Chatiryworld

One year on

It's really bizarre to think that a year ago this moment we were tucking into barbecue goodies at our wedding.  In some ways it feels like yesterday and in others more than a year ago due to everything we've done this year.  Time can be so strange.

This is one of my favourite photos from the day, by my brother Rory (you can see lots more here).  It was taken not long after the ceremony and before all the official photos meant tiredness had set in.  We had both been nervous about the ceremony, not because of the act of getting married, but in case one or both of us collapsed or completely broke down in floods of tears.  We didn't though, and it was well worth all the preparation and (what turned out to be unecessary) worry.  So here we are grinning with happiness.

We're off on a Highland jaunt for a few days, it's been very warm and sunny here in Edinburgh over the weekend, will we continue our run of amazing weather on our northern holidays?  Who knows!  In the meantime, watch this fabulous Elbow song, it was on our wedding soundtrack:

Honeymoon in Cornwall.

Some of you may remember that way back in the midsts of time we planned to go for a massive adventure around Scandinavia for our honeymoon.  But then we went to Brussels and got a little freaked out by just how weak the pound was (although our financial advisor has been helping Jon come to terms with the whole credit crunch thing), plus Scandinavian countries aren't the cheapest.  So we had a look at some other options: Highlands, France etc and in the end decided to go and see what Cornwall had to offer.  It was a brilliant plan.  Not only did we not go broke within two days, we also didn't knacker ourselves out with almost constant travelling.  The day after the wedding we were struggling to keep our eyes open and the idea of a few days of train travel just made me want to throw up.  (I didn't.)

So, where did we go and what did we do?  We consulted Alistair Sawday's Special Places to Stay website to find, um, some special places to stay.  We soon came up with a little tour itinery:

1 night at the Cheltenham Lawn Hotel to break the long journey
2 nights at Anchorage House near St Austell (quickly renamed St Awful) and walking distance from the Eden Project.
2 nights at the Boskerris Hotel in St Ives
2 nights at Ednovean Farm in Perranuthnoe near Penzance
5 nights self-catering at Badger's Hollow near Fowey

All the Cornish accommodation was amazing, each in it's own different way.  Out of the hotels/B&Bs I think Ednovean was my favourite.  It wasn't as out and out luxurious as the others but it had a lovely homely feel to it.  We had our own little courtyard looking out over St Michael's Mount and there was a massive pile of house p0rn for me to read.  Badger's Hollow was also pretty spectacular, to the extent that we couldn't work some of the high tech stuff in there.  We were also able to have our own version of Springwatch, lying in bed watching rabbits, having a pheasant come and have a nosy through the patio doors.  It was also great to have 5 days of not having to get up and leave the premises until the afternoon.

What did we do?  Pottered about mainly.  We went to the Eden Project and it totally lived up to the hype, even in the rain.  We got there not long after it opened and I would definitely recommend doing that, especially if you are there in the school holidays as we were.  The owner of Badger's Hollow told us that the most popular days are Tuesdays and Wednesdays, not the weekends as many people think.  This is because most people take self-catering holidays in Cornwall and spend the weekend settling in and the weekdays Doing Things.  Eden had definitely got stupidly busy as we left.

In St Ives we went to the Bernard Leach Pottery, wasn't really Jon's sort of thing but I liked it.  I also went to the Tate and the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Garden while Jon sketched and went to a real ale festival.  It felt like a kind of pilgrimage for me as I spent a lot of time in the Pier Arts Centre in Orkney as a child, where there is a permanent collection of works from the St Ives school.  It was good to see the place for real.  Apart from that St Ives was a very, very busy town that couldn't take the stupid amount of cars and people that were there.  I couldn't even be bothered to look in many of the cute little shops.

The weather got really hot in St Ives and stayed that way for most of the rest of the trip.  In Perranuthnoe we attempted to walk to St Michael's Mount but got as far as the Mount Haven Hotel in Marazion where we spent a stupid amount of money on water and decided to make our way back.  We loved Perranuthnoe, a lovely wee village with a beautiful beach and the famous Victoria Inn, where we had two fantastic meals.

Then on to Fowey, where we just kicked back and relaxed.  We walked down to Fowey every day for a big lunch and sometimes afternoon tea and to buy a few bits for dinner.  Yum.  We did have plans to try and see the Lost Gardens of Heligan but by public transport it was a bit complicated from there.  We plan to return to Cornwall some time and will make sure we stay somewhere on the Heligan bus route!  Fowey was a pretty little town, crowded but not on the scale of St Ives.

And where did we eat?  Lots of good places.  First was Austells, an unassuming place on a shopping parade well away from the centre of St Awful.  But it was great!  It was Pie Club so dinner was more bargainous than it would have been otherwise.  In St Ives we dined at our hotel in the evenings (residents only) but on the last day had lunch at the wonderful Porthminster Beach Cafe.  Not only did it have a tasty vegetarian option on the main menu, there was a whole other separate vegetarian menu as well.  Fantastic! 

Perranuthnoe saw us bag the last table in the Victoria Inn, highly highly recommended.  We were also enchanted by The Cabin, a non-descript looking shed by the beach that sold delicious home baking and things like homemade hoummous and cordials.  Between leaving there and arriving in Fowey we spent a couple of hours in Penzance where we lunched at Archie Browns vegetarian cafe.  It was too hot to truly appreciate all the tempting hot dishes but my jacket potato and salads were gorgeous.  Our food highlight in Fowey was the Dwelling House, a B&B/tearoom on the main street.  You can't miss it, it has knitted cakes in the window.  The kitchen was open with cakes coming fresh from the Aga.  We also ate at Food for Thought and Pinky Murphy's, the latter was more interesting and eccentric.

All the photos I took are here.  Thanks to everyone who suggested places to eat and things to do, I seemed to get loads out of the Atheist and Agnostic Crafters Group on Ravelry, a lot of Cornwall fans on there!  We didn't do Scandinavia, but it definitely remains on our list of must-do adventures.

Jon's wedding posts

You should read them.  Settle down with your beverage and snack of choice, and maybe a box of tissues, as they are lovely and long.  Apparently there are more to come as well.

How I Got Married
Saturday Night Wedding Fever
The Groom Wore Blue

Moving, not moving, leaving...

It's been an odd week, first we were moving and getting very excited, then we weren't moving, then we might have been moving and then we decided definitely not to move.  It was all to do with money and sums and mortgages and other really grown up stuff.  On top of that it was my last week in my current post (I start my new one tomorrow, hurrah!) and whilst I have really been wanting to get out, I will really miss the people.  So an emotional week too.  Here's some photos from our honeymoon in Cornwall, I'll blog about that another time, but just thought I should check in.

Moments

• Hearing our clarsach players (they play with my dad in Kilairum) rendition of the bagpipe music from Orkney Wedding with Sunrise by Peter Maxwell Davies.  Beautiful.
• My mum and family seeing our dear friends from Orkney for the first time since 1993, it was the only time I cried that day.
• Everybody giving Emily (The Cutest Bridesmaid Ever) a wave during the ceremony.
• Saying our vows and exchanging rings.
• Finally allowing myself to look at all our guests after our vows and realising there were a lot of tears.
• Jon whispering 'you're my wife now' after we signed the register.
• Walking back down the aisle, glancing up to the balcony and seeing the Book Trust staff who had sneaked in to watch the ceremony, they had big grins on their faces.
• Guests of all ages enjoying the bubbles we provided.
• Finally getting a photo of me and my siblings all together, the wedding day was the first time my brothers had met my sisters on my mums side.
• Our sisters all getting on like a house on fire.
• Two little girls who had never met before becoming firm friends (and getting me to read a story to them later!)
• Taking Emily for a walk around the bookshelves of the library at the Book Trust.  My dress was big enough to protect her from the scary giant ladybird toy, which several other small people were merrily hurling themselves onto.
• Guests wanting to snuggle up to my shawl.
• People being totally wowed by the cake.
• My dad's girlfriend's son asking me if he was allowed to take the books in the library home.  If only.
• Marilou presenting Emily with a picture book from Belgium.  She's probably a fluent French speaker by now.
• Walking up to Marlin's Wynd with Kal heckling the other wedding party who were coming down the hill.
• Gregor carrying a bin liner full of Tunnocks goodies up to Marlin's Wynd.
• Evening guests applauding us as we came down the stairs.
• Our sisters trying to sing a Girls Aloud song over the music, only to realise that said music was Come on Eileen and was more fun to dance and sing along to.
• Kal saying his goodbyes only to return a few minutes later having decided he didn't want to go home after all.  Yay!
• Lucien and Marilou recreating the video of Fat Boy Slim's Praise You.
• My cousin's 2 year old, Callum, dancing to Adam Buxton's The Hours song.
• Jon and I giggling when we heard the Adam and Joe pirate radio clips we'd inserted in the playlist.  It's unlikely anyone else noticed them.
• Kal deciding it was time to eat more cake, so went off in search of a knife, cut it up and handed a load out.
• Marlin's Wynd staff complementing us on the music.
• Al and Carrie dancing to Born to Run.
• Seeing people write masterpieces in our guest book - and then enjoying reading them all the next day.

Things I didn't see but would have liked to:

• Emily headbanging to the clarsach music.
• My mum and MM wanting to nip in to the PDSA shop between venues to have a look at something from Clothkits (retro version).

There's probably more, but these are the things that have stuck out for me the most.  It was a truly wonderful day and I am married to a truly wonderful man.

Back

I'll write more soon.  This great photo by our friend Marilou Guisset is of us all walking up  the Royal Mile from the Scottish Book Trust to Marlin's Wynd for evening shenanigans.  As we were walking up another wedding party was walking down (minus the bride and groom, don't they know walking is the new travelling-in-a-vintage-Rolls?) and Kal (pictured here on the left carrying the cake) took great pleasure in calling out 'Our cake's bigger than your cake!' and 'You're not vowing anymore!'  It was moments like that I want to remember most, and I'm planning on doing a post full of them.

If you'd like to nose at our official wedding photos by Kate Brandwood, please feel free to do so here.  I think she enjoyed taking some of the more amusing shots involving Jon and the boys, and the one of Emily's dad reading the book about taking drugs (there was a small library in the Book Trust that many people dived into), not something you get in most wedding albums but I like that's it's there.

Married

But way too tired to blog about it, plus I need lots of photos of the day to illustrate a post, so you'll just have to wait for a couple of weeks to find out more.  In the meantime enjoy some of our wedding cake, it's a baumkuchen from Falko Konditormeister.

It was an absolutely amazing day, love and thanks to everyone who came and our families for all their help.  Three of our friends didn't make it yesterday, Jill and her family were much missed but a big welcome to the world to baby Angus who decided to arrive a few days early.

We're getting married in the morning

This beautiful personalised boat is a gift from our friends in Orkney, we love it.

Yikes, this getting married business is tiring!  We're pretty much ready though, got the hall all decorated this morning.  Big thanks to Jon's mum for doing the driving and Ben and Stu for helping carry the drink.  It's been quite a week, Jon's muscle sprain turned out to be pretty bad and he got signed off work.  Fortunately physiotherapy has down wonders and he's walking much better.  Plus we had to co-ordinate repairs to the bathroom.

We decorated the hall this morning and are having a quiet afternoon/evening before the madness of tomorrow.  Hopefully I'll blog before we go away on Monday but if not, see you in a couple of weeks!

The faces of poetry

Jon and I currently feature on the homepage for BBC Radio 3's Poetry Season.  If that seems completely random, let me explain.  The photo was taken about 10 minutes after we got engaged and I titled it using a quote from Edwin Muir's The Confirmation.  This was one of the poems selected by presenter Mary Anne Kennedy for the season, and when someone from the BBC searched for images using the same quote I used as a title, they got our photo.  I thought the photo might appear on a page about the poem, rather than the general one as it's not really clear why we're there.  Not that it matters, we (and you) know why.

I am finding it very surreal that people start arriving in Edinburgh tomorrow for our wedding.  I'd blog more about it all but I'm finding it all pretty tiring.  Nearly there though when all our hard work will be worth it.

Now we can get married

For the shawl, it is finished.  I've stopped feeling emotional about it now but it continues to amaze me.  Because it is knit from angora, which sheds everywhere, I've mainly knit it with the majority of the body tucked in a bag, so I hadn't really seen it properly laid out (apart from taking this photo, which I did very quickly before I went to work one morning).  Now it's blocked and I've been able to see how the patterns fit together, spot my little mistakes (!) and also enjoy not working on complicated lace whilst more and more bunny hair goes all over the sofa (going to have to take a clothes brush to the wedding to keep Jon's suit looking nice).

The pattern is Papay, by Orkney knitting designer Liz Lovick, and was designed with weddings in mind.  I would knit it again, but not in angora.  At the time I was so carried away with having an Orkney connection to the day that I saw beyond the practicalities and bought a load of Orkney Angora.  But if the chilly May weather continues I'll be very glad I made the shawl.

Tea for ten

Yesterday saw hen do number two, an afternoon tea party at The Roseleaf in Leith.  We squashed round a rickety old table piled high with mismatching vintage china, (Croila was in her element) cucumber sandwiches and cakes.  Some people opted for the alcoholic version, pot-tails, cocktails served in teapots that you drink from teacups, that's what you can see in the bottom left photo.  Even Iggle Piggle joined in the fun as nearly-two-year-old Alex attended his first hen party.

Thanks ladies (and boy!) for coming and making it a really enjoyable afternoon, just what I was hoping for and not a stripper or L plate in sight!

6 weeks and a day

The wedding is rapidly approaching and there's still plenty to do.  I'm trying to knit at least 20 rows of the edging on my shawl every night to have it done by the end of the month.  Then will come the fu of working out how to block angora.  I am slightly regretting my choice of yarn as it sheds everywhere but I did want as many Orkney connections as I could find.

On Monday we wore ourselves out by going to see the new venue manager of our daytime place, taking our forms to the registry office who neglect to inform people on their website that you need to make an appointment for this.  Then they insisted we put 'religious ceremony' on our envelope which irked me.  I know legally that Humanist ceremonies are seen as religious, that's why you can have them, but it is about as unreligious as you can get.  Grrr.  Then we decided to go to John Lewis and finish the gift list, too many people about but I suppose it is the school holidays.

Other people have been crafting for the wedding, here is the bowl for the rings made by one of my dads, Hugh, resting on some bunting made by one of my sisters, Ellen.  Both look great, but it's impossible to get a decent photo of the bunting in the flat.  Hugh is also going to make a little ring for me to thread ribbons on for Emily to hold, a bit like these but with shorter ribbon so she doesn't get tangled up!

This weekend sees the Writing Of The Vows so our lovely celebrant Juliet has something to say, and we have something to promise on the day.  I suppose we could ad-lib with 'I love you more than anything else in the world and want to spend the rest of my life with you now let's eat cake' but we both feel the beginning of our marriage warrants something a bit more serious than that.  I also need to make a start on the outdoor bunting, plus have my final dress fitting.  Nearly there!

Tagine, bags and weddings

After enjoying delicious and healthy food at Leon in London last year, we decided to buy their cookbook .  It arrived last week and this week I made Jossy's Vegetable Tagine.  It was brilliant, the recipe worked really well and I wasn't left with lots of watery juices like I usually am when making something like this.  Tomorrow I'm going to make their sweet potato falafel.

Apartment Therapy have a post about a weird green dilemma - too many reusable bags.  I've been thinking about this for ages as we have loads given as gifts and freebies.  Sometimes I wonder if we have more of them than plastic bags.  I prefer bags like Onya that fold up very compactly so you can always keep them in your handbag.

Three months and two days until we get married!  I think I'm about to get ridiculously over-excited about it all.  The dress is at the dressmakers, the rings have just arrived and I'm arranging hen-type activities (lunch in Leeds for Yorkshire folk and a tea party in Edinburgh for people up here).  I got a huge roll of ribbon for 50p from a charity shop to make the garden bunting with.  I'm also not too far off finishing my shawl.  I've resisted temptation to get some bride and groom toilet roll though.  Much more tasteful is this lovely wedding over at Style Me Pretty.

Wedding, making, doing, thinking...

We're about to make our wedding website password-only (there are some idiots out there who think it's fun to cancel other people's weddings using the details they put on their sites, plus there's the whole personal safety thing) so I may well go back to posting random wedding stuff on here.  I went through a phase of posting 'Weddings I Heart' for a while and today found one that fits the bill.  Seth and Dionna had a lovely outdoor countryside wedding, I love her dress and the knitted shrug and the grooms outfit.

Maker Faire is coming to the UK!  And not to London or Birmingham or Manchester or places that are just that bit too far to get to from Edinburgh for the day.  It's in Newcastle, a comfortable train ride away.

The atheist bus campaign has spread across the UK, will look out for one in Glasgow tomorrow.  Of course lots of people are complaining about them to the Advertising Standards Authority and some MPs want to ban them.  There's been a discussion about this on the Atheist and Agnostic Crafters group on Ravelry and a few of us are thinking of making lots of counter complaints against some of the hateful religious advertising telling us we are going to hell.  There are also posters on the London Tube now as well, I really like these as they include a further quote from Douglas Adams.

Love, marriage and Proposition 8

When Jon and I went to meet our wedding celebrant she explained that part of the wedding ceremony included our views on marriage and what it means to us.  We're not gay, we live in the UK where civil partnership is legal and our wedding isn't going to be a political statement, but this clip below gives a lot of food for thought: