Naming fish...

Several weeks ago, we were being even more rubbish at the weekly pubquiz than normal, so we started making a list of all the fish we could think of. In the last 30 hours, we have done our very best to eat as many of the fish on the list as we could. So far we have eaten...

(Tuesday evening)
prawns
crevettes
sea bass
plaice
hake
lemon sole
crayfish
(Wednesday, and we cooked most of these ourselves too)
mussels (x2 dishes)
cockles (x2 dishes)
clams (x2 dishes)
prawns (again)
lobster
mackeral
squid
hake (again, and I got to fillet it - it's a beast and a half)
lemon sole (again, and a real fiddly little sucker to fillet)
tiger prawns

....and of course the notorious pasty (I'm sure it's a type of fish if you look hard enough)

No shortages of Omega3 oils here! And as if that's not enough, we're off fishing tomorrow on a boat to catch some more... maybe even a pollock (but not Jackson).

Photos

Katie did a fantastic job as our last-minute stand-in photographer, even though her hat wasn't quite Nikon compliant. She took over 600 pictures, and the best ones are here (you'll have to flick past pictures of cake making first!). They're hopefully in chronological order, although I can't remember some of them happening!

The flickr group pool is at flickr.com/groups/getting-hitched/. People have started to put their pictures there, and fine they are too. If you're not sure how to do it, follow these easy steps:

1) Sign up for a www.flickr.com account. It's free and spam free. Upload your photos of the wedding (and other things too, if you want!)

2) Once you are signed in to flickr, go to the getting hitched group homepage (here). Join the group (there should be a link for this somewhere on the right-hand side of the page)

3) When you are a member of the group, you need to add your photos to the group pool. Sounds complicated but it's easy really, honest. At the top of the flickr page, click on "organise". All of your pictures should appear in a line at the bottom of the screen.

4) At the top of the screen there are some tabs. Click on "your groups". This should (hopefully) show the groups you belong to.

5) Click on the picture(s) you want to add to the getting hitched group, then just drag the picture over the top of the group name.

6) That's it.

Alternatively, if this technology business defeats you, stick your pictures on a CD and mail them to us and we'll do the faffing for you.

Almost There

It's 11:30, we have lots of sausages, there's 4 and a half hours to go and I've been doing the most amazing curry farts ever.

The night before the morning of...

Julia (sage advisor and person wot has had to do wedding things before) said that we should put a time limit on our faffing tonight. She is one mighty wise woman. By 9.00pm we had pretty much finished sorting Pears School (reception venue) and I went into faffy-tired mode, which involved picking up boxes and moving them from place to place but not actually achieving anything. Luckily my Guides had come down to help for a couple of hours and they had done everything important by then.

To ensure that we finished on time, we booked a table for 10 at the local curry house. After all, when meeting lots of new relatives (who have never had the misfortune of meeting you), it is ideal to smell of garlic and coriander and to have tumeric-stained fingers. Luckily, I now meet all of these criteria.

Time now for bed. Zzzzzzz.....

Cake making - stage three

Stage 1.
Remember where you stashed the cakes when you made them several weeks ago. In the case of one cake it was easy: it never made it off the kitchen table. The others we located in the Camping Cupboard, the flat's resident tardis and store of all things random.

Stage 2.
Clear a space in the kitchen. This involves moving boxes and boxes of wine, and reshuffling paperwork to take up less space. Wipe table (see - hygenic as ever)


Stage 3:
Unwrap the cakes...


and lay them on the board-covered-in-metallic-paper


Stage 4:
Line the cakes up so that they are roughly the same height. Try to get them central on the board, then give up. Decide not to trim them so that they fit snugly, because then someone gets the special present of marzipan-polyfilla. Yummmmmy!


Stage 5:
Cover the cake in apricot jam. Why apricot? I know it's traditional, but why? Or is this just of the great unanswerable questions of our time?


Stage 6:
Roll out your marzipan and get kneading. And rolling. And kneading. And rolling. And... until your knuckles give out.


Stage 7:
Place the marzipan on top of the jam-covered cake. How hard can it be? Repeat, ad infinitum.


Stage 8:
Fill all of the gaps between the marzipan with more marzipan. I love marzipan, me - I just hope our guests do too!


Stage 9:
Wipe all excess jam, icing sugar and other assorted gunk from the cake board. Stand back and give a big sigh of relief. Tick "marzipan cake" off the To Do list.

Productive day

The cake is unwrapped and marzipanned (is that a word?!) and the photos uploaded. Installment three in the Cake Epic will come tomorrow when I have had time to string the pictures together with words.

Yikes!

As the days tick past, and we're well into single figures now, the To Do list is getting increasingly longer... I think it's currently standing at 5 pages long. This evening is the wedding rehearsal, so we know where to stand, what to say, and how slowly to walk down the aisle. It's suddenly very close. We have, however, finalised the Order of Service sheet and I am pleased to announce that our hymns are Tell Out My Soul, When A Knight Won His Spurs, and At The Name Of Jesus. You'd best get practising!

In other news, the wine arrived yesterday (all seven boxes of it) and we spent the weekend buying last-minute things, including the entire stock of Pimms from a local supermarket. The checkout lady's face was a picture as we put 22 bottles through her till! We also discovered our first (and hopefully last!) wedding disaster, but I'll leave that for Rob to write about (seeing as it was his disaster). Other than that, it's all exciting and I can't wait for Saturday! Hurrah!!

Henning

I've always viewed the stereotypical hen party - flashing L-plates, inflated condoms and screaming women who are old enough to know better - with a good pinch of disdain. What with the lack of time and the long list of other commitments, I was quite happy to give the hen night a miss and to hold a chicken party at some point in the summer, after dealing with the wedding, South Africa and moving house. My carefully laid plans were, however, upset by sixty or so teenage girls and their housemistress, who were all looking for a good excuse to let their hair down.

Last night was the appointed night. Although they did make me wear a flashing L-plate, they stuck it on my back, so my sensibilties weren't too offended; after all, out of sight, out of mind. I only really noticed it when I sat down on it. There was lots of food, cocktails, a chocolate fountain, and the sixth form girls had even arranged some strippers.* There were silly games, giant jenga, a limbo competition, and I impressed them with my performance in Fluffy Bunnies. All in all, it was a good night, if being at a party where the majority of people are under the legal drinking age can be classed as "good", and I dread to think what the photos are like!

* I spent most of this part of the evening with hands over my eyes going, "Nooooooooo!!". After all, I've got to teach most of strippers on Monday morning.

Stagging... or should that be Staggering

Ten Pin bowling dressed as Batman.
A list of questions (What is Mad’s bra size? What colour are her eyes?)
A list of forfeits (Find the oldest person here and offer to buy them a drink. Find somebody with a hat and ask to try it on.)
A curry
The After Dark (The best club in Reading and possibly the country)

It could only be the stag night.

The brother did a fantastic job of making sure that everybody was in the right place at the right time, with suitable drinking stops on the way and (in a non-competitive way) the Court brothers did reign supreme during the bowling. Although that may have been because Anthony is actually good at bowling and I was wearing a Batman cape, which improved my game by at least twenty points.
The two main objectives of the evening were met, everybody enjoyed themselves and nobody woke up missing an eyebrow.
There was a couple of disposable cameras floating about all day, but whether the photographs end up on the internet may depend on whether they are sent to me or Mad.