Tomorrow morning we’re going back for a second look at what I’m 95% sure is going to be where we get married. As you may remember, when we visited the first time I became a little bit emotional and had to take myself off into a corner to pull myself together, a sure sign, given my notoriously stony heart, that it was the place for us.

So now I’m scared.

What if when we go back the second time it doesn’t feel the same?

What if I look at the stained glass and don’t feel the same swelling in my chest? What if I gaze up into the beautiful ceiling and don’t get that prickling sensation behind my eyes?

It’s a ridiculous thing to worry about I know, but I was so blown away by the intensity of my feelings last time, so convinced by how right everything felt, that I can’t quite believe I’m going to be able to go back a second time and feel the same. I just want everything to be perfect and beautiful, to create this wonderful, happy day that stays with me forever.

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As you know, I recently got engaged. You might not have noticed, perhaps I didn’t mention it? Oh no, hang on, I did. A MILLION TIMES.

I’ve actually had the ring on my finger for nearly a month now, I just didn’t tell the internet straight away as I wanted to milk the whole ‘face to face announcement’ thing. I wanted to be able to turn up at book group and shove my hand in people’s faces and have them be actually excited rather than just saying ‘oh yeah, I saw on Facebook’. That’s definitely not as much fun.

Engagement ring

Oh whoops, how did that get there? I must have accidentally taken a picture of my own hand while typing this post.

So, a month in, and I have yet to have that moment where I refer to my ‘fiancé’ in a random conversation with a stranger OR on a blog post. Boyfriend is easy to say, but somehow I feel like fiancé doesn’t fit as casually into a sentence. Especially as I know I would put way to much emphasis on the last syllable and end up just sounding a bit of a knob. View Post

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I received my first ever proposal when I was ten years old from a boy in my class called Richard Gibson. In our school we had these white plastic 30cm rulers that were ideal for passing messages on; you could write on the back with pencil and rub it out when you were done, then when you wanted to pass a note to someone it jut looked like you were helpfully passing them a ruler.

One day I had a ruler passed to me from Richard Gibson.

“Will you marry me?” it said in pencil on the back.

I wrote back. “Which school?” At ten, your choice of secondary school was a life defining thing.

“Stanchester,” he wrote back.

“Huish Episcopi,” I wrote back, “sorry.”

And that was that.

I then went through a bit of a dry spell proposal wise, a 27 year dry spell in fact, which was broken on my birthday in April this year when I received my second ever marriage proposal.

HOORAH! View Post

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Today I am very pleased to welcome my very funny friend Lucy, with some top tips for planning a wedding on a budget. Please leave a comment if you enjoy the post!

budget wedding

My two girls are getting quite excited by the prospect of my imminent wedding. Despite raising them to spurn all things pink, romantic and princessey in favour of equality and female empowerment, they have been leaving notes for my partner to ‘definitely marry mummy’ since he first stepped his nervous foot into my house.

“So…something old?” questions my 9 year old daughter, Josie.

“That’s me!” quips my (slightly older) fiancé.

“Something new?” asks Josie.

“That’s you – his new wife!” says my eldest, sarcastically.

“Something borrowed?”

“That’s the money to pay for the wedding!” I snort.

How we laugh. I should say, however, that it’s not quite true: we have been saving for the last year. It’s not so bad saving for something exciting like a wedding; you don’t mind sacrificing those new winter boots when you are excitedly planning your brideszilla Jordan-stylee 40-layer tulle extravaganza.

And some people really do spend ridiculous sums on their wedding day: the average cost of a wedding is now a terrifying £22,000. But it doesn’t need to be a horror story: here are my tips for a financial fairy-tale ending that will ensure that the ‘something blue’ isn’t you: View Post

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Last night I was invited by Kirsten – aka the Little Wedding Helper – to the launch of her new wedding pop-up shop in Clifton – Little Wedding Space.

If you have ever been to a wedding fair, you’ll know that they can be uninspiring to say the least. I once took the girls to one, thinking it might be a fun way to spend a Sunday afternoon. It was not. Think cheap hotel conference room, bland surrounding, rows of collapsible tables covered in pens and fliers. Romance was not high on the agenda on that occasion.

The Little Wedding Space is the opposite of this.

It’s a dozen independent creative types who have come together to create, until October 28th, what is possible the most beautiful collection of things all together in one place ever. If you are planning a wedding any time soon, or simply like pretty things, it is definitely worth a visit. View Post

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No, is the short answer. But that wouldn’t make great reading, so I will try and expand…

I want to believe in the idea that at some point in my life, I will meet somebody and know. Know that this is the person I want to spend the rest of my life with, the person who completes me, the person I will love forever. But I don’t believe it. It’s a lovely idea, but in my mind completely unreasonable. How can you say that you will love somebody forever? How can you know?

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I was coming home from visiting a friend in Cambridge over the summer holidays, and as I drove down the slip road onto the motorway I was faced with a giant billboard, offering me the chance to meet the man of my dreams through the website sugardaddie.com.

As the name almost suggests, the site offers the opportunity for both men and women to meet people who are “classy, attractive and affluent” at the same time as “eradicating the issues of financial stress that modern living can bring”.

Sounds good doesn’t it?

I’ve never had Money. As a child we never had money, which is why at 16 I became pregnant in a bid to get my own council house and sponge off the state for life. (Joke.) The pregnancy part isn’t a joke of course, but I have never lived in a council house…

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My last post about infidelity sparked some really interesting discussion, and has got me thinking about just what fidelity means, and how important it actually is in a relationship.

So, given I always get such thoughtful interesting responses, I wanted to ask some more questions about what loyalty in a relationship means to you.

Firstly of course we have the issue of what is cheating? I think we have established that the majority of men (all my readers excepted obviously), would probably cheat if they had the chance and knew they could get away with it, but what exactly do you define as cheating? Is it a kiss? Is it sex? Or do men take the Bill Clinton approach to just how much bad behaviour you can defend… ‘I did not have intercourse with that woman…’

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I was talking to a male friend at the weekend about infidelity and he came out with a rather shocking statement.

He said that the only thing that stopped men from cheating on their partners was the possibility of getting caught. He reckoned that if there was a guarantee that the wives and girlfriends would never find out, that ONE HUNDRED PERCENT of men would cheat.

I will say that again just in case you didn’t hear me properly – ONE HUNDRED PERCENT.

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