Duck Wedding

As my esteemed colleague, crazybrave mentioned the other day, I have upcoming nuptuals. Very upcoming nuptuals, actually. I have been telling myself that they are a couple of months away, but with the start of November yesterday I have had to come to terms with the fact that I have only 3 1/2 weeks left.

This is my second wedding, and Best Beloved's first. Neither of us are very taken with the idea of a big wedding, we just want to wake up one day and be married. Unfortunately, to do that, you have to go through some sort of ceremony. In the Territory of the Free it is not possible to just stand in front of an official desk and do the bare minimum. Apparently they no longer have a dedicated room for ceremonies. So in Canberra the bare minimum is hiring a celebrant. We did look across the borders, but to have a registry wedding in Sydney involves starting with an appointment during office hours just to set a date, and neither of us have time to visit Sydney during the week. Civil wedding facilities in sunny Queanbeyan involve standing in the foyer of the courthouse with a Judge between 4 and 4.30pm on a Thursday afternoon. Not really to our taste, especially as you had to take a chance as to who would be in the foyer with you, waiting for their hearings. And every time I rang someone about having a simple registry wedding, the vibe on the phone was "Why don't you get out there and do this properly, you tight twats?"

There's a very simple answer to this vibe. Because I have better things to do with my energy and money than spend at least $20,000 and over a year of planning on a day that I won't even enjoy due to anxiety that I'm not doing it right. Best Beloved and I like buying books, eating and paying off the mortgage on our tiny little house. We don't need masses of white fabric, scads of flowers and a limitless bar tab. We have a friend who is getting married in October next year, and she's already been planning it for over a year already! We have a sweep going on how much she's spending, and the general consensus is not under $40,000. It's a number that takes my breath away.

My first wedding was a simple affair (and a fantastic party, thanks to my terrific friends) but it will look like Charles and Diana's wedding compared to this second one. We decided that if we had to get a celebrant, then we might as well have a celebrant marrying us somewhere we liked being. So we are going coastal. We shall stand on the beach, barefoot and splendid in something nice to wear, and say our vows in front of our immediate family. Bumblebee will get to participate in the ceremony by holding rings and saying a po-em, and then we shall sit down somewhere shady with a case of champagne and a bucket of prawns. Divine. Friends are grumbling, but hell, it's our day. I'm sure we shall celebrate with them some other way.

OK, I've cheered myself up and distracted myself from impending American doom. Everyone send good thoughts into the ether tonight to boost Kerry's voting appeal.