In our last diary entry we had taken our first steps into the weird world of wedding planning and had begun to work out our overall budget and started to look at the sort of ideas we might be interested in. These were not not things I had never spared a thought to whilst planning my proposal but Dom, it would appear, had been thinking about them since the age of 4! After shooting some Bond villains and guzzling down a dozen or so Vodka Martinis things were looking much rosier (or at least my cheeks were) and I returned to my laptop to rejoin Kathryn, Dom’s mum, in working out where our biggest costs would lay. Meanwhile Dom occasionally looked up from Doodlejump long enough to dismiss our cost-cutting solutions!
Here are the top 10 costs we could see from our preliminary investigations:
1. The Wedding Breakfast. Now I’m a big fan of breakfast but to me £50 a head sounded expensive for a bacon sandwich. Are there any extras with that? Is Ketchup included? Apparently such questions make me an idiot. I think you’ll find that whoever named it Breakfast when it’s clearly Dinner is in fact the idiot. Actually they’re not
an idiot, they came up with a way to make us spend a lot of money, (in fact probably the biggest single cost of the whole thing) whilst finding a name that implies that you might still need to pay for another two slightly more substantial meals before the day is out: technically that’s genius! From a very rough first list of likely guests we reckoned we would probably invite around 60-70 people and for a traditional sit down meal we were looking at £45 to £50 a head. It’s at this point that I tried to apply an intriguing quadratic equation that called into question the entire fabric of mathematical science in order to prove that £50 x 70 is in fact £4.52 (+VAT), although I was working on an impersonation of a poor church mouse in order to obtain charity status and be able to knock off the VAT. Unfortunately my dad was an accountant for 20years and was able to prove to me that my sums were not, strictly speaking, accurate in any way shape or form, and assured me that additional marks for showing my working sadly did not convert into cold hard cash.
2. The Champagne reception. Now this may come as a shock, but Champagne isn’t actually the cheap “knock it back” drink we all assume it to be! Apparently it is in fact so expensive, so exclusive that even if you were to somehow save up enough caviar to exchange for 
one or two bottles of this elusive substance, it would appear that virtually all venues are bound in a solemn code that, for each individual bottle you provide to your guests, the establishment must hire some form of highly trained specialist champagne butler to conduct the sacred uncorking ceremony. With 20-30 of these ninja-like pricelessly skilled gentlemen’s gentlemen stalking the room ready to open their personalised bottle it is easy to see how the corkage fee begins to add up to the fees quoted on so many venues’ websites. It would appear that the training is such an intensive process, presumably learned after years of solitary mediation amongst a temple of benedictine monks, that we mere mortals cannot open champagne for ourselves.
3. Connected to this cost is the optional extra provision of canapés. For those unfamiliar with the etiquette of the formal soiree, canapés are, as far as I can tell, a form of mild torture, designed to make the guests believe that they are being fed whilst in fact providing elaborately designed snacks roughly the size of the atom and, coincidently, often costing the same as your average nuclear physicist.
4. The Wedding Dress. Dom won’t actually tell me how much the wedding dress is costing, but she assures me that this is for my own mental well-being.
5. The photographer. Wedding photography ranges hugely in price from the low hundreds up-to £5000 and beyond. Dom being a photographer of discerning taste we would be looking at some of the very best photographers out there, but that definitely comes at a price!
6. It’s all about the music! We met playing in a band and I do a lot of sound work in my job. If we could stretch to it we really wanted to bring in some live music to the day: we loved the idea of a friend of ours playing piano at the ceremony and ideally wanted to bring in a proper band to play the bulk of the reception but would also want a cheesy disco afterwards to continue the party into the wee small hours! This would mean bringing in a decent PA system (I cannot stand poor quality sound!) and some lighting to set the atmosphere. Although I’m a lighting designer I was fine with the idea of doing something very basic with the lighting rather than my wedding feeling like work, but it would still be an additional cost!
7. The transport. We loved the idea of getting a classic car to drive Dom to the ceremony and to chauffeur us around afterwards. And when I say classic car I of course mean a heavily modified DeLorean with built in Mr. Fusion! Depending on the location of the ceremony and reception we might also have to think about a bus to transport the guests between locations… maybe it would be cheaper to hire a troupe of donkeys instead…?
8. Cake. We love cake. ‘Nuff said!
9. Accommodation. If we don’t get married locally Dom probably won’t accept spending our wedding night in a tent! Apparently Dom will also need a room to get ready in and she informs me that the ladies toilet of the McDonalds service station on the M1 will not really suffice. Applying your makeup whilst tucking into a McFlurry…no? Really?
10. Moth repellant. It has, after all, been quite some time since I opened my wallet this wide and those pesky critters do get everywhere.
Costs appeared to be spiraling out of control and I had already swapped from googling venues to wondering how much those human medical experiments really pay and this was merely day one. As my eyes began to tire from what seemed like days of staring at the screen and I lapsed softly into a gentle heart attack, I looked across at Dom as she settled down next to me. As she flashed me the briefest of smiles I was reminded of one thing: She’s worth every penny.
…Well maybe not the pennies for the canapés but nearly every penny. Ok maybe not the canapés or the bleedin’ corks or the…Dom, ARE YOU STILL PLAYING DOODLEJUMP?
No…it’s Angry Birds.
