Somewhat ironically, after so many months in which we have rarely posted to our dlog due to a bit of a lack of things to tell our readers about, we now find ourselves with so much going on that there is plenty of news, but no time left in which to type it all up!

I’ve somehow found a small piece of time (is that a bit like a pocketwatch?) in which to recount the events of the past few days, though, so here goes.

On Friday, we headed up to Westminster Register Office, which is near to Baker Street station, in a large, picturesque old building – much like most register offices really, not to mention rather like the endless plethora of buildings we were so determined to avoid when we discovered the modern-looking facilities on offer at the zoo! Very nice, if you like that sort of thing.

We met there our registrar, Paresh, whose surname escapes me, and he went through our ceremony plans and logistics in great detail with us, which was both helpful and reassuring (since he didn’t seem to have any problems with any of it!). It was useful, as two people who haven’t married [intransitive] before, to speak to someone who has married [transitive] an inordinate number of times before, as he was able to help us understand what was ‘usual’ in these situations. After all, if you don’t know what’s a convention, how can you know what to do to deviate from it? ;)

(A quick digression, as it seems apt to set the record straight on our attitude to traditions and conventions here. Essentially, we like to know what the traditions and conventions are, but we certainly don’t follow or conform to any for the sake of it. If they sound good – for us or for our guests – we’re up for them, but if they just sound like insignificant actions based on centuries of unquestioning imitation, we’re not so keen. If doing the complete opposite of a tradition would be even more fun, that’s just a bonus too good to decline!)

So, after a productive session with Paresh, we took a walk across Regent’s Park to the zoo. We were there 90 minutes or so ahead of schedule, so we used the entry buzzer anyway to ask our contact if she would mind letting us in early so that we could be planning our route for the day in advance of the meeting, rather than hanging about somewhere only to have to stay behind afterwards for the route-planning.

We were indeed let in, and we collected some zoo maps (one to draw on, one to scan and zoolyweds-ify!), then set about devising a route. It was a bit like that puzzle where you have to try and draw a strange little house without taking your pen off the paper or repeating any lines – although we essentially needed to go back to certain areas more than once, we didn’t want to retrace any of our earlier steps when there are so many other places we could be going to in our limited time!

If you’re invited to the wedding, you can have a look at the final route we’ve come up with on the main zoolyweds site’s zoo page; if you’re not invited, just come back in a few weeks when the post-wedding site has launched and you’ll see it then!

(More news on the site relaunch to come in the next couple of weeks. Suffice it to say that I obviously didn’t think I would have enough else to prepare in the next few weeks when I decided that the site should relaunch at 17.30 on the wedding day, immediately after our ceremony. Oh dear.)

At the meeting, we got a huge number of questions answered, all of them favourably, so that was certainly good. We also finally got to enter the ceremony venue, having previously only peered through its locked doors, on too many occasions to remember. As luck would have it, it was very nice inside! We also tried out our music on Edith’s portable CD player (which I shall resist referring to as a ‘ghetto blaster’, although I suspect this parenthesis will have assisted many of you in picturing it), with amazing results: I pressed Stop on a particular tune from our ceremony and my breath was taken away by the reverberation of the note I had stopped on around the room! A once-in-a-lifetime moment, though – I’m sure that our guests’ bodies will absorb a lot of the sound, altering the otherwise astonishing acoustics.

What else, what else…? Oh yes, we shared some of our top secrets with the events co-ordinators and they were either impressed or politely pretending to be impressed while thinking we were mad; I think it was probably the former but you never know! I did also say I would mention one of our contacts – Amy Vogel – by name here, as she joked that she would like to be made famous on the site. I suppose a level of minor fame achieved through appearing on a web site read by fewer than 70 people is preferable to a similar level of fame achieved through daunting three-hour shifts presenting interactive quiz channels on Sky TV, so it’s fair enough. Thanks for being so helpful, Amy – and of course for being professionally unfazed when faced with our array of unusual ideas :)

The weekend was spent doing further preparations, such as designing the route maps, printing the orders of service or programmes or whatever you call them, and, as the saying goes, much, much more. We also heard back from the coach company about the timings and pick-up locations. (If you’re invited to the wedding, you can see these on the zoolyweds coach page.) They’ve been as precise as they can be with the London pick-up locations, but having been to Great Portland Street a few months ago I can’t really see a good stopping place there, so my advice to people there is probably going to have to be just to stand outside the Tube station and look out for a ‘Kentishman’ coach! I think I’ll try and get hold of a photo of it, so that people know what they’re looking out for. I’ve a feeling their coaches are all dark blue, but better safe than sorry…

Now, what was I saying about being too busy to post? This was just a very quick one, I’m sure it won’t have delayed anything else at all… Oops.