When we have put so much effort into attending to every last detail of our wedding, what could possibly go wrong? The weather, of course.

Neither of us likes the heat, but for obvious two-hour-walk-around-the-zoo-related reasons we most certainly do not want it to rain on Saturday. Ideally, it would be a bright, sunny day (for good photos and an enjoyable walk), but not as hot as it’s being at the moment.

Well, if the BBC weather forecast is to be believed, that’s exactly what we’re in for! The coolest day of the week, but with clear, sunny skies all day. If this turns out to be true, we’ll certainly be delighted. Here’s hoping…

The forecast as it stands at the moment is shown below. You can click on it to go over to the BBC Weather site for any updates.

Oh dear, I appear to have caught the pun-based headline bug from Paul!

I have been very quiet on here lately, but that’s because I’ve been busy, not because I’ve had nothing to say! My stress levels are receding as my to-do list shrinks: the greatest relief for me is that after weeks, nay months, of procrastination, I’ve finally written my speech. When you hear it you’ll wonder why on earth I avoided writing it for so long, as it’ll only last about as long as a chocolate wedding cake will when faced by 60-odd guests waiting for pudding :)

My to-do list is shrinking rapidly - if I were to write it out afresh it would be no more than half an A5 sheet now, and thankfully most items left on the list are quite minor tasks. My main jobs have been the sorts of things that are extremely important but also very boring to write about, mainly consisting of endless organising emails sent to the zoo; to people with special roles on the day; or just to any guests with questions - keep them coming! Amy Vogel and colleagues at the zoo deserve a medal for their patience when dealing with our eye for minutiae and our madcap schemes!

Today we’ve finally finished making all the music playlists we could possibly need (fingers crossed), and we’ve started packing things up ready to take to the zoo this Friday…

…this Friday?! Oh my, I think I need a lie down!

(Oh, and to top it off, my library traineeship finished last week, and I start at university (for the second time) a week after getting back from honeymoon - the fun never stops ;))

With so few days to go, I am delighted to say that we are actually feeling on top of things at last now! My speech is ready at last, and even most of the music is sorted out now, and all in all it’s all feeling a bit more like we’re ready than it was a few days ago.

Saturday saw perhaps the most bizarre excursion of the preparations, though.

For reasons that will become clear at the reception, we wanted to procure seven pencil sharpeners. I first went looking for these a fortnight ago today, and in the first shop I looked in - Wilkinson in Bexleyheath - I found the perfect specimens - an appropriate shape in two appropriate colours. However, they were part of a range of four shapes and four colours, so there were only three that were suitable.

Since then, I have been returning to the shop in my lunchtime every day, and managed to get a further two on Wednesday. However, as the countdown on the right of the page suggests, time is getting rather tight, so towards the end of last week I started looking further afield - Wilkinson in Dartford, to be precise. No luck there, though - the whole range was completely out of stock on both Wednesday and Friday.

So the upshot of all this was that yesterday we embarked on a time-consuming tour of Wilkinson shops in the area, with the sole aim (and this is where it starts to sound ridiculous) of spending a grand total of… 30p. Yes, these sharpeners cost 17p each, but that just isn’t cheap enough, so for reasons I can’t quite work out, if you buy two you can save four pence. Amazing.

The half-good news is that we found one more ideal sharpener, in Thamesmead, but we had to buy a not-quite-so-good one as a fallback if I don’t manage to get one more ideal one this week.

Never let it be said that there is no attention to detail in this wedding. Although actually, I think that’s about the second least likely thing anyone would say about this wedding - after “Oh, it’s in a zoo - that’s a bit boring, why didn’t they go for somewhere more unusual?”

[Admin note: Mark never did press the right button to publish this, which is why it’s actually appearing several weeks after the date given!]

I was just finalising a few things such as writing the card for the wedding, and I came across the card I’d been sent from Paul and Edith for the dlog. So I thought I’d write something before I lost the chance.

I’ve nearly finished the final slides for my speech on Saturday. I don’t really have any time left now as I’m on night shifts from tomorrow which are about 13 hours each. Then I will be on my way to Kent from Southampton.

See everyone soon. I just realised that both best men will be somewhat jet-lagged as I’ll be used to being on night-mode and Martin will be just back from the USA. Hopefully we’ll be able to be at least equal to 1 best man between us!

Mark

PS It took me 10 minutes to work out how to actually post this!

It has been another busy week chez zoolyweds, and one at the end of which we find lots of progress has been made, but we’re also considerably poorer than we were at its start!

A lot of the work this week has been of a musical nature.

We’ve come a long way towards arranging all the tracks for both the coach and the reception, and indeed last night the tape for the trip up to the zoo was actually recorded. A slight hiccup came at the end when it emerged that, even though the two sides’ music supposedly totalled the same length (give or take five seconds), the second side of the tape ran out before the music did. But I’m an optimist who’s hoping we’ll get to the zoo before the tape runs out anyway so here’s hoping no-one ever hears how the tape ends. Then no-one will ever know my mistake… oh, except everyone reading this. Whoops.

The music for the coach journey home is coming along nicely, and the background music for the evening meal is ready. Most work is needed for the rest of the evening’s music, but even that has at least been narrowed down to a manageable pool of potential tracks.

Most excitingly, the special piece of processional music for the ceremony that Edith has put into a cello duo arrangement is now not only finished being written, but has also been recorded and mixed (she played both parts!). You’ll have to wait and see what it is on the day.

It will hopefully be preceded by some classical music we have on order, following a recommendation. This has been dispatched so we’re just hovering at the letterbox, waiting to find out if it’s up to the task!

Edith’s recording will be one of the particularly attractive downloads on the new zoolyweds site, which will launch on the day of the wedding, probably at 17.30.

This will see the site move from its current main role - helping us organise things and keep everyone informed of what will be happening on the day - into a new role, acting as a kind of record of the day.

Those of you attending the wedding will be able to come back to the site and, for instance, find out the name of that song you heard on the coach at 14.15 and wondered what it was called, or have a look at one of the readings from the ceremony to remind yourself how great it was!

And of course those not attending will be able to relive the day as if they were there, or something.

To this end, we’ll be throwing open just about the whole zoolyweds site to everyone, without a login, when the new site launches. So those of you who haven’t been able to log in and see what’s going on will at last find out what you’ve been missing.

Don’t worry, though, guests: the login system will still protect your contact details from public view, and enable you to keep them up to date so we can keep in touch more easily!

We’ll also be unveiling an online photo-sharing community into which we will welcome every last photo you can be bothered to show us, for a comprehensive record of our day. The details of this will be available on the new web site, and it’ll be great to be able to see as many of our guests’ photos as possible when we get back from the honeymoon!

The official photographer’s photos will also be available online after a few weeks, with the opportunity for anyone to order prints of any they particularly like, over the internet. Again - guess what - details will appear on the new site. We’ll also send an e-mail out to let people know when these are available - hence the need to keep your contact info up to date!

The photographer has now been paid for his services, and the zoo have too, hence my comment about us now being rather poorer. It’s money well spent in both cases though, so we don’t really mind!

This new web site I keep mentioning is actually the other main thing I’ve done this week - after all, although it launches on the day of the wedding and is written in the past tense, we obviously won’t actually be nipping home to write and publish it after the ceremony, it’s not really the done thing. So the new site is just about ready to go now, with the exceptions of the parts where it refers to things we haven’t actually finished arranging yet. Prioritisation? I’ve heard of it.

Speaking of which, I’d better get on with something completely different, that’s rather more useful. In fact, I’ll stop writing this load of uninteresting rambling for the consumption of an audience of 60, and go and write my speech instead. Oh, did I say ‘completely different’?

Somewhat ironically, after so many months in which we have rarely posted to our dlog due to a bit of a lack of things to tell our readers about, we now find ourselves with so much going on that there is plenty of news, but no time left in which to type it all up!

I’ve somehow found a small piece of time (is that a bit like a pocketwatch?) in which to recount the events of the past few days, though, so here goes.

On Friday, we headed up to Westminster Register Office, which is near to Baker Street station, in a large, picturesque old building - much like most register offices really, not to mention rather like the endless plethora of buildings we were so determined to avoid when we discovered the modern-looking facilities on offer at the zoo! Very nice, if you like that sort of thing.

We met there our registrar, Paresh, whose surname escapes me, and he went through our ceremony plans and logistics in great detail with us, which was both helpful and reassuring (since he didn’t seem to have any problems with any of it!). It was useful, as two people who haven’t married [intransitive] before, to speak to someone who has married [transitive] an inordinate number of times before, as he was able to help us understand what was ‘usual’ in these situations. After all, if you don’t know what’s a convention, how can you know what to do to deviate from it? ;)

(A quick digression, as it seems apt to set the record straight on our attitude to traditions and conventions here. Essentially, we like to know what the traditions and conventions are, but we certainly don’t follow or conform to any for the sake of it. If they sound good - for us or for our guests - we’re up for them, but if they just sound like insignificant actions based on centuries of unquestioning imitation, we’re not so keen. If doing the complete opposite of a tradition would be even more fun, that’s just a bonus too good to decline!)

So, after a productive session with Paresh, we took a walk across Regent’s Park to the zoo. We were there 90 minutes or so ahead of schedule, so we used the entry buzzer anyway to ask our contact if she would mind letting us in early so that we could be planning our route for the day in advance of the meeting, rather than hanging about somewhere only to have to stay behind afterwards for the route-planning.

We were indeed let in, and we collected some zoo maps (one to draw on, one to scan and zoolyweds-ify!), then set about devising a route. It was a bit like that puzzle where you have to try and draw a strange little house without taking your pen off the paper or repeating any lines - although we essentially needed to go back to certain areas more than once, we didn’t want to retrace any of our earlier steps when there are so many other places we could be going to in our limited time!

If you’re invited to the wedding, you can have a look at the final route we’ve come up with on the main zoolyweds site’s zoo page; if you’re not invited, just come back in a few weeks when the post-wedding site has launched and you’ll see it then!

(More news on the site relaunch to come in the next couple of weeks. Suffice it to say that I obviously didn’t think I would have enough else to prepare in the next few weeks when I decided that the site should relaunch at 17.30 on the wedding day, immediately after our ceremony. Oh dear.)

At the meeting, we got a huge number of questions answered, all of them favourably, so that was certainly good. We also finally got to enter the ceremony venue, having previously only peered through its locked doors, on too many occasions to remember. As luck would have it, it was very nice inside! We also tried out our music on Edith’s portable CD player (which I shall resist referring to as a ‘ghetto blaster’, although I suspect this parenthesis will have assisted many of you in picturing it), with amazing results: I pressed Stop on a particular tune from our ceremony and my breath was taken away by the reverberation of the note I had stopped on around the room! A once-in-a-lifetime moment, though - I’m sure that our guests’ bodies will absorb a lot of the sound, altering the otherwise astonishing acoustics.

What else, what else…? Oh yes, we shared some of our top secrets with the events co-ordinators and they were either impressed or politely pretending to be impressed while thinking we were mad; I think it was probably the former but you never know! I did also say I would mention one of our contacts - Amy Vogel - by name here, as she joked that she would like to be made famous on the site. I suppose a level of minor fame achieved through appearing on a web site read by fewer than 70 people is preferable to a similar level of fame achieved through daunting three-hour shifts presenting interactive quiz channels on Sky TV, so it’s fair enough. Thanks for being so helpful, Amy - and of course for being professionally unfazed when faced with our array of unusual ideas :)

The weekend was spent doing further preparations, such as designing the route maps, printing the orders of service or programmes or whatever you call them, and, as the saying goes, much, much more. We also heard back from the coach company about the timings and pick-up locations. (If you’re invited to the wedding, you can see these on the zoolyweds coach page.) They’ve been as precise as they can be with the London pick-up locations, but having been to Great Portland Street a few months ago I can’t really see a good stopping place there, so my advice to people there is probably going to have to be just to stand outside the Tube station and look out for a ‘Kentishman’ coach! I think I’ll try and get hold of a photo of it, so that people know what they’re looking out for. I’ve a feeling their coaches are all dark blue, but better safe than sorry…

Now, what was I saying about being too busy to post? This was just a very quick one, I’m sure it won’t have delayed anything else at all… Oops.

At times, writing about our preparations, I feel like a scriptwriter for a 24-hour news channel trying to cover some kind of top-secret police investigation: everything’s still progressing nicely here, and that’s all the detail I can release at the moment ;)

However, I can tell you about tomorrow - we’re off up to London at some unfair-on-a-day-off hour of the morning for a 9.30 appointment at Westminster Register Office, to meet the registrar who will actually be reading out the words we wrote the other week for our ceremony, and generally officiating to ensure we actually are legally married. We’re ready to ask several questions of him, but they’re just boring, pragmatic things about the ceremony so I won’t bore you with those here!

After that, however, we’re off to the zoo for our final meeting there until 2 September (when we drop off all our bits and pieces ready for the next day!), and we really do have a lot of questions to ask and things to find out from our contacts there.

For a start, it would be nice to go inside the ceremony venue itself, for the first time! We’ve been unfortunate with our timings up to now, always visiting when the room is closed and locked for various reasons, but this time we’ve made sure we’ll be able to go inside it. This will prove useful as we would like to make sure that the portable CD player we intend to use to provide music at that venue is actually up to the task of filling the room in any kind of audible way, before the day itself. I’m not sure what we’ll do if it isn’t; I’m not sure I can really slip an invoice from Bose or Bang and Olufsen through on the wedding budget, even if I have managed a guillotine, a laminator and, er, a laptop* :)

Furthermore, we really need to be able to work out how we’re going to arrange seven large tables in a room full of huge intrusive pillars and wall extrusions in such a way that all their occupants can see the top table and the speech-givers. We have a possible layout in mind but we could really do with some expert advice!

And, well, you know me and my attention to detail (or is it minutiae-control-freakery?), but they don’t, so I’m not sure what their reaction will be to my attempts to usurp their Microsoft Word/Leith’s/Times New Roman signs and menus with replacements in our (for want of a better phrase) zoolyweds ‘house style’ (corporate identity? brand image? stop me if I get too ludicrous… oh, too late)! They’ve been helpful and receptive to our every wish so far so I’m sure it’ll be OK :)

There are so many other things we have to sort out with them, but now there are at least as many things I have to sort out here before bed, so I’d best be off.

* Strictly speaking the laptop is more of a long-term investment, but the fact that we ideally needed computer-type functionality for (for instance) playing music at the reception did help the case ;)

Preparations are still ticking along nicely here, which is probably for the best considering that at this time in four weeks we’ll be getting the last of our photos with the zoo animals before heading back to the venue for our ceremony!

The zoolyweds print shop has this week opened for business (in our lounge) in an even more extensive way than it did to get the invitations run off earlier this year. We’re printing, for instance, the day’s running orders you should all be receiving on arrival at the zoo. I’ve been struggling to get decent colour printing of some of the other items onto on some nice thin white card, and have just bought some more supplies, then finally noticed - once I got home of course - that the card is actually labelled as ’suitable for laser printers, copiers and mono inkjets’, which could go quite some way to explaining why the colours from our inkjet aren’t exactly going well. Oops.

Meanwhile, in a news item that’s just about related to our dlog, I thought that this was quite a nice gesture (or perhaps just a nice PR move, depending how cynical you are!). Of course, you’ll all be getting into the zoo for free too, in a few weeks’ time, to thank you all for your hard work in putting up with our strange wedding arrangements! ;)