Soundtrack of a Journey into Marriage: Warble

4 DAYS TO GO

Over the last few weeks, spring has sprung with a vengence. The trees - including our lovely pear tree - are covered in leaves and blossom, there are more daisies on the lawn every day (wow, they grow quickly) and the sun has shown itself more in the last fortnight than I remember for the whole of last summer. The warm air carries with it the sounds of birdsong of all sorts, reminding us that now is the time for new life, new beginnings and to revel in the sheer beauty of nature.

The sound of melodious birdsong in itself is not really wedding related. However, it is a clear signal that winter is well and truly over, and spring is beginning to turn its head towards the hazy days of summer. And this year, early summer means, for us, our wedding and the beginning of our marriage. As I write this, there are but 4 days to go. And really, everything for this weekend starts on Friday as we pack up the car (probably several times - perks of a venue which is just 15 minutes away) and some of our guests arrive at the hotel.

I am looking forward to this coming weekend so much, even if the thought of being the centre of attention still makes my stomach churn every so often. Every stomach churn is followed by a little skip of anticipatory excitement at seeing everybody together, at finally getting to marry the man with whom I dream of being that elderly couple walking hand in hand in the park picking up conkers.

But the birdsong reminds me of the promise of summer and the start of our life beyond the wedding. I'm as excited for our post-wedding plans for this year as I am for the wedding; in some ways more so - selling this house and buying our forever house, career plans, afternoon teas, walks in the park, our honeymoon and our planned Autumn trip to New Zealand, weekends with friends...the list is endless, and that's the best thing about it.

So, Mr Blackbird, please keep on singing as much as you like. It reminds me of what comes next - and I think I'm ready for it.

Soundtrack of a Journey into Marriage: Chickens

Well, hens to be more exact...

Ah. The Hen Do.

I was always quite nervous about having a hen do. I've actually never been to one, as I wasn't able to make it to my friend's when she got married back in 2010 (a sad tale of having to move house the same weekend).

But I've read all the bridal magazines, I've watched Don't Tell the Bride and I've seen enough photos on Facebook to know that the idea of going round bars drunkenly (or even non-drunkedly) bedecked in sashes and rude straws just wasn't for me.

Enter Phillipa, my lovely maid of honour and organiser extraordinaire. As we lived together during our time at law school, she is fully aware of my love of tea and cake, and the fact that a barcrawl complete with stripper would be nothing further from what I wanted. We figured that afternoon tea was the way forward, and Phillipa also suggested a spa day where she and I could spend some time having a catch up. As we currently live at opposite ends of London and I no longer work across Heron Quays from Phillipa, we don't see each other as much as we should, so a spa day together sounded brilliant - I'd never been to a spa so I was particularly excited about this.

We went to the Chesterfield Hotel in Mayfair for afternoon tea (note the coincidental name, although Phillipa confessed that this was completely unintentional. The room had a beautiful garden-like feel to it which, if you've seen the Invitations post, goes well with the general decor of our wedding.

There were 9 of us in total, and it was great to be able to catch up with my cousins and friends from law school who I haven't seen as often as I would like recently (note the general trend - I WILL get better at this after the wedding). Our waiter was hilarious and knew it was my hen party so made a great fuss of me!

 

  We picked our menus. I had a traditional tea, with plain and fruit scones. There was also an option for a 'chocolate lover's tea',which came with chocolate scones and all the cakes/pastries had chocolate in them. Both looked divine when they arrived!

I had a flowering osmanthus tea which, as the name suggests, had a flower in it which gradually opened out when the hot water was added - so pretty. Juliet had a milkshake which came with a chocolate straw - I was a little bit jealous as it looked gorgeous.

My goodness but the food was TASTY. My favourite sandwich was ham with cheese and a tomato chutney; closely followed by egg and watercress on basil bread and chicken with mustard mayonnaise and toasted almonds. I do love sandwiches, and these were some of the best.

As we hoovered up the last crumbs of the sandwiches, our lovely waiter came over and queried which sandwiches we liked best. He then promptly disappeared and reappeared with a plate of MORE SANDWICHES. My favourite kind of person!

I'm at risk of turning this post into a food love-in, but it's so worth it. The fresh warm scones, with clotted cream and jam, were excellent (and they, erm, brought more of those as well). As for the cakes - WOW. Eclairs, brownies, fruit tarts, cupcakes. The eclairs were my personal favourite - they melted in the mouth.

Phillipa had organised a quiz where I had to guess the answers given by Alan and my brothers to various questions. All the girls had bought me little gifts with memories attached - when I got a quiz answer right, I got to open a gift and had to guess who it was from.

It was harder than it sounds - when asked to name Alan's favourite book, I promptly forgot the title of every single book that's ever been printed. There were enough questions for me to be able to open all the gifts though, although I was embarrassed that I struggled with guessing each gift-giver! Each gift came with a story of why that gift had been picked, which was really fun.

Eventually, food eaten and teapots emptied, it was time to leave. Our waiter presented me with a box containing the leftover cakes (I love this place!) and told us to help ourselves to the pick'n'mix sweets round the corner (more love!) - which of course we duly did.

Some of us then went for a drink in a nearby pub (pink prosecco - YUM!) and grabbed a table which was apparently reserved, but they never turned up so we stayed there for an hour and a half before ambling home. I went back to Phillipa's, and we stayed up very late eating soup, cheese (after tea and cake, one of my favourite foodstuffs!) and biscuits and crisps, and watching films.

I'm going to have to put our spa day in a post of its own I think - well done if you read to the end, and apologies for the inevitable mouthwatering!

Soundtrack of a Journey into Marriage: Click

Also known as 'There's one month to go'...

So - we're well into April now and, with one month to go, things are getting busy! There are the last few things to buy, spreadsheets to edit and final details to organise. We've had the menu testing (which mostly seemed to involve various glasses of wine), and the hen/ stag dos are fast approaching - mine is this weekend, eek!

Last weekend we met our photographer, Ross Holkham, for our pre-wedding photoshoot. We met at Trent Country Park, in north London, and really enjoyed walking around in the sunshine. Here's a few of the resulting photos.

All photos courtesy of Ross Holkham Photography

Suffice to say, we're looking forward to our wedding day photos! Thanks Ross, these are beautiful.

 

What I Did On My Holidays - Trip to St Lucia

"Pre-wedding holiday?" I can hear you ask. "Are you crazy?"

Not crazy at all - well, only in the 'desperate for sunshine' sense. We have spent the last year using all our holiday time staying at home, for wedding planning, the Olympics and Christmas - a year in which the British summer just decided not to bother and it rained on us for what seemed like 360 days out of the 366. Sometime in November, when we finally concluded that any chance of good weather was over for the year, we thought a holiday sometime in February would be nice. Somewhere with a chance of blue skies and sunshine.

So - the Caribbean. We picked St Lucia simply because it sounded more 'nature-based' than some of the others - rainforest trails, volcano springs and the two Pitons (large peaks, formed like volcanoes but the molten rock solidifies underground before it has a chance to erupt). We booked the Sugar Beach Resort, which is nestled next to the beach between the two Pitons.

To say that we were ready for a holiday was an understatement. By the time the plane touched down on the island we were bouncing with excitement, mainly at the idea of heat and sunshine - and luckily there would prove to be plenty of both.

Apart from climbing Gros Piton (ok, yes that was crazy - it was like walking up and down stairs for four hours), we didn't really do a lot - sleeping, swimming and reading was enough to keep us happy this time.

Our room, with garden and patio

Beach overlooking Gros Piton

Reading by the pool

Then retiring to the mini plunge pool in our garden!

Surveying the view from our patio balcony

View from the top of Gros Piton

Halfway up Gros Piton, looking at Petit Piton

Sulphur Springs - preparing to bathe in volcanic mud

Reading my AOW Book Swap book on the beach - happy days

View of the Caribbean Sea from our balcony - mmm!

Always something lovely about having breakfast outside!

Fin

 While we really liked the island (mostly for the February sunshine it should be said), if we went back to the Caribbean we would probably choose a different island or at least look for a different hotel. The Sugar Beach is in a fairly isolated, if beautiful, spot and there was no easy way of venturing out on our own which, if we hadn't been there to simply relax, would have created difficulties.

We had a few problems with service and room facilities - for example, the 'butler' was obsessed with making dinner reservations (and failed to organise the scuba-diving we wanted to do) and the bedside lamps seemed to fuse with amazing regularity for the second half of the week. The worst problem was coming back to the room one afternoon to find that housekeeping had left all the doors and gates of our room open while they went to fetch fridge supplies. Anyone could have walked in! All in all, it made us quite glad we weren't on our honeymoon - when somewhere markets itself as being sheer perfection, it's easier to notice when things go wrong.

However, there was sunshine, heat and a much-needed opportunity to spend lots of time together - and with two months to go, that can't be a bad thing!

Soundtrack of a Journey into Marriage: Whoosh

This blog was originally intended to mostly be a diary of the countdown to us getting married, so with all the doom and gloom of job-hunting and house-hunting of late, maybe it's time to provide some wedding cheer.

This time in two months (the time is flying past, hence the 'whoosh' in the title) we will be married and preparing to head down to Devon for a few days of peace, quiet and pub lunches. And nothing says "Wedding Alert" like that moment when the invitations land on doormats up and down the country.

We took quite a long time to decide on our invitations, as we had wanted to do them ourselves but really wanted something fairly artistic and, as you will see, our drawing skills are not quite up to doing anything which is leaving the house.

We stumbled across Momental Designs which is run by American artist Kristy Rice, and were hooked by the beautiful handpainted designs. I had a phone call with Kristy to talk about process and design, and two weeks later we were sent our first prototype. It was amazing to see our design ideas turned into reality.

Some months later, the design and production work was completed and a week or so after that, they arrived (along with a couple of hefty postage and customs bills, which we hadn't been expecting - one drawback of using an American company).

We added some cream ribbon and luggage tags embossed with silver cherry blossom, printed address labels and they were ready to go.

The final design

My design for the reception card - just as well someone else did the final design!

Luggage tag production line

Cherry blossom - stamp plus silver embossing powder

Ready to go into their envelopes!

We rushed down to the Post Office the day we went on holiday - it was an oddly nervous moment handing them all over and hoping they would all arrive safely.

It's been really exciting receiving the first responses and hearing everyone else's positive opinions about something we put so much emotion into. Now, if everyone else could send their RSVPs back please...

It's International Women's Day...

... which in Russia and many other countries is a public holiday and should, in my opinion be a feast day here too. As well as providing me with fond memories of picnics in snowy Yaroslavl woods with bunches of flowers, IWD serves as a reminder that the world is better off for having smart, educated women playing a full part in society with the choice to do so.

And because there are so many of them out there (how could there ever be too many?) and because I've been all caught up in job stuff and weddings, I'm directing you to Any Other Woman where everyone is writing about what it means to be a woman.

Happy reading - I promise it's worth it.

Perspective: Qualification and Job Hunting

Since I last posted, I've become a qualified solicitor (Celebrations with cake and champagne? Well, if you're offering...). However, if you've kept up with the sheer, erm, (non-)flurry of posts - admittedly most of them were more like half posts drafted in my head, whoops - you will be aware that I wasn't going to be staying at the firm where I trained and that I was adding 'find a new job' to the to-do list.

Before we went on holiday (more on that when we're slightly less jetlagged) I had an interview with a firm down in Bristol. I really liked them. I liked the work they do and was attracted by the sectors they specialise in. They liked me too, enough to ask me back for a second interview.

On my way back from Bristol, I suddenly wasn't so sure. Alan and I had talked about how we would make it work should I get an offer; it would involve weekly commuting, having lives in Bristol and London... and a lot of time apart.

Accepting such a job in Bristol would be a declaration that the south-west was where my career was going to be, at least for the next few years. That in itself wasn't unthinkable. The legal sector is expanding in the region, and a lot of big firms have chosen to base themselves there.

However, despite the cosy EU notion of freedom of movement of workers, simply relocating so far for a permanent role is not so easy - not when there's two of you to consider. Alan is pretty entrenched in the London market, and, while not tied to insurance, catastrophe and risk modelling is relatively London-centric for the time being. On the personal side, we've been looking forward to starting our lives as newlyweds and have enjoyed starting to make plans for Life Post-Wedding, things that we want to explore and experience in the couple of years before we even consider things like starting a family.

So although at first it felt like moving to Bristol could be an opportunity for an adventure, in reality it would mean that we would spend those precious years snatching time together at the weekend, while perhaps losing touch with other friendships through wanting some time to ourselves. It worked for six months with my secondment to Paris - the idea of doing this with no end date to aim for (or, the end being that we would want to start a family - and isn't THAT a minefield for working women to negotiate?) seemed less and less palatable.

This afternoon I spoke to the recruiter and withdrew my application for the role, explaining my predicament and emphasising that if the firm should have a similar role in London, I would jump at the chance. Whether or not I live to regret doing this, I am grateful that this situation has made us revisit conversations about how we see the next few years - we have obviously talked money and children before now, but it's important to keep talking these things through.

While this has made me reassess and focus on what I want and currently need from my career, it has also made me think: is this one of the base differences between men and women in a couple? Is it an advantage of being female that I feel that I can afford to turn down a job in order to put our family life first right now? Would it have been easier to make a decision in the other direction if it had been Alan with a job offer elsewhere? I can't help thinking that the answer to both these questions is yes...