There are so many suits involved in this wedding; how many more bad suit jokes can we make headings out of, I wonder.

Happy Easter, by the way.

On Saturday we took a trip to Essex – Billericay to be precise – to what we were informed has won a plethora of awards along the lines of Best Shop That Makes Suits And Stuff In The Country. This is a reassuring fact, because I intend to spend something in the middle of the three-figure range of pounds on a tailor-made suit from this shop. No ordinary suit will it be, either: it’s a lovely shade of purple :D

The shop staff were very helpful and as luck would have it they had the constituent parts of purple suits in some sizes not too dissimilar to my own there for me to try on. Originally they tried to talk me into a long-jacketed suit, but when I tried this on I felt as if I were in a hall of mirrors looking at a warped reflection in which my torso had been vertically stretched and my legs squashed, so I soon switched back to my original plan of a standard three-button job.

The suits were lovely quality, and it was so pleasing to go into a men’s tailor’s shop which wasn’t lined in grey, navy and black suits; while this had a small section covering these, the bulk of its content was a near-rainbow of clothing, including yellow, orange, light blue and lilac suits, and terrifyingly luminous lime green and pink shirt-and-tie sets. Fantastic.

After leaving the shop (to which I’ll return for measuring once I’ve lost a bit more weight :)), we called in at Ikea on the way back and noted down a few things to be added to the wedding list when Edith gets a moment.

Also to be added to the list is the lawnmower we picked up from the B&Q adjacent to Ikea, which I’m sad to say I’ll be using later today.

We also called in at Lakeside itself, and a clothing shop in the retail park, to continue the frustrating hunt for coordinating clothes that Edith mentioned in her recent post. It really does seem that the colours we’ve chosen for our wedding are hopelessly unfashionable, and I hadn’t realised just how dictated by fashion the shops’ available stock really is until now – it’s quite shocking. That said, unfashionable places such as Marks and Spencer, and the one place with a genuinely large range of shirt colours, Thomas Nash at Debenhams, should just about sort us out with the things we need. Speaking of which, now it’s time to call as many nearby Debenhams shops as it takes to find one with two purple shirts with 15½-inch collars in stock…