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?”