At times, writing about our preparations, I feel like a scriptwriter for a 24-hour news channel trying to cover some kind of top-secret police investigation: everything’s still progressing nicely here, and that’s all the detail I can release at the moment ;)

However, I can tell you about tomorrow – we’re off up to London at some unfair-on-a-day-off hour of the morning for a 9.30 appointment at Westminster Register Office, to meet the registrar who will actually be reading out the words we wrote the other week for our ceremony, and generally officiating to ensure we actually are legally married. We’re ready to ask several questions of him, but they’re just boring, pragmatic things about the ceremony so I won’t bore you with those here!

After that, however, we’re off to the zoo for our final meeting there until 2 September (when we drop off all our bits and pieces ready for the next day!), and we really do have a lot of questions to ask and things to find out from our contacts there.

For a start, it would be nice to go inside the ceremony venue itself, for the first time! We’ve been unfortunate with our timings up to now, always visiting when the room is closed and locked for various reasons, but this time we’ve made sure we’ll be able to go inside it. This will prove useful as we would like to make sure that the portable CD player we intend to use to provide music at that venue is actually up to the task of filling the room in any kind of audible way, before the day itself. I’m not sure what we’ll do if it isn’t; I’m not sure I can really slip an invoice from Bose or Bang and Olufsen through on the wedding budget, even if I have managed a guillotine, a laminator and, er, a laptop* :)

Furthermore, we really need to be able to work out how we’re going to arrange seven large tables in a room full of huge intrusive pillars and wall extrusions in such a way that all their occupants can see the top table and the speech-givers. We have a possible layout in mind but we could really do with some expert advice!

And, well, you know me and my attention to detail (or is it minutiae-control-freakery?), but they don’t, so I’m not sure what their reaction will be to my attempts to usurp their Microsoft Word/Leith’s/Times New Roman signs and menus with replacements in our (for want of a better phrase) zoolyweds ‘house style’ (corporate identity? brand image? stop me if I get too ludicrous… oh, too late)! They’ve been helpful and receptive to our every wish so far so I’m sure it’ll be OK :)

There are so many other things we have to sort out with them, but now there are at least as many things I have to sort out here before bed, so I’d best be off.

* Strictly speaking the laptop is more of a long-term investment, but the fact that we ideally needed computer-type functionality for (for instance) playing music at the reception did help the case ;)