SWF Seeks A New BFF

No not me don't worry! Having just celebrated ten years of marriage, I think Mr. TheBoyandMe might be a little concerned to see me using asingles dating service.

The other day the 'My Pictures' screensaver started up on the laptop. The Boy absolutely adores watching the pictures flash up and was fascinated by one of them that he hasn't seen before; a group shot of our wedding. I opened up the picture for him to study in greater detail and we spent a good ten minutes identifying the people in it. He realised who mummy and daddy were, could find the immediate relatives but some of the extended family were a bit trickier, and some of his cousins were just a twinkle in their daddies' eyes at the time.

Looking around the group was fascinating to see the relationships that have flourished or withered since our wedding day. Two of the couples were married within a few months of us (one of them since divorced sadly, the other still on the up), two more marriages have had their trials and tribulations but still going strong, one couple split with my friend now happily married to her millionaire (I kid you not) and a little Welsh Cake cooking, one has since found her dream husband, and one just seems to have no luck.

For this final friend, my heart breaks. All she wants is to settle down and have a family, but it's just not happening. Having moved from Cardiff to the south coast of England earlier this year to settle down with someone who she thought was Mr. Right, she's found out he was Mr. Alright-Not-Now-Love-I'm-Busy-Talking-To-This-Other-Woman and has had to relocate cities and jobs again.

I'm not sure why she has such difficulty; she's slim, attractive, bubbly, successful (a store manager in a well-known high-street store), caring and funny. Somehow though, she seems to keep finding men who are incapable of maintaining a relationship for longer than a year. I've told her that she needs to look at the relationships in a different light, base them on friendship for longevity rather than his ability to hold a pint of lager, packet of crisps and a cheeky vimto without spilling a drop. She has decided that she will be using an online dating facility from now on, and at least that way she can get all the awkward questions out the way and sort the wheat from the chaff!

I'm hoping that when I've finished celebrating the next ten years of wedded bliss, I will look at that picture and be safe in the knowledge that she found Mr. Right and not another Mr. Alright-You'll-Do!

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Listography: My Wedding

This week, Kate has decided to be slightly patriotic and commemorate the Royal Wedding by dedicating her Listography to the Kate that suddenly became a Catherine. In order to show solidarity to the lady entering the world of wife-dom, we need to share with the world '5 Things We Would Change About Our Wedding.'

Despite always saying that I wouldn't change a thing about my wedding, I can very easily think of five things. And they are not funny!

  • The Photographer

Our photographer was the same one that my sister had used six years before and her photos were amazing. Ours? Not so much. She got married in September with early-afternoon Autumnal sunshine; I got married at 3pm in late November. I've since come to the conclusion that the photographer could not have ballsed hers up because everything was handed to him on a platter. However, there was very little thought when it came to our photos.

We got married in 2001 before people were really using digital cameras and so his was a 'film' camera. He didn't wind the film on properly and all the photos taken before the wedding, of my husband and his family, and of my dad and I in the car and walking up the drawbridge, did not get taken. I found this out straight away and it upset me before I'd even walked inside the venue. The flash he used was too bright, resulting in an over-exposed foreground and a background entirely blacked out. In 90% of the photographs I am blinking because of the flash.

This year we will have been married for ten years and I still do not have a wedding album because the 'official photographs' upset me too much.

  • The Best Man

Absolute idiot. Let's just check here: is it acceptable to say "I don't know the bride at all but I can talk about the groom's ex-girlfriend"? Is it?! And it is acceptable to ignore the deathly silence? The only thing acceptable about his speech was when my new mother-in-law told him to shut up and sit down.

  • The Cake

My mother paid £200 for our cake, which back in 2001 was a lot of money. It was a beautiful fruit cake but the decoration was atrocious. I asked for white chocolate covering, and hand-made sugar flowers shaped like hydrangea flowers in a purple-blue sprinkled over as if they were falling down the cake. I got a white chocolate covering with icing piped around the join in the middle of the two tiers where she'd left the cake-board in (WHY?!) and pink daisies glued all over with silver dusting. I looked at it, said "thank you very much", got in the car and sobbed. We went straight home where mum and I prized all the flowers off. Too late, it was ruined. Thankfully one of the waitresses in the hotel had done a cake-decorating course and came in four hours early the next day to re-ice it whilst my mum contacted the florist who created a fresh-flower centrepiece.

  • Evening Reception

This is just a weenie after-thought here. We got married at 3pm, and because of that we sat down to eat at the reception at 5pm-ish. By the time people had eaten, terrible, awful speeches had happened (my husband wrote his that morning on a scrap of yellow envelope: I will never forgive him), toasts, and the magician (yes we did and he was brilliant!) had happened, it was 8pm plus. We didn't have a disco or a first dance, because we don't Neither do any of our family. However, this meant that it all basically fizzled out by 9.30pm which was a shame. I wish we'd had some form of evening entertainment and a small buffet. A friend of ours had bacon butties as the late-night snack which struck me as genius.

  • Preparation

We were fairly young when we got married, I was 23 and hubby was 26. Not having been married before, we didn't really think some of the things about the ceremony through, for example the actual service. Oh, we chose the vows, had readings (my sister forgot hers but I knew she would so had a copy ready) and got all the main bits correct. But I remember distinctly walking into the ante-chamber in the castle, looking at the registrar and saying "I don't know what to do!" Turns out that my husband-to-be had said exactly the same thing! We were living in Reading at the time, but got married in Cardiff mid-term and so couldn't get back to meet with her and discuss the service. We literally had no idea what the hell was going to happen! But we managed it, and yes, we both fluffed our lines.

Saying all of this above makes the wedding sound trouble-ridden. It was not, it was one of the best days of my life which I remember being distinctly happy and relaxed about. So much so, that my mother had to wake me up in the morning at 11am to start getting ready!

Now pop over to Kate's blog to check out the other Listographies.

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