More wedding-related writing? Hell yes, and this isn't even the last of it - I'm milking that day for all it's worth! What the groom wears probably interests very few indeed, but there were some elements in my wedding kit that I wanted to celebrate in my own wee way. Besides, I've never looked as good as I did that day, and having spent so much of my life bemoaning my appearance it's a pleasure to actually feel good about it. So, starting at the top...
The suit jacket and trousers were blue pin-stripe from
Jaeger, a shop I'd never been to (the über-cheekboned models scare me) and wouldn't have even set foot in but for the giant SALE! posters in the window and a typically vigorous Glasgow rainstorm. Even at sale price the suits were brow-raisingly costly to someone used to Slaters, but to be fair the quality was a huge step up from what I usually get. I remember trying it on at the shop and being amazed by the comfort, the fit, the lightness of the material. Goodness knows how I'd react to a bespoke suit. Although it was 2008 when I bought the suit, it was a wise move - I never saw anything as good at such a price in all the months that followed. If only I had more reason to wear it post-wedding, work just doesn't seem to warrant such class...
The shirt was bought during my quasi-stag-weekend in Brighton a few months back at
Gresham Blake. I'd been searching all over Edinburgh and the Internet for a blue shirt light enough to not be dark navy, dark enough not to be retina-scarring electric blue, but I was only ever able to find one thanks to the aforementioned south coast tailors. Reasonably priced and with excellent service, they even tailored an oversized shirt to my scrawny frame for free and posted it back to me in Edinburgh, thereby solving my fat neck problem and making the wearing of a tie sound quite acceptable rather than a choking misery, soooo...
Necktie from Austin Reed - again, not a shop I'd normally go to but their website suggested a couple of nice bluish ties that got the Lass's approval, choosing one with an
intriguing enough pattern to balance out the relative brightness of the shirt and the stripes of the jacket. If only it had come with instructions on how to knot the bounder, but no doubt they reasonably expected an adult male to be fully versed in the way of tie-knotting. If only I'd gone to Eton...
Cufflinks - ah HA! Now
these I'm chuffed with, and took every chance to show them off on the day. Initial plan was to get some silver painters-palette cufflinks from the National Gallery... Until they were priced at around £50. For freaking cufflinks?! Scuppered, I went home and had the thought of searching for cufflinks on
Dawanda and seeing what cropped up - and amongst the results was the obvious choice, so obvious I should've known from the start. Lego! Yup,
blue Lego block cufflinks (keeping things coordinated) from
Bitsandbadges at a tenth of the price for the palette cufflinks and far better suited for the day, especially given my childhood love of the little plastic blocks. If only we'd actually brought some lego along, I could've actually built something on my cufflinks. How many grooms can say that? Though the
stormtrooper ones were awfully tempting...
And so to the shoes - well,
boots, real clodhopper lovelies. I'd been trying to think of some way to reflect Northamptonshire, the place I spent much of childhood, in the day. There's only really two things that come to mind with Northants: footwear and rugby, and since I'm as much use in a scrum as a guinea pig it would have to be the former. Thing is, so many of those old-time shoe manufacturers have deserted the Shire for cheaper, distant lands, most damningly of all being
Dr Martens, that it was starting to look as though it was
Church's or nothing, and they're not cheap. Yet again, the internet came up trumps - I searched for "british boot" and ended up at the BBC:
British Boot Company, selling UK-made boots as they have for over 150 years. Sweet! A little more clicking around revealed that one of the lines they sold,
Solovair, were still made in Northants, not far from Wellingborough, and one of their best-looking steel-toed boots was called
Highlander, a nice nod for me towards my love of the Highlands. Although highly tempted to wear them as soon as they arrived, I waited until the wedding (apart from breaking them in at home, naturally) and have been using them ever since. The quality is solid and well worth the extra pennies, as is the knowledge it's helped support what little manufacturing remains in the Shire.
And finally there's the most important thing you can wear on your wedding day - the ring. Just as I had the Shire represented by my boots, it was important to us to have elements of Orkney in the wedding day (especially as
the Lass was born there). There were a few touches echoing back to the isles -
the bride's shawl was knitted from Orkney Angora, while the ceremony began to a clarsach interpretation of Orkney Wedding March with Sunrise by Peter Maxwell Davies, and our wedding rings were forged there (goodness, that sounded dramatic). They're the Tryst rings from
Ola Gorie, who very nicely made extra-small rings for Missus and me, what with us having the scrawniest digits in christendom (and even then the ring still fair rattles about on my finger - I'll have to get it puffed up with silicon implants or fat or something). I've never had any kind of jewellery on my fingers before and I'm still trying to get used to it, something I suspect would be easier if it didn't keep sliding around, but it's an exceedingly nice feeling to look at the ring and think of what it symbolises. Besides, the markings on it -
oghams, letters from an early medieval alphabet found on stone monuments, those on the ring
apparently translating as "eternal love" but probably read "Olaf woz ere" - remind me of Tolkein's
One Ring. After all, it
is one ring to bind them... can you blame me for going all Gollumy?
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