First of all, "Daring lousy guy" (http://www.alwaysontherun.net/shivaree.htm - scroll down to "Daring lousy guy") is a song whose lyrics are composed entirely of bad translations of Hong Kong action movies. The guy who posted this on the Feng Shui mailing list promises an MP3...
Secondly, I saw a table of estimated wedding costs in the Guardian, in their Consumer section. Now, as regular readers will be aware, we're getting married, so I was interested and read on - especially as I'd recently heard someone mention that the average cost of a wedding was £11,000 (gulp).
(Earlier versions of this post had garbled figures. Sorry about that.)
Well, compare and contrast what the Guardian says (their archived version doesn't include the actual table, which they got from weddingguide.co.uk), and what we expect to shell out.
| Item | Guardian | Us | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bride's wedding ring | £200 | £200 | Pretty accurate so far. OTOH, this is stuff that will last, so we're prepared to spend money on this sort of thing. |
| Groom's wedding ring | £150 | £180 | |
| Wedding dress | £700 | Nowhere near that | We're getting a friend (J.D.) to design the dress; she makes money on the side by going down to Sherwood Forest in the summer and doing medieval reenactment and archery, and in any case you can't get the sort of dress Cleodhna wants easily (her main requirements, I believe are a) it should be red, and b) she wants an open back to show off her tattoo - which many people, including most of her family, haven't seen). |
| Headdress and veil | £150 | - | That's one of those "virginal bride" things, which we're not getting into. I mean, even if Cleodhna's father was going to be at the ceremony, we wouldn't be having the whole Father giving her away thing anyway. We've been living together for two years now, or thereabouts. Talk about bolting the stable doors. |
| Bridal bouquet | £75 | - | No cut flowers, please. |
| Shoes and accessories | £125 | £15ish | Cleodhna needs her existing shoes repaired, because Laszlo ate bits of them. |
| Bride's beauty treatments | £75 | Free | Some visiting sister can do this. |
| Bridesmaids' dresses | £500 | - | What bridesmaids? |
| Groom's outfit | £150 | Something like that | Haven't budgeted this yet. I see it as: I need a better suit than the one I have now. So I'll go out and get one. Again, this is something I'll use again; I don't mind spending money on that sort of thing. |
| Flowers | £200 | - | As above: no cut flowers. We both hate them. It seems such a profligate waste. |
| Printing | £300 | £10-£20ish | God bless inkjets. Decent-quality card and maybe a replacement cartridge should be the limit. (Note also the hypocrisy of not counting Cleodhna's time in the cost estimate.) |
| Transportation | £300 | £20ish | We'll need to hire taxis for people who can't walk very far. As for the rest, well, we live in the West End, the Registry Office is in Park Circus about 10 minutes away, we're planning on a restaurant half-way between there and the Research Club, our local, where the reception will be. We don't need to sit in traffic jams looking smug at the all-night garage because we're in a Roller and it's not. |
| Civil/church fees | £200 | £140 | Helps that we don't have to hire a church |
| Photography | £400 | - | Guests are invited to bring their own cameras and take better photographs than we'd get for a pro, because the pro isn't coming to the reception. |
| Videography | £400 | - | Videos are evil. Camcorders are banned. After all, if this is supposed to be a perfect day you'll remember for the rest of your life, do you really want someone recording a fly-on-the-wall documentary, complete with all the bits that weren't actually that good, the hesitations, and in general the things that, when you decided which photos to blow up from the reel of <lots>, you reckoned you were better off forgetting about? |
| Wedding cake | £200 | £400-£1,000 | Fiona from the Research Club prides herself on being able to make any kind of cake you'd want. Which is good, as we want to cut the cake with an axe. |
| Reception venue/marquee hire | £600 | Marquee? Did I mention we're having an urban wedding? | |
| Reception decorations | £150 | Is this more cut flowers? How can you spend this much money on jumped-up Christmas decorations? | |
| Evening reception catering | £750 | As mentioned before, Fiona reckons she can seriously undercut these figures. I like the Research Club (sorry, the Postgraduates Club). | |
| Wedding reception catering | £2,000 | £500-ish | Now, this is where it gets slightly tricky. Our plan was always as follows: 1) If we're going to have a meal after the wedding, we want a damn good one; 2) We can't afford to invite everyone over to the Stravaigin; so 3) Let's have a damn good meal for close family and relatives, and after that have a reception for everyone, have the speeches and everything at that point, and have it in a far more relaxed environment. weddingguide.co.uk don't agree with that. |
| Drinks | £750 | £200 tops | Not something we've budgeted as yet, but again I think they're talking about a full-blown "everyone gets fed sort-of OKish food" reception. |
| Entertainment | £500 | £100-£300 | The Research Club has a house DJ that we can hire, and we also have a number of friends that take part in the regular Open Decks. Neither Cleodhna nor myself are that interested in a big dance night, and we don't need a huge band. |
| Bride's going away outfit | £150 | - | What is this supposed to be? I certainly don't see how we'd need another dress (although I suspect this one, unlike the wedding dress, could be recycled later on). |
| Wedding night hotel | £125 | - | Our flat is closer to the reception than any hotel. |
| Honeymoon | £1,500 | Deferred | As above: we've been living together for 2 years; one of the reasons we planned this was because we realised that a) we were going to live together for the rest of our lives, and b) Cleodhna needs to be able to work in this country legally. This isn't one of these "now have some quality time together abroad" type of things. We know each other. |
| Wedding insurance | £50 | - | If you're spending £,000, I can see why you'd want insurance. If you're not, I can see why you wouldn't. |
| Other expenses | £300 | ? | Not sure what this is supposed to mean. |
| TOTAL | £11,000 | £2K - £4K | Take away all the random fripperies, and it all starts looking far more reasonable. |
I note that they didn't make any mention of stag night or hen night costs, which seems bizarre to me.
More generally: I think Cleodhna and I have decided that the important thing about a wedding is having a good time, having it be memorable, and having the people who you would want to witness an important stage in your life, be there. That's why our wedding list (soon to be live, honest - God, I'm appalling at this sort of thing) doesn't have stuff on it - you know, toasters, saucers, duvets, all the sorts of things that you need to set up a house. We've set up a house already - it's the flat we live in, and we have some of my stuff from when I was single, and some of her stuff from when she was single, and other stuff we've bought when we were together.
Instead, our wedding list is comprised uniquely of the airfare of Cleodhna's mother and most of her sisters (Stalszve is making her own way) - because they need to be there, and it wouldn't be proper for us to be married without them.
There's a month to go, and it's getting agitated (I still, for instance, haven't told my family officially that I'm getting married). But I think we're doing the right thing.
