Committed (nuptial man)

Hello, so, it turns out that last weekend the world didn't end, as portended for the third time by that mad Harold Camping fellow, and I got married. All up, that's a pretty successful weekend, I'd say. 

Also, never fear, loyal follower! Not only did the world not end but this blog won't neither! At least not straightaway, anyway. Inspired by the one lovely wedding guest who told me to keep this beast rumbling, I plan to upload a few blogs over the coming weeks reflecting on how awesome the wedding went (and how awesome it is to be married), the awesome things that went on and were said on the day, some awesome photographs and other assorted awesome ephemera for anybody who's interested.

Hopefully those posts'll be, you know, quite good or thereabouts. 

And, who knows, perhaps I will eventually commence uploading my worried thoughts as prenatal man? (Calm down mum, this'll be years away.)

I shall start this one with a few of the lessons I have learned, having now been through a wedding, for the benefit of other prenuptial men out there:

1. Practise your chalkpersonship before the morning of the wedding. This is particularly important if you plan on having a blackboard with directions for guests.
2. If you are having a cocktail-style wedding, ask your venue to put a plate of food aside for you and the wife. Your mouth will be too busy talking to eat and you'll miss out on most of the delicious goodies you carefully selected.
3. Don't be fooled into thinking that, because you are not doing full speeches, you can get away with a hastily-scribbled note of thank-yous. You will forget to thank some people and feel rotten about it for days afterward. This includes your friends who got there early to help set up chairs, your other friends who stayed back late to help remove chairs, and your cousin who flew all the way from the UK just for the weekend and whom you didn't get much of a chance to chat with. Clearly, these are people who should be thanked and praised.
4. You will probably be doomed from the start if you try to talk to everybody at the reception. You'll most likely end up talking to most people not nearly enough, rudely ceasing conversations to move onto the next guests and repeat. Instead, focus on those people who travelled the farthest to be there and whom you see least often. You can catch up with your regular chums at the post-wedding pub hoedown a following weekend. 
5. You'll forget heaps of stuff, like leaving the caketoppers in the hotel room. Luckily you'll also have many friends and relatives willing to help out with your mini-crises, like your dad, who'll ransack your hotel room to try to find those caketoppers while you have a good time not talking to enough people.
6. Getting married and having a big party is fucking fantastic. Stop putting it off. If you've nabbed the right one, don't lose her. 

I was going to write something about regrets as well but it's late now and I'm lazy so I'll save it for next post. In the meantime, look at these awesome pics uploaded by our awesome photographer. These are just some of the advanced previews, note, so there should be loads more coming.

It's only right that the rest of the world sees how tremendously beautiful Vicky looks. 

I have tried on the wedding ring and she is good.

The wedding is tomorrow. I'm surprisingly calm, which means that I alternate from relatively calm to outlandishly wired. What? That is totally a surprise.

Anyhow, I thought I would do one last prenuptial man update for those of you who are still paying attention. In case you are curious, I have tried on the wedding ring and she is good. Whereas Vicky's ring was made up special to fit snugly against her engagement ring, I have had my great-grandpappy's ring (with the french engraving inside preserved - "Alice et Roland unis le 15-9-28") resized to fit my well-nourished chubbers. 

Wearing the ring helps reduce a lot of the anxiety I have about tomorrow. When I put it on, it feels nice, looks grand and I feel that I could easily get used to it. 

I don't know why that helps but, then again, I don't really know why I'm anxious either.

See you on the other side. 

On second thoughts and Plans B.

Thinking about the totally pimp ceremony I wrote about in the last post, it occurs to me now that such extravagant fripperies may detract, rather than add to, the simple wonderment of the occasion. 

Instead we really should go with the original plan: some heartfelt personal vows while girt by loved ones.

And no, this decision is not only due to our reluctant decision to shift our ceremony one suburb over. Sure, it will be hard to pull off a lot of the last post's majesty now that we will be hosting the ceremony outside in the splendour of nature but, in honest seriousness, I think we are both better served by simplicity and authenticity, regardless of where we commit. 

Also, so why have we bitten the bitter eggplant and relocated our nuptials?

Although the temporary fencing has been removed from Kidogo and we can now access the building, it still remains adjacent to the ruins of its previous surrounding topography. On the northern side, there remains a triad of bright blue portaloos, which should be downwind. We tried to overlook this through sheer bloody-mindedness. The building is still wonderful once you get inside. 

Unfortunately, the sound of stuff-hammering, angle-grinding, sand-vacuuming, cat-calling, nose-honking and ill-informed politicking follows you in. It ruins the atmosphere a little.

Even if one could block out the sound (one can't), it requires a leap of faith concerning access to the building. The City of Fremantle has advised that "there could possibly be a problem with access" as "Western Power will be digging  in the access way at some stage", though they don't know when this would happen.

Weighing up the risk that we may face litigation as our guests injure themselves either long-jumping or tightrope-walking to our ceremony, Vicky and I have decided to take our business elsewhere. 

Personally, I think that once they dig the trench, they ought to fill it with fire and hoist up a Sad Roger pirate flag as a warning to others that the Kidogo Arthouse is now a no-go zone of death. What was once an inspiring sanctuary for the creative arts is now a place where hopes and dreams atrophy, are garrotted, stuffed into undersized potato sacks, bashed with lead pipes and buried, only half-dead, in shallow graves underneath those trees that drop loads of sticky berries. 

I have tried to change the entry on google maps to a description like the one above but my hacking skills are not as good as they used to be, back when everything was straight HTML.

The Azelia Ley Homestead, in the City of Cockburn, is now the proud host of our wedding ceremony.  Azelia Ley, who was a Manning, built the house with her own husband from 1915 to 1923. Then, while a kooky old bat, well read and dressed all in black, she used to stand on its verandah and take pot-shots at anybody she thought was trespassing. You can see why it appeals.

I bet the place is haunted by her now. I'll be scrutinising our photos carefully afterward to see if she's in any.  

I've attached below a picture a kid drew of the homestead. I bet Kidogo never inspired a child to draw it. 

We won't be inside the building. That's now a boring museum. We will be married in the glorious, great outdoors in a true-blue Australian setting.

It better not fucking rain.