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The sharp end

With so few days to go, I am delighted to say that we are actually feeling on top of things at last now! My speech is ready at last, and even most of the music is sorted out now, and all in all it’s all feeling a bit more like we’re ready than it was a few days ago.

Saturday saw perhaps the most bizarre excursion of the preparations, though.

For reasons that will become clear at the reception, we wanted to procure seven pencil sharpeners. I first went looking for these a fortnight ago today, and in the first shop I looked in – Wilkinson in Bexleyheath – I found the perfect specimens – an appropriate shape in two appropriate colours. However, they were part of a range of four shapes and four colours, so there were only three that were suitable.

Since then, I have been returning to the shop in my lunchtime every day, and managed to get a further two on Wednesday. However, as the countdown on the right of the page suggests, time is getting rather tight, so towards the end of last week I started looking further afield – Wilkinson in Dartford, to be precise. No luck there, though – the whole range was completely out of stock on both Wednesday and Friday.

So the upshot of all this was that yesterday we embarked on a time-consuming tour of Wilkinson shops in the area, with the sole aim (and this is where it starts to sound ridiculous) of spending a grand total of… 30p. Yes, these sharpeners cost 17p each, but that just isn’t cheap enough, so for reasons I can’t quite work out, if you buy two you can save four pence. Amazing.

The half-good news is that we found one more ideal sharpener, in Thamesmead, but we had to buy a not-quite-so-good one as a fallback if I don’t manage to get one more ideal one this week.

Never let it be said that there is no attention to detail in this wedding. Although actually, I think that’s about the second least likely thing anyone would say about this wedding – after “Oh, it’s in a zoo – that’s a bit boring, why didn’t they go for somewhere more unusual?”