La Minette Anglaise

Wedding mosaic

I thought I would share a few wedding highlights;

*  The bus arriving

*  View over the pond where we held the ceremony

*  Inside the marquee

  * Left over flowers the day after

Home Sweet Home

Where do I start after so long away?

After nearly a month away, we are back home with a bulging suitcase and lots of wonderful memories!

We spent a week in London, culminating in the most glorious weekend of the year and our beautiful wedding. A year of stress and lots of tears was a high price to pay, but on the day it turned out to all be worthwhile. We were blessed with the most beautiful weather and it was really special to get together our families who jetted in literally from the four corners of the globe!

We hired a red route master bus (for those who don't know, it's a traditional London open-backed bus) to take all the guests to the venue - a beautiful farm an hour outside London. We had the ceremony in front of this little pond in the shade of a 500 year old Oak tree.

A reception on the lush green lawn (well, it had been raining all summer!) followed by the most delicious lunch, then dancing and more dancing! At 5pm a full English Tea was served - scones, little sandwiches and yummy cakes with tea from Mariage Frères. Then even more dancing before everyone was taken home by bus.

I had so much fun I forgot to throw my bouquet till the very end and am very happy to say that my lovely sister-in-law caught it, which makes me very happy!

The next day we left for Japan, for a three week trip (but much more of that to come later...)

Back in Paris now to the reality of Autumn (in September!!!) and time to knuckle down to some real work. But first  I promise that over the next few posts I will share some of the amazing sights of Japan....

Getting ready to fly away

In the next few day we will be off to London for our wedding and the day after we fly off to Japan for our honeymoon. Excited doesn't even come close...! We will be gone for nearly four weeks and although I know I should be more excited by the wedding, between you and me, I am much more excited by the holiday!

Over the last few days we have been slowly packing, cleaning and arranging the apartment ready for friends from Texas who will be house-sitting. Our beloved plants are being looked after by friends with a balcony around the corner. So yesterday, we carefully packed them into fruit crates and carried them round to their new temporary home.

Our view of the courtyard is so much bleaker without the swaying heads of lavender and Oxalis flowers. My lovely strawberry plant that I have nurtured so carefully looks set to fruit just in time for our friends to enjoy them! (That is if their cats don't get them first..) It's quite amazing how empty the apartment feels now with our little green leafy friends gone and it reminds me how much I would like a little balcony to fill with even more plants.

I will be back at the end of August with lots of photos of our trip so I wish you all a very nice summer...

Wedding Fever

As we get closer to August, our wedding plans are starting to really take shape. Stress levels are going up all round, as we make lists of all the last minute tasks still to be done.

With so much family coming from abroad there are lists for everything - table plans, photo lists, a list of passengers for the route master bus that will drive everyone to where the wedding will take place, emails flying across the globe with detailed instructions for how to find hotels, how to use the tube, where to go for a nice meal...it goes on and on.

Somewhere in the middle of all this I find myself so far from the simple, uncomplicated wedding I would have liked. The word "compromise" is tattooed on my brain as I try my very best to keep everyone around me happy.

After several high octane rows  with my parents, I have decided to concede all and just try and get through the next few weeks in the calmest way possible. I am trying to concentrate on the things that give me the greatest pleasure - sharing a special day with our family all together, seeing friends who live far away, spending a day in a beautiful setting, serving everyone great food with wonderful music playing in the background, the wonderful flowers like the ones in the picture and hopefully....fingers crossed....some sunshine?

More wedding whatever

After my little rant yesterday (for the background rant see my post on Thirty Voices) I finally managed to finish all the invites. Just waiting for my lovely sister-in-law to post over stamps from the US for the RSVP envelopes and  they'll be ready to go.

One of the things we had forgotten was a wedding list. We already have nearly two of everything - from my flat in London and our flat here. What we would really like is cash. But it is just not done to put on an invite "please make cheques payable to.." What a shame we are not Greek - they've got it covered with the pin-money-on-the-bride thing - very clever!

Unfortunately we're Jewish so the politics of a wedding list are far more complicated. My parents got 7 tea sets when they got married and nearly 40 years later they still have a cupboard full of things they hardly ever use. So for fear of receiving endless crystal vases and cheese plates we found this service - 1001listes.

The idea is that you can pick items from over 40 shops and services and we can  change the things on the list at any point. After the wedding they give you a kind of credit card to use in all the store and you have up to three years to use the credit. Since most of our guests are in the US and UK, it's great for us to have a list on line - and there are no tea sets on our list!

Wedding madness

I am either very lucky or a glutton for punishment. I am going to have two weddings. Or rather we already had one and the next one is this August. 

In February we had a lovely civil wedding here in Paris with just our closest friends and family. We were 20 people in all and after the 15 minute ceremony at the local town hall we had lunch in a lovely Corsican restaurant on the Quai de Montebello opposite Notre Dame. It was a beautiful sunny warm day, the lunch was delicious and the atmosphere relaxed and low-key. Everything we wanted.

This August we will be having our religious wedding, or rather our families will be having their wedding. It seems that it is impossible to organise a big family wedding without everybody getting involved and eventually hijacking all the arrangements.

We would have liked a small wedding, less than 100 people, no huge fuss, just a sweet little ceremony in my parent's back garden with dancing and some food. Somehow this wedding has taken on it's own life - 300 people invited, big marquee, double decker buses to ferry the guests in, ushers, wedding bands and discussion of colour schemes.

I'm trying very hard to just go along with it, to let it wash over me and keep agreeing with everyone. But as my mother's hysteria reaches fever pitch and our cross-channel phone calls are carried out at a volume that could break glass, I just want to run away.

So this afternoon, much as I would love to relax in the sunshine, I will be running back to the BHV department store to buy more invitations. My brother has just decided to invite some friends and I'm all out of envelopes...