I’ve recently been thrown into the wonderful world of weddings. Like horses, there are 101 websites and magazines dedicated to the topic, and, like horses, there are thousands of different ways to spend money on the big day. Feeling totally overwhelmed by it all, I’ve done the mature thing of keeping my head in the sand and not addressing it. At all. Which was working perfectly fine, until I found out about venue wait-lists.
In our naivety, we thought that if you liked a venue, you booked it a few months before and that was it. How wrong I was… Some popular places have a three year + wait-list! He and I didn’t even know if we wanted one of these popular venues, so we thought that it would be sensible to look around a few. Which meant we had to actually start thinking about what we wanted for the big day before we went to meet any venue owners.
Our preliminary debates were, on the whole, chaotic. We haven’t even got to sorting when or how we’d like to tie the knot, because our discussions have been spent working out the larger challenge — how to incorporate horses into the big day.
His suggestion was to ride away from the church, which in theory would be lovely. However, I found all too often that when He was playing polo, and I (wearing a summer dress and under the impression I would be enjoying a relaxing day spectating in the sun) would be told that something had ‘come up’ and ‘there were now six ponies needing warming up.’ Before I could say ‘I’ll grab my jodhpurs’, I was thrown up on a horse (still in a summer dress), handed two more and sent on my merry way. Therefore, I’m slightly over the whole riding-in-a-dress thing! Plus, these experiences have also shown me the horrors of helmet hair.
He also suggested arriving and leaving in a horse and carriage, but the venues we have looked at have the church and reception mere metres away (about three trot strides), so that option doesn’t look like it will work well either.
That is, if we haven’t scared away any of the venue organisers. You see, when they ask you if you have any questions about the venue, I don’t think ‘can we have horses on the drive/lawn/barn?’ is what they are expecting. There is always a pause, and a look of surprise, before they regain their composure and ask WHY and how there will be horses on their beautiful drive/lawn/barn.
‘We aren’t sure yet… we just know there will be, umm, horses’.
Everyone has been rather lovely and polite and listed how this could logistically be achieved, but I realise we must sound nutty, and that in itself is quite an achievement to shock someone whose everyday job is to deal with bridezillas.
(Things got worse the first time this happened, as when we moved on to talk about relatively simple details, like how many guests we wanted or which month we were keen on, I explained I hadn’t really thought about it all as I was still in shock from getting engaged because I thought I was getting a pony instead of a ring….)
Continued below…
Like this? You might also enjoy reading these:
Confessions of a horsey couple blog: the horsey proposal
We’re still tempted with the idea of riding down to the church one morning, getting married and then hacking to the local meet for a day’s hunting. Although we couldn’t agree whether a Tuesday or Saturday meet would be better!
HH
For all the latest news analysis, competition reports, interviews, features and much more, don’t miss Horse & Hound magazine, on sale every Thursday
