One of the things that really took me by surprise after Barbara and I announced our engagement was the sheer volume of warm wishes.
I personally simply wasn’t expecting all of the enourmously sweet cards, and even some very generous presents. I have been totally bowled over, and thanks to everybody that has gone out of their way for us – it means a lot.
However, as I stared at the engagment cards that Babs has hung around the flat, and the large pile of borrowed wedding magazines a thought came to us – we really ought to get on with sorting this thing out!
… and it’s only then that you realise quite how big this wedding beast can be.
I wish I could give you a figure for the number of venues that we have looked at. Hours spent staring at screens and then plenty more hitting the road looking round different places. We’ve met some really nice people and seem some absolutely gorgeous places.
For a lot of the time we equated it to searching for a flat or house – just hoping that, at any moment, we would walk through the door and just go ‘yep, that’s the one’. I think the problem is that we didn’t expect that to happen to us on more than one… but it did. We’ve spent the last few weeks being really torn between a few different venues. The ones that we ended up narrowing it down to couldn’t have been more different, and ranged from the local village hall through to quite a swanky hotel that would let us have the whole thing for a good few thousand pounds.
We’re coming close to narrowing the choice down, but I certainly feel that having had fun riding the wave we’re now getting down to the ‘work’…
The Groom 
