Weddings & Grand Designs

It turns out planning a wedding is exactly the same as building your own house. Well. Kind of.

Grand Designs is a show that follows people building their own houses. Normally with some grand idea behind it all, hence the name. At some point in the show there's always the section where the novice home builder is swamped by questions and decisions that they don't know the answers to and they have to rapidly learn a lot to be able to answer them. It is in this regard that it's exactly the same as planning a wedding.

Now I've got to have opinions on things like favours*, flowers, table decorations, colour schemes, invitations, chairs, table shapes, napkins. It's exactly like having to choose where your plug sockets and light switches and plumbing goes or what kind of flooring and heating you have... and whatever the other decisions are that I don't understand when they are talking about them on Grand Designs. Slightly overwhelming and bewildering. It also uses up so much of your spare brain capacity that I know totally understand why people become wedding bores. I'm sure I have to some extent much as I try and resist. I can only guess as to how much worse having kids is!

Not that my fiancée enjoys any of those things any more than I do. In fact it's worse for her because people want to talk to her about it and suggest things and ask what she's doing about stuff much more than they do with me. I try and maintain an interested looking expression but I probably do glaze over from time to time.

The stuff that I know about, choosing food, wine, music, getting the stuff for the band etc. is all good, and fun but the other stuff? Urgh. And every time you think it's all sorted you find out it's just the tip of the iceberg. It's just a big party, why is it so complicated?

Thing is though, you probably wouldn't want anyone else deciding where the plug sockets or lights go in your house, or you'd at least want to approve what they chose, and it's the same with the wedding, there's no way to abdicate responsibility. The biggest shock about the whole thing is finding out that you do care about stuff like what colour the sodding button holes are going to be.

It'll all be worth it in the end though right?

*Favours are little presents you get on the table at the wedding, apparently originally they were just on the wedding cake or something. Shops like Confetti will kindly sell you things like little boxes of sweets for an extortionate price so you can give all your guests a few pence worth of sweets each but feel better about it 'cause you've spent £500.