 15½-inch collars in stock…

On Sunday, we came one step closer to getting the bridesmaids kitted out for the wedding, when Rosy, Paul and I went window-shopping in Oxford Street for suitable (hoho!) suits and tops. I don’t tend to do much clothes shopping and was surprised by how tiring it was, but it was all worthwhile as we came away from the experience with a good idea of what’s available, a shortlist of suits and an even shorter list of tops. Paul also found a couple of good suit hire places for his best men, as well as possible shirts for them, so the trip was particularly successful for him.

The official bridesmaids’ shopping trip is in Aberdeen in under a fortnight, which will be the first time the bridesmaids have all met each other. I hope they get on ok!

By the way, we’ve added a few new things to our wedding list, since people keep telling us there’s not enough on there. However, please remember that it’s not finished yet, so don’t worry if it’s still not good enough, we’re working on it and will let everyone know when it’s complete!

Just a quick update to let those of you who use the LiveJournal web site for keeping up with your friends’ lives know that - thanks to Ben - you can now add a user called dlog to your Friends and then you’ll see when we update the dlog without having to check it manually.

If all this means nothing to you, don’t worry: just ignore this post and it’ll end soon. Very soon, in fact.

Well, first of all I must say thank you to everyone who has provided perhaps surprisingly positive feedback to us about the main site and this dlog - it’s much appreciated, and very nice to know people are actually reading and using the sites!

My previous post was of course as much about introducing everyone to the dlog as it was a normal update, so we’ve had to fight our updating urges for the past week in order to keep it at the top while the bulk of people were visiting for the first time. But now no longer must we wait - hurrah! I can update you on what’s happened since my last post.

First and foremost, so far 43 of the people we’ve invited have let us know whether they can come to the wedding or not, and fortunately almost all have said yes, so it’s already shaping up to be a great day :)

Second, on Saturday we went to Patisserie Valerie in Soho and ordered our wedding cake. Not for us any dry, hard, stodgy fruitcake; this is a gorgeous, deliciously light yet fulfillingly rich chocolate cake :9 It’s rather amazing, and it comes looking actually fairly traditional, but tasting a whole lot better. Fantastic.

Finally for now, the wedding party shopping trips are taking shape, with Rosy, Edith and I planning to case a few joints, as it were, this coming weekend, to find good clothes that we can then share with the more time-constrained party members in future shopping trips in a couple of weeks’ time.

So it’s all moving on nicely, and we’ll be updating the dlog to keep everyone posted. Thanks for reading! :)

Read this from time to time to keep up with all the latest news about the wedding preparations!

It’s been a busy few days of wedding preparations here, so a quick update is in order.

On Friday, we went (with my mum) to London Zoo to meet the latest in a long line of employees who’ve been our contact there about our wedding. It was a really productive meeting and we got lots of useful information, enabling us to solidify some of our plans, and at least make others a few steps away from gaseous and perhaps through liquification.

The upshot of this is that we then felt we had enough information to send out our invitations, safe in the knowledge that nothing much that we wanted to print on them would change a great deal in the near future. So, after a few frantic last-minute redrafts to try to make our less-than-conventional wedding arrangements easily understandable within one side of A5, last night we finally took the plunge (no, not that plunge, that’s in about six more months) and printed out 70 copies.

We posted them all off second class this lunchtime, so we reckon the most postally gifted of our guests may turn up at the web site on Tuesday (although Wednesday is probably a more realistic earliest expectation).

Of course, almost as soon as we posted them, something we’d printed on them changed a little: my Grandad put my mum in touch with an old friend with a coach company this evening and their price was very competitive, so the line on the invitation saying that we ‘hope to offer’ a coach is now out of date: we will be offering the one booked this evening!

Anyway, the title and first line of this post were designed to attract people to click through from the main zoolyweds site to this one, but this isn’t actually the first post on here, so feel free to go and catch up with the past month of preparations now.

If you’re new to this weblog business, by the way, I have two quick things to say to you:

1. Congratulations, you’ve managed to avoid the incessant media coverage of ‘blogging’ as the biggest revolution ever to hit the Western world - and you’ve done very well to avoid it.
2. The newest posts on weblogs generally appear at the top, so if you’ve just started reading an established site such as this, you’ll need to work your way up from the bottom. Computer geeks are logical like that.

(Alternatively, you can use the calendar on the right-hand side of the page to browse through the posts so far. The days which have posts on them appear in blue; clicking these will take you to a page showing all the posts made on that day.)

I was most surprised to see that it’s been one month since Edith installed this dlog: for a start, that means it’s been over a month that I’ve been working on the main zoolyweds site!

Rather a long time, but the site is now basically ready, except that I keep putting off writing the Help page because I know it’s going to be very long and rather boring.

It’s a bit scary, knowing that the site and dlog will be thrown open to all our guests in just a few days’ time. I hope it doesn’t all fall over like a typical government web site when it gets a moment of publicity (e.g. Food Standards Agency’s list of Sudan 1 foods, 1901 Census web site). I imagine that even the government aren’t hosting their web sites on a home PC in their living room via broadband, but I suppose you never know.

This Friday, we’re meeting a catering person at the zoo to start arranging food and drink for the wedding. We’re bringing Paul’s mum along to help us, since we’re novices at this event organising thing. I’m posting about this because we’ve decided to delay sending the invitations slightly to allow for this meeting - originally we were going to post them today, so they’d mostly arrive on Thursday (exactly six months before the wedding), but it seems silly to print the invites now when we’ll have a better idea of things before the week’s out. Hopefully we’ll be sending the invites early next week, so people will be reading this from next week onwards!