Top Of The (tying the) Knots

In the couple of months that I have been undergoing training in the ways of The Bride (less learning Kill Bill-style combat skills, more reading a couple of magazines and looking at websites), I have noticed a number of things that pop up at almost every wedding.

So, I have decided to share with all you pop-pickers the top ten things YOU MUST HAVE at your wedding this year.

*As a quick disclaimer, some of these ideas I love, others I find completely mental. However, just like Mark Goodier announcing the results of the Blur Vs Oasis Battle of the Bands in 1995, I'm not here to judge.

10 - Hat hooks  

I have never seen hat hooks at any wedding I have been to, but myself and Diary Of A Bride To Be have noticed them popping up with alarming frequency in blogs of late. What are they? Why, they're hooks you fix around your venue for your guests to hang their hats on of course, and no 2012 wedding should be without them.

9 - Ice-cream/fish and chip/kebab vans  

Fed up of the usual cold sandwiches and slices of wedding cake you're served up at evening receptions? No? Well, according to the 2012 wedding chart you really should be. Couples today are saying bye-bye to buffets and instead treating their guests to these glorified takeaway services.

8 - Sweetie tables

2012 brides are keeping their guests sweet with sweetie tables. I thought this was an amazing idea, giving guests the freedom to choose what they want to snack on, rather than you picking their sweets for them and presenting them as a favour. However, I soon realised the sweetie table is not there instead of favours, but as well as. The 'not instead of, but as well as' motto very much appears to be a theme of weddings this year.

7 - Homemade favours

On the subject of favours, this year's brides-to-be are working their fingers to the bone knocking up gifts from scratch. It seems sugared almonds or chocolate truffles are no longer satisfactory and no guest will be content unless they are presented with a favour that has been lovingly crafted by the couple's own hands. Expect to be handed heart-shaped pin cushions, tea cup candles and jars of chutney by a bride with bleeding, wax-covered fingers who smells of onions.

6 - Garden games

A bride in 2012 knows a disco is simply not enough to entertain her guests, which is why you can also expect to be able to play bowls, croquet and cricket at any marquee weddings you go to this year. After all, it is the year of the Olympics.

5 - Photo booths

Guests are difficult creatures and need a lot to keep them occupied. Indeed, without couples laying on a host of entertainment, guests might simply become confused and disorientated, wander out of the marquee and on to a country lane, where they could be tragically hit by a tractor. Avoid calamity and provide them with a photo booth, where they can put on fancy dress costumes and hold up funny slogans while a photographer merrily snaps away.

4 - Moustaches

It doesn't matter if they're real or fake, you must make sure they're invited to your wedding if you don't want to be the odd one out this year.

3 - Lace

Ahhh Kate Middleton, she has done so much for the British wedding industry. If you want to make like a duchess this year, you'll be coveting lace over satin. And it doesn't stop at your dress either. To really get to grips with this trend, you should deck out your reception venue in lacy décor as well. Get working on your bunting now.

2 - Nick-nacks

Also known as vintage finds/personal touches/piles of junk. Uniformity is out of the window this year and when it comes to decorating your wedding venue, miss-matched is very much the word du jour. Pile up leather-bound books as your table centrepieces, place random bird cages filled with vintage postcards around the room and bus in 200 cake stands and you'll have succeeded in creating the 2012 wedding look.

1 - Sunglasses

Topping the chart this year is sunglasses. Both bride and groom must take care to protect their delicate eyes from the sun's harmful rays on their wedding day, no matter what time of year they're tying the knot. If you're wondering what style will work well with your lace gown, make like Tom Cruise and invest in some Ray-Ban Aviators.

Are there any movers and shakers you think should be added to my 2012 wedding trends countdown?

Attack of the Green-eyed Monster

Since I started this blog, I have waxed lyrical on everything from bizarre celebrity weddings to the plethora of traditions surrounding nuptials, along with producing many, MANY posts about my table centrepiece dilemmas. However, I have outlined very few of my own experiences. This is mainly because, as myself and D's wedding is some time away, I don't have much to talk about.

Apart from, that is, the trouble I've been having with an emotion I started to experience soon after I got engaged, which has caught me largely off guard: jealousy.

A jealous bride-to-be? Surely not! Yet it should come as little surprise that the thing making me feel like the Green-eyed Monster is the very same thing that has pushed me towards the edge of a stress-induced breakdown in the past few months. That is, other people's weddings. Admittedly, I've largely brought it on myself, as before I was ever engaged I vowed I would never read a wedding blog or magazine. This was very sage advice I should have stuck to.

As it is, I can't help but indulge in the odd glance and I often head immediately to the real-life wedding section. It is this that's my downfall. As I flick through picture after picture of meadows filled with tables covered in gingham, laughing people cavorting through a dressing up box and filling up on ice-cream from the van that has been hired especially for the day, I feel the envy start to bubble up. Looking at snaps of the couples posing on Portobello Road, larking about between the stalls (just to really rub it in that not only have they had a cool, London wedding, but they have also been shopping for vintage loveliness) I can feel myself tense with rage. Then there are those brides who get choppered into the ceremony, present each of the guests with a Faberge egg as a favour and spend their photoshoot frolicking in a cornfield wearing a pair of Louboutins - which would fill even a saint with unparalleled jealousy.

But just what is it that's making me envious? The Louboutins obviously, although I lack sympathy with anyone who would spend that much money on shoes only to traipse around a muddy field in them (and white satin is hardly the most hip of materials when it comes to ever wearing the heels again). But what else is causing the Green-eyed Monster to surface?

After all, it's not like they are all my dream wedding. Every one I read about is completely different from the last, ranging from shabby to city chic. And while I may wish I had some of the elements at my own wedding that I see in these pictures (an ice-cream van would be ace - just perhaps not in Manchester in February) - others are absolutely the last thing I would covet (any type of enforced fun, folk songs around the campfire, Cinderella-style carriages.)

Undoubtedly, reading all of these stories has made me stressed, reminding me of how much there is left to do and providing me with inspiration, thereby creating even more work for myself. But that's not what's prompting the envy.

Anyway, I've finally worked out what it is. There's one thing every single photo and account shares - shiny, happy joy. Every bride I look at or read about looks happy, gushing about it being the best day of her life. It doesn't matter whether they partied in a castle or on a barge, they're all happy because, after all that planning, they've finally had their big day.

So, it's the smiles I'm jealous of. I have 11 months to go until I experience that level of joy - and that leaves a lot of time to stress about whether or not to hire an ice-cream van for the reception.

The great wedding cover-up

Cover-up. A term that has so many meanings - all of them intriguing or glamorous. For instance, it could refer to a beautiful beaded shawl, worn by a woman to stop her delicate shoulders getting cold. Or, it could refer to a Roswell Area 51-style mystery, which Mulder and Scully will gradually unravel over the course of 45 minutes. So, what is the case of the great wedding cover-up?

Well, unfortunately it refers to these:

Chair covers.

Now, if you were after an informative read, offering useful advice on what chair covers are available, where to find them and how much they cost, you have come to the wrong place (although you may find this post by my good friend over at Diary Of A Bride To Be useful). If, on the other hand, you would like to learn more about why chair covers are evil, read on.

These items were a pet hate of mine long before I got engaged and are fast becoming the bane of my life. Yet there was a time when weddings were a land free of chair covers. When you could walk into a reception venue and not be greeted by 100 grounded Casper the Friendly Ghosts wearing organza ribbons around their necks. I attended weddings in the 80s and 90s and don't remember once having to balance for dear life on a chair while worrying that the slippery case hanging on it would slide off, taking me with it.

Yet according to the wedding rules for the new millennium, you simply are not allowed to have a wedding that does not feature chair covers in some capacity (or so they would have you believe). It's as though the rhyme should go:

Something old,

Something new,

Something borrowed,

Something blue, and

Something to cover your chairs, lest they get covered in goo

However, the risk of dropping goo on the chairs is not the reason we are all advised to cover them up. In fact, the reason these covers exist appears to be so guests' sensitive eyes are protected from the monstrous sight of the chairs themselves.

Wander around a wedding fayre and you'll see countless stands flogging these strange items, complete with bows available in every colour under the sun. You also have a choice of materials - slippery silk, powdery polyester, crumpled cotton or shiny Lycra - the latter of which will make all your chairs look like something out of a Mr Motivator Bums, Legs and Tums exercise video.

Then there's the task of fitting them. You can get up at the crack of dawn on your wedding day and, together with some unenthusiastic helpers, wrestle the covers on to the chairs yourself (and risk the room looking like the aftermath of a massacre at Dreams) or you can hire someone to do it for you. Either way - and whether you choose to rent or buy them - you're going to pay hundreds of pounds for the privilege of having each of your seats uniformly disguised so they don't look quite so obviously like chairs.

Why must we cover our chairs, though? In my opinion, unless the only chairs available are an absolute eyesore that belong nowhere other than a classroom or bonfire, they probably look better uncovered.

So, what's my problem? If I don't like them, I just shouldn't have them, right? Yes, except that for some reason the whole world EXPECTS couples to have chair covers at their wedding. And slowly, you can start to become brainwashed into thinking they're a vital component of your big day. Particularly if you learn that the chairs in the room you're having your wedding ceremony in are black, cushioned, faux-leather - great for relaxing with a cocktail and listening to some smooth jazz, perhaps not so great on the solemn occasion of a marriage. "Don't worry though," everyone tells me: "You can hire some chair covers."

And so, that is why I am using this blog to directly appeal to wedding venue owners across the land. Buy some decent chairs. Just some plain wooden chairs painted white. They don't have to cost a fortune; they just have to blend into the background and perform the function they were designed for - to be sat on. If every venue seeing a good trade in wedding hire was to replace their plastic school chairs/folding metal seats/faux-leather furniture with a set of bland and inoffensive chairs, we could end the chair cover madness forever.

On behalf of shawl wearers and conspiracy theorists everywhere, I say it is time we reclaim the term cover-up once and for all. Because the only thing that needs covering up in the world of weddings is its shameful obsession with chair covers.

Play that funky music

There's one element of my wedding that I started planning long before I got engaged - the music. Being able to soundtrack an entire day is a particularly thrilling prospect for me - after all, up until now the only event I had planned a set list for was my funeral.

But enough doom and gloom. The big day will also be an exciting opportunity to give people a musical education. From the ethereal soundtrack of the ceremony to the party pieces of the evening, I have high ambitions for my wedding to act as the ultimate mix tape (long live the cassette).

One problem though: guests just want to enjoy themselves, rather than receive a "musical education" from someone pretentious enough to use the words "musical education" (I'll have a word with myself later).

It's not just me getting married, of course, and D's musical favourites will have to get fair representation on the turntables as well. Unfortunately, this has made drawing up the set list a struggle of difficult-second-album proportions. There is, of course, some overlap in our respective choices (we have about 15 duplicate CDs at home), but we also both have incredibly eclectic taste. As evidence of this, you only have to check out one evening's worth of our Spotify listening, which will run seamlessly from Goldfrapp, through Bowie, on to Dubstar, past Hall & Oates, with a detour to N.W.A, on through Deee-Lite and ending with the Les Misérables soundtrack for a theatrical climax to the (usually drunken) evening.

We both like bands people have never heard of - The Research and Robocop Kraus anyone? - and we both also have our own shameful guilty pleasures (Celine Dion and Ultravox - and no, I won't reveal whose is whose). Unfortunately, it's impossible to dance to Celine and Robocop Kraus are unlikely to get the uninitiated up and grooving. On top of that, it's hard to find a DJ who is likely to carry The Bee Gees and Death in Vegas in the same record bag. And if we did get our way, we would probably be the only people dancing anyway, while all the guests sit around the edges of the room, like countless wallflowers at a high school prom.

The fact is most people just want to have a good time, which means entertaining them with the usual list of wedding classics. Come On Eileen, Livin' On A Prayer, Dancing Queen, YMCA, I Think We're Alone Now - you know the drill - ending with a slow dance to Adele. However, while I might not know what table decorations reflect our personalities, I'm certain a soundtrack featuring Westlife doesn't.

Luckily, we are on our way to a solution. We have picked our three songs for the ceremony, are close to booking the DJ and have pencilled in two friends to do a guest DJ spot. With that many cooks in the musical kitchen, the broth should be well and truly mixed, with something for everyone, including a few of the usual crowd-pleasers at the end of the night.

And if any of them play Robbie Williams' Angels, there'll be hell to pay!