Photography Credit: Bluebird Vintage

After enduring the heartache of finding (and losing) our wedding venue, I’m sure you can appreciate that we felt as though we’d fallen off the horse a bit in terms of planning our wedding; trying to accept something so stressful wasn’t easy, and I’m sure that I don’t speak for myself when I say that it made me a little anxious to think about other wedding-related things for fear of tripping up again. However, as with all horses that one might fall off of, it is often said that’s important to get back on again – and we could only do that if we put faith in our planning again.

I must say that I wasn’t really sure where to start in the grand marital scheme, especially without 100% confirmation on a venue – we couldn’t exactly book anything for a specific date in case the date had to change, and equally I couldn’t get started on our invitations (which I intend on designing myself) in case some or all of the details had to change. Realistically, the only thing we could do (correct me if I’m wrong!) was to think about our guest list. This in itself was a little daunting because I’d always heard that compiling a guest list and/or seating chart (which we’re going to leave until much later) is one of the hardest parts of wedding planning, particularly if/when it comes down to avoiding feuds, rifts, exes, and so on – for example, “if we invite Dave we can’t invite Sandra but if we don’t invite Dave then Martin won’t come”, and so on.

Still, this wasn’t an aspect of our wedding that was going to just sort itself out, so we uncorked a bottle of wine, opened up a Word document and set our minds to task. Before we started to think about our guest list in any great detail, we had to consider what the constraints of our venue might be. The CUC had originally quoted us a 60-person capacity for the ceremony, with a 150-person capacity for the reception, so until we had confirmation back about the constraints of The Florrie we thought it was best to work with these initial figures.

Considering the ceremony first, we started by jotting down the crux of the wedding party: our parents, bridesmaids (my two sisters, Lamb’s sister, and my best friend), and best man (Lamb’s brother). We then added “obvious” immediate family, like my ninna (grandmother) and our close aunts and uncles, (we also contacted our parents to ask which members of their respective families they would like to have at the ceremony). The rest of the list consisted of our closest of close friends, whom we wanted to share our vows with.

Guest list genealogy chart – available from Mélangerie Inc.

It wasn’t until we’d polished off our list that Lamb noticed something we’d previously overlooked; we hadn’t thought about whether the 60-person capacity included us. That might sound a little silly, but it’s worth paying attention to particularly if you’re at a latter stage in your “guest-listing” and want to avoid any nasty surprises! After contacting The Florrie for further confirmation, we were surprised to hear that their capacity for the reception was actually 200 for the ceremony and 250 for the reception (providing we dropped a few of our dining tables after the meal). This was a really welcome piece of news purely for the fact that it meant we could create a more balanced ceremony list – in our original list it was decidedly “Lamb-heavy” due to the fact that a few of his friends have long-term partners, and inviting them as couples soon swallowed up the numbers. Lamb had suggested only inviting their partners to the reception, but I insisted that they come to the wedding together in order to celebrate their own relationship as well as ours.

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When I got a text from Roo just before Christmas saying “erm…I think we might have to cancel our wedding…our wedding venue is being shut down” my heart skipped a beat. You know when people say “oh I know exactly how you feel…” but actually, really, they don’t? Well in this case I could reply those words with utmost sincerity. Our wedding venue pulled out of our wedding just three months before our day. That’s a story for another time, but I did have 100% confidence in my reply “Roo, everything with be OKAY. You won’t have to cancel your wedding”…

Photography Credit: internet k-hole

You know that phrase “rollercoaster of emotions”? I hate it. It’s up there with countless other overused phrases that initially sound incredibly profound, but actually they’re just unbearably hollow and totally meaningless. When you have a hatred for something that burns as deep as mine does for this, then you can imagine my turmoil when suddenly, out of nowhere, I found that it actually applied to me. A bitter taste, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Now, I won’t be offended if you’re sitting there and thinking what on earth is she rabbiting on about? – because really, I get that all the time. So I’ll tell you: after all the fussing and fighting of finding our wedding venue, we all sank comfortably into the cushions of wedding planning bliss, and looked forward to enjoying a real family-orientated Christmas before we thunder-bolted into the new year with the rest of our arrangements.

It’s funny, isn’t it, how you always remember where you were when you received bad news? It was a dull afternoon on December 2^nd, 2011, and I had just come home to show Lamb some of the Christmas gifts I’d managed to pick up. My phone chirruped with a text message from my friend and bridesmaid, Rea, and I glanced to read it almost absent-mindedly (my attention span is mortifyingly weak) until I saw what it said. Simply, “have you heard about the CUC?”

You know when you just know? Well I just knew. My fingers sort of became haunted with this ghost that wanted to text back and ask the question that I already knew the answer to: what about the CUC? – but the truth is that I already knew in my heart of hearts that what it was about was that it was no longer our wedding venue. To read her reply, “it’s closing down” was no more illuminating than my intuition, which had supposed that our gorgeous venue had either been washed away by a flash flood or had been completely overrun by mean and scary ghosts – two perfectly understandable reasons for closure that I absolutely could not have argued with no matter how much I was crying. And I was crying a lot. Buckets, you might say. Rea told us to look online, and sure enough in black and blue it was there for all to see on their website:

 “CUC TO CLOSE ITS DOORS 3^RD JANUARY 2012”

They cited public sector cuts as the reason for their closure, but as a bride on the receiving end it did not compute; all I could see in my mind’s eye was that room; flashes of that iron spiral staircase and those Chesterfield sofas and how we cried when my dad put our wedding deposit down because we realised that we had actually set a date. The Contemporary Urban Centre was not just a wedding venue to me, it was the wedding venue that had helped us over the hurdle we felt we’d fallen at, it was the wedding venue that finally made our wedding seem real – it was our wedding venue, and now it was gone, and it didn’t matter how many times I read it or re-read it – it just didn’t make any sense to me.

Contemporary Urban Centre

It also didn’t make a blind bit of sense to me that this press release had gone public without us being notified first. I had the CUC on redial, ready for a kick-off, when eventually their wedding co-ordinator, Adele, returned my messages. I started to spit out my complaint when I heard that she was crying, just like me – not only had we lost our venue that morning, she’d lost her job, too. It suddenly became apparent that it had been an absolute shock announcement, with 28 other couples in the same position as us – some of them due to hold their wedding just days after the closure date. Adele insisted that she’d tried to speak to us all before 12pm when the press release was published, but that it had been impossible. We started to understand, but it was by no means any easier. Things had already been so hard for us and now we had to face it all over again, in even more of a daze.

Contemporary Urban Centre

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