Now I know why marriage is for life....

...Because that wedding took a year and a half of planning, so it better be bloody worth it!

I'm currently struggling with how to describe the sequence of events that is our wedding story. Should I start with the story of how husband proposed (which was pretty decent) and move linearly, or should I talk about it in any old order? I think I'm going to settle for some combination of the two (i.e. you'll get the proposal story first, but I can't talk about the wedding without talking about the planning of it first. Also, the engagement party story can come later).

Right, so planning a wedding...

The first part is deciding where and when to get married. I knew I wanted to get married in Malta, rather than England or somewhere else, and made a deal with husband - I get a Maltese wedding, and he gets me to take his surname. Fine...done.

Picking a date was slightly more difficult. No point getting married in winter. But summer is too hot! Can you imagine getting your hair and makeup done in 35 degree, humid weather? Right then - May or June were the obvious options. Then dad put a spanner in the works (there's always one family member who will do this) and said that June is too hot and actually so is May. So we compromised on the beginning of May. Hilariously, once we found our venue, the only date they had available (a year and a half away) was Sunday 14th May - my parents' anniversary and Mother's Day in Malta. Anyway, we went with that even though we knew there would be some complaints (and boy were there!)

Picking the venue should be fun, but is actually quite difficult when you don't live in the country where you're getting married. I put together a spreadsheet (naturally) with a list of venues, and then used a range of criteria to score each venue. Criteria included price, size, location, and uniqueness of the venue. We wanted somewhere beautiful, Mediterranean, with a great open space but with indoor options in case of bad weather. A hotel was out of the question - why bother getting married in Malta if you're going to be in a hotel? Ultimately, the obvious choice was the Castello dei Baroni - a little castle in the middle of nowhere with a Knight of St John theme. We both fell in love with the place :D

The Castello

I won't go into the details of every step of the wedding planning. We were so lucky to have mummy doing all the footwork in Malta, and dad footing the bill. We found our priest (Father Tony), our church (Santa Marija Parish in Attard - I was baptised there), our band (Crosswalk, although we nearly lost them to the Eurovision song contest!) and our caterers (Neriku - fantastic up and coming catering company who bent over backwards to accommodate us on all our crazy requirements).

The one question I got asked by basically everyone (ok, everyone female) in the year leading up to the big day was whether I had a dress and what it was like. I was actually pretty nervous about dress shopping, as white, long and tight-fitting isn't exactly me. And I really hate shopping. So I found an incredible Spanish dress shop named Pronovias (just off Oxford Street) and went to scout out dresses with my friend Shaz. Their collection is huge, so I knew that I would have a full choice of styles, cuts, etc etc to try on there, and they did not disappoint. My initial dress choices were all big, princessy types but Pronovias encouraged me to try a different style on first, just to get a sense of what I do and do not like. Needless to say, that very first dress that I tried on was the perfect one, and all subsequent dresses were completely disappointing in comparison. I went back a month later to give mum a chance to come along and check it out, and that was another element of the wedding sorted. Boom!

A big part of Maltese weddings is obviously the catering and the drinks. Our weddings tend to be big (although we kept ours to a tidy 200 people) so we don't have a sit down 'Wedding Breakfast' as experienced in the UK. Instead we have lots of food going around all the time, and an open bar serving any drinks you like. I was super keen that we have a Maltese buffet alongside the usual food, to give all the British guests a chance to experience all those key Maltese flavours we love. Rabbit, bragioli, hobz biz-zejt...we had it all! And for those Maltese guests I made sure there was plenty of pasta, cheese and crepes, alongside all the food that was being circulated. And just in case people got thirsty, we brought down 90 bottles of Villa Sandi prosecco from Sicily (a big thanks to Mario for suggesting and sourcing this for us).

The legal and Catholic aspects of getting married in Malta are somewhat chaotic, and something we had to jump through quite a few hoops for. On the Catholic side, we were expected to attend a marriage preparation course before we could get any paperwork approved. Luckily we found one just up the road from our house, and spent a pleasant 36 hours discussing conflict resolution and a few other topics that are just a bit too PG15 for this blog. Once we had our certificate, we had to sit down with our parish priest, fill out a bunch of paperwork and subsequently say some vows, after which the paperwork was sent to London, and then sent to Malta. On the legal side, we also had to fill out a bunch of paperwork, and find a legal witness to sign it all (thank god for friends) before sending it to the Marriage Office in Malta. I think if there was anything that stressed me out about this wedding, the paperwork was definitely it.

Finally, as a scientist, I completely embraced the geeky aspects of planning a wedding. I had a neat little spreadsheet costing the entire thing, which I updated as I went along. The final cost was within the margin of error (that's a lie - it was a full £9k less than I expected!!!). I also produced a handy Gantt chart for the big day itself and naturally had a full on To Do list. As is to be expected, the biggest and messiest spreadsheet was the guest list, which has many many columns marking various things such as whether invites has been sent, whether they'd RSVPed, which hotel they were staying in, whether they'd need transport for the wedding, and a whole host more things!

My Gantt Chart

And there we have it - one ready to go wedding wrapped up in a neat little package (no, of course it wasn't that easy). But that was organising the wedding, in a nutshell. I haven't gone into the details of the cake, flowers, photographer...yadi yada...but you get the picture. There were some really fun aspects (such as food tastings, creating a wedding list) and some tedious aspects (writing and sending 150 invitations, many many meetings) but I'm so glad that we went through it all. Needless to say however, if we ever renew our vows it will be in Vegas!