Things have been pretty hectic the last few weeks, with the practical aspects of this whole marriage malarkey coming into consideration. The proposal? Man, that was the easy bit.
Now, I knew coming into this that weddings are, on the whole, rather pricey. How much so? According to this site, the average cost of a wedding in the UK is £11,000. Eleven grand! That's 11 iMacs! It's a boggling amount of money, all the more so considering it's basically funnelled into one day. Taken over 24 hours, that's £7.64 a minute. The thing is, when you look further down the page at what that total breaks down into, it gets increasingly ludicrous. £2,000 for a wedding reception, then a further £750 for the evening? £300 for printing? £400 for, er, videography? And these are average figures?
With us both being rather financially prudent (and, personally speaking, skint) there was no chance that the future missus and I would be going for anything so pricey, but the wedding industry - and, oh, what a greedy, insecurity-preying, dead-eyed industry it is - seems determined to wear down any intentions of frugality, clear thinking or common bloody sense. As the Lass noted, the magazines are appalling, presenting weddings that cost tens of thousands of pounds as though they're the norm, the implication being that anything less would be miserly and result in a cheap, cheesy and lesser wedding. For fucks sake, chair covers? I never even knew such things existed until the Lass pointed them out to me on website after website in abject horror.
[At this point in writing, I mentioned to the Lass who'd just popped into the study about the £11,000 figure. She said that she'd heard it was actually a fair bit higher these days and that the above figure was probably a few years out of date. A wee bit of Googling later and this article from the Scotsman comes up. In summary: TWENTY FUCKING THOUSAND?! (And that was two years ago, so by my calculations it must now be approximately a bazillion quid). I don't even want to think what that makes the minutely rate. If my flabber hadn't been gasted already, it truly has now. GUH!]
Anyway, it's one thing to have magazines bellowing SPEND OR BE LACKING - they can be cheerfully dismissed with a cursory curse and flung into the nearest recycling bin. My troubles came when we started researching for places to get married and hold the reception. Initially we'd thought about doing so on Skye, considering we're mouth-frothingly obsessed with the isle, but quickly realised that while it's a nice idea in theory, it'd be a pricey endeavour for all the family and friends we wanted to be present. If we lived there, there'd be no question, but as we'll still be here in the central belt for the next few years it makes much more sense to do it in Edinburgh, Glasgow or anywhere inbetween. So we scribbled down a long list of potential venues and started making enquiries. And the answers came back...
Let's be clear - we're not having a whopper of a wedding. Being the godless heathens that we are, doomed to an eternity of writhing in hell watching BBC3, we're not after any kind of church service. Registry office sounded fine, but we really liked the thought of having a Humanist service - one of the nifty points about living in Scotland is that, since 2005, Humanist celebrants are able to legally marry people in any location, just as religious ministers can. So - somewhere we can have the ceremony in the afternoon, some nice munchies afterwards for a few hours, and a bit of a do in the evening. Sounds reasonable, surely?
We looked at venues throughout Glasgow and Edinburgh. The latter were notably higher. The facility fee to hold the ceremony and reception at the Signet, for example, was priced at £6,000 + VAT and staff costs. This was about average. A small room at Surgeons Hall to hold the wedding ceremony itself for one hour - £600. For one hour. We looked at so many sites and the high figures that kept coming back left me feeling genuinely dazed and really quite drained. Likewise with catering. As the days went by, the sense grew and grew that either we'd be shelling out thousands of pounds just on venue hire, the costs inconceivable for any other occasion. One almost expected there to be an invisible wedding tax that must be paid on everything - as soon as that 'w' word is mentioned in a quote, whether it be for venue, food, photographer, car, flowers, whatever, there's a 40% mark-up on 'normal' pricing. It's as though people are expected to lose any sense of financial awareness when it comes to weddings, instead shelling out whatever ludicrous amount is quoted. The zoo, museums, galleries, gardens, hotels, centres, halls, caves... it felt more and more as though we'd have to get ourselves into debt just for one day, or otherwise go the registry office then hire a function room above a pub somewhere - which, after a week or two of this, didn't sound so bad to me at all (so long as it was CAMRA approved). No wonder threads like this are all over message boards, complaining that "[e]verywhere is too expensive, too pretentious or too popular."
There's this strange conflict at the heart of planning a wedding, or at least the stage of picking and confirming the venue. On the one hand, I know that it's the ultimate special occasion, one that we'll never have again, a genuinely once-in-a-lifetime event, and I feel that the Lass deserves the best day possible, in as wonderful a location as can be found. But on t'other hand, we're still living in the real world. We need to be saving money to make the move to Skye in the next decade, so to instead see it all go on one single day, so much money on just a few hours, seems almost obscene. So somehow, like a Venn diagram, we've tried to find a way to appease both feelings, allowing for a day that'll be lovely without sending us into a financial apoplexy.
Guess what? We did! Well, there had to be a happy ending to such a gloomy post. While I'd love to tell you where, we're keeping the locations shtum so as to guard against unwelcome guests and the paparazzi. I can tell you that we've hired one venue for ceremony and afternoon reception, then another for an evening shindig, the total of both being comfortably under 700 quid, and they're both slap bang on the Royal Mile which should be very handy for anyone arriving by train. The ceremony/reception venue is a cracking place, not what people would normally expect but I think we'll make it work perfectly (we've already concocted a theme for invites and such, though sadly it's not Lord of the Rings (imagine, an LOTR wedding! It'd be so cool! I'd make a fab Aragorn and we could get any kids to be kitted up as hobbits! Sigh...)). If it's a sunny day, it'll be stunning, but even if it's not it'll still be absolutely fine, no question about it. As for the evening, it's somewhere very distinctive yet (compared to everywhere else, anyway) very reasonably priced, and means we've got the place to ourselves, allowing our guests to eat, drink, natter, make merry and boogie their socks off well into the night. Trust me, the pictures are going to be awesome.
The moral of the story? Surprisingly, not "don't get married until you win the lottery" - rather, when you're venue-hunting, look, look and keep looking. It can be an overwhelming experience, especially if you're somewhere (such as Edinburgh) which has so many possibilities, all of which appear to be hella expensive, rattling around in your noggin. There are other places, ways you won't need to compromise your finances, you just need to keep going. Hell, once we've had our wedding, we'll be able to tell you of two perfect places in the centre of Edinburgh which offer just as much as neighbouring venues that charge double. If you've imagination, patience and a determination to not send yourselves hurtling into the swamplands of debt before you've even got rings on fingers, less really can be more.
(In case you're wondering, there'll be no chair covers at ours. Somehow, I think we'll manage.)
Thirty one! Good grief, where 
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