However, when I was faced with JTA’s strong desire for me to take his family name, I got very defensive about being a Varley. Taking a new name seemed like turning my back on the things that I’d achieved as Ruth Varley, and on the family that I love. I didn’t want to stop being that person.

I think that JTA was quite hurt by my insistence on keeping my own name, and it was this that eventually made me think again. I turned the problem over in my mind, and realised that I don’t have to give anything up, here. All I’m doing is forging a new family, but it doesn’t mean I won’t still be part of my old one. It may not be my name on my degree certificate, but it was still my hard work that went into the degree. I’m planning on taking Varley as a middle name after the wedding, but the name isn’t who I am; it’s just a label. And I’m happy for my label to tell the whole world that I belong with JTA.

With apologies to any non-geeks reading this, there was a PVP comic during the storyline when Brent Sienna and Jade Fontaine were getting married which said what I’m trying to say. See it here.

Eagle-eyed readers will, of course, note that the Fram was not, of herself, an icebreaking ship and that therefore structuring the title and introduction to a blog post in such a way as to imply that she was is something of an untruth.

That’s actually quite handy, because we’ve now allocated the seating, and ordered stationery for the seating plan and for place markers. For those of you coming to the Breakfast, the seating plan tells you what table you’re sitting on, and the Place Marker tells you which seat you get when you arrive at the table.

For the benefit of other people at your table, we have as promised procured Place Markers which say your name on the one side, and an interesting fact about you on the other. Mostly.

Most of you will have an interesting fact. A few of you have got an absolute untruth. Your choice, therefore, is to either cop to the lie, and instead offer a more interesting fact about yourself to keep the conversation flowing, or to roll with it and see how long you’re able to convince people that the lie on your Place Marker is actually the honest truth. Plus, of course, you can try to work out which of your fellow diners is trotting out fibs.

There’s at least one liar per table, although up to half of you could be liars. Mostly, though, people are telling the truth and that alone should get the conversation rolling. But, should you care for an extra edge, you’ve got one.

Snazzy.

So far, we’ve had two. The favours arrived on Friday, they’re very beautiful and just what I wanted but sadly they have the wrong date printed on them. I’m being calm about it.

However, I just had an email from the lady who was supposed to be doing my hair and makeup on the day, to say that she’s not going to be able to help after all due to illness. This has rather dented my calm, since I’m rubbish at doing makeup and not that great at doing hair, and I now have less than two weeks to find a replacement. If anyone knows of a good hair and makeup service in Telford, I’m in the market…

Um.

Anyway, venting aside, for those of you that are coming to the Breakfast, we’ve just been thrashing out the seating plan, in such a way that nobody ends up sat at a table with people they don’t know. That, it turns out, is pretty challenging but even so we’ve come up with a pretty reasonable workaround: as far as the Breakfast goes, and barring accidents and last-minute rearrangements, nobody should end up sat at a table with more than nine or ten people they don’t know, which is pretty fair if you ask me.

Plus, if you’re lucky, we may yet have time to get possible icebreakers printed on the backs of your placecards, so if the conversation runs really dry, you can always fall back to the conversational redoubt of ‘So, Boris, tell me why does your placemarker say “Ask me about LOOM”?’

Still, that brings us to the Table Names, and then on to the Wedding Table Competion in which you can win a bottle of fizzy stuff, of which I hope presently to have a vast and leftover supply.

In order to enter the competition to win the goodies, you just need to answer the following question, which you can do by carefully emailing myself, or Ruth, or Dan (unless, somehow you have none of our email addresses, in which case I for one am deeply suspicious of your motivations for reading this blog).

The question, then, goes like this:

‘What links the names of the tables at the Wedding Breakfast to Oxford, where Ruth and JTA now live?’ For this, you will need the names of the tables, which are (in no particular order) ‘Coalport,’ ‘Trench,’ ‘Horsehay,’ ‘Ketley,’ ‘Lilleshall’ and ‘Wombridge’.

There’s only one correct answer, mind, and it’s relatively specific. Yes, part of the challenge is working out the deeper meaning of the question, but I will say it’s not something totally dissociated from us and the whole wedding thing. Worst case, we’ll give the bottle away to the best guess, so you might as well throw your hat in!

Such as it is, the competition stays open until midnight on the 26th of October, and I’ll try and get round to picking one of the correct answers by the start of Advent.

And remember, please, to email in your answers rather than adding them here. No sense in giving hints to all them other people, now, is there?

It also means that now seems like a fair time to warn you about the dichotomous nature of the wedding day itself. Per your invitations, and the details here, you’ll see that the day is split into the Wedding Ceremony and the Breakfast & Reception.

That’s where it gets complicated. Because a Quaker wedding is pretty much your regular Quaker meeting, barring the two randoms who stand up and clutter up all that nice clean theosophy with noise, and the nature of a Wedding Reception is that it’s pretty much your regular party, but with more alcohol. And more food, more guests, more posh dresses, more speeches, more formal photographs, more confusion over who said what to whom at the previous obligatory family reunion, more panic about what might be about to go wrong, more awkward pauses when you forget somebody’s name… and so on.

It’s pretty well our feeling, therefore, that “Posh dresses” and “Quaker Meetings” don’t entirely sit well together, so here’s fair warning:

The clothes in which Ruth & I are planning to get married are not the same as the clothes which we will be wearing at the big party at Rowton. We’ll be getting changed into fancier clothes shortly after the Wedding itself, and prior to that we’re basically wearing the sort of clothes we go to work in – all very business as usual, like I say.

That means there’s a risk some of you who adopt a less stubborn approach to this sort of thing than what I do might find yourselves feeling vaguely overdressed in the first part of the day, but don’t worry, because that won’t last more than 90 minutes or so, at which point, we’ll complete the paperwork, and then sneak away to get changed.

Basically, if you wear snazzy formal wear to the actual Wedding, you might notice that we’re doing the opposite and wearing regular clothes. But not to worry, because that’s not the way it’ll be all day. Just as soon as we’re married we’ll get changed into fancier clothes and we’ll start fitting in again.

O, and one other thing: no confetti. It’s specifically prohibited by the venue(s) who are very much against loosely dyed bits of torn up bank statements getting thrown about the place. Likewise no rice for much the same reason. If’n you fetch up getting into trouble for this, be ready for me to chuck you to the wolves. And give your slice of cake to someone else…

See you crazily soon!

I should warn you, this next section includes mildly gory pictures which some viewers may find unpleasant.

Earlier in the summer, we were sitting cutting out geometric shapes and enjoying a glass or two of wine. As I had done hundreds of times before, I laid a small piece of green card down on the cutting mat, placed a metal safety ruler along the edge I wanted to trim, and ran a craft knife along it to remove any rough bits. Unfortunately, on this occasion I wasn’t paying quite enough attention and the first and second fingers of my left hand were sticking out over the edge of the ruler. The blade took a large chunk of skin off both finger tips before I even realised I’d made a mistake.

Luckily, I pulled my hand away quickly enough not to bleed on the piece of card, so we don’t have to change the wedding colours to include red.

I reacted sensibly and maturely by bursting into tears, but fortunately Dan and JTA were around and took me off to the hospital (JTA getting up from his sick bed to do so), where we waited around for four hours only to get bandaged up by the same guy who’d done my triage when I was first admitted. Ah, the NHS. It was a good thing that JTA thought to grab a stack of books as we were leaving the house. Of course, since I injured myself on a Thursday and Thursday night is date night in our household, we did share a romantic moment together under the glaring lights:

Mostly this took so much effort because of all the stuff we have. Since I got myself a semi-disposable income through the medium of Student Loans back in 2003, I’ve been buying things on a pretty regular basis. I now have enough possessions that even I think there might be too many of ‘em.

And that brings me only slightly pointedly, to the subject of Wedding Presents. Traditionally, y’ken, the bride and groom are given gifts by their friends and family, in order that they can begin their married life together with some possessions of their own. That works pretty well, if the start of “married life together” is also the start of “life together at all”. It doesn’t work quite so well with seven years of material goods already demanding to be allocated within the confines of a moderately small house.

Thing is, we’re stupidly lucky. The pair of us have contrived to be born and raised in the prosperous West, with the might of history, piles of natural resources and an ethically embarrassing system of globalised capitalism combining to ensure that our worries mainly consist of “Can I buy another pair of Italian leather loafers, or should I finish paying off that awesome tweed sports jacket first?” and “Good God, what am I going to do with a seventh saucepan? That stupid stand from ARGOS is already way too full, and we can’t move the fridge because it is full of Reisling and if I unplug it it will get warm!”

High on our list of questions are “What the Hell do we need that we haven’t got?”, and “Damn, I wonder if I should upgrade my graphics card? It must be six months old by now!”. Low on our list is “Where is the next drink of clean water coming from?” and “I wonder if anyone will remember my name when they finally find my body?”

I reckon we can all agree that of those four questions, only the latter two are worth straining yourself to answer.

The basic gift list is up. We don’t need things, and the things we want are things we don’t need (and therefore crazy expensive). So we aren’t asking you to buy us things.

What we are asking, and what we do want, is for you to donate some money (about as much as you might have spent on a present, according to your means) to one of our nominated charities. It means more to us that our getting married is something that helps other people than it does that in fifteen years we might be able to say “Crap, that plate’s got smashed, an’ it was a wedding present an’ all.”

We’re asking you to push money at one, two or all three of our charities:

• Samaritans of Aberystwyth and Mid Wales, provide emotional support to people experiencing feelings of distress or dispair. Both Ruth & I used to volunteer with them, and you can take my word for it that they’re an essential service.
• Air Ambulance is an organisation supported entirely by charitable funds. They provide emergency assistance and transport those in need of urgent medical attention to hospital, often saving lives that would be lost waiting for a road-bound ambulance to reach remote locations.
• Water Aid is an international NGO that provides clean and safe drinking water to people in some of the poorest communities on the planet. They aim to provide lasting access to clean water and sanitation facilities in order to reduce the two million deaths per year caused by reliance on unsafe water sources.

I don’t want to come across as harsh here: if you’d like to give us a gift, I promise you I’ll thank you for thinking of us. But we’d both like it if your wedding present to us gave us something to be grateful for, and you donated on our behalf.

If, out of a sense of tradition, or obligation, or for some personal reason of your own, you feel obliged to get us a physical gift in addition to donating, then I guess that’s fine too: we have set up a gift list just in case you want to do both. But it’s a short list, because we don’t need this stuff. We want it, I guess, but not badly. And not more than we want to live.

Of course, that’s all got to change after Ruth and I get married: we’re going to have to start treating each other as husband and wife, so Ruth will end up talking about her husband and her boyfriend, instead. That’s a pretty big change, I think – it’ll feel strange to me, leastways – but big though it is, it’s the only change you’re likely to see come November.

Y’see, getting married – to us – doesn’t mean ‘never seeing anybody else,’ and when you think about it, there’s no real reason it should, since we already found that being together anyway didn’t mean that. What it does mean to us is something like ‘we are a unit, and that’s not about to change.’ That’s probably a whole post in itself, and I’ll rein in my natural instinct to shoehorn it into this one through the use of parentheses: the important thing to note here, is that this isn’t the sort of wedding after which we make everyone miserable by foisting ultimata onto them.

We’re legally square here – because we’re neither of us proposing to get married twice – and more importantly we’re theologically square – because whilst we both believe we’re making a commitment to one another before God, and our family & friends, we’re not committing to anything we don’t mean: just that we’ll be loving and faithful to one another (and, to be honest, we were rather trying to do that anyway).

This is one of the things I really like about the Quaker marriage, and I have to say that when we promise to be loving and faithful we may well have an edge over rather more people than you’d think, because we’ve got a pretty rock solid idea of what we mean by ‘faithful.’ It’s actually the same definition we’ve been working to for about three years now, I’m pretty confident we can manage to stick to it in the future.

Meeting, being populated chiefly by people who describe themselves as Quakers (although we’ve got at least one Buddhist, and anyway, it’s not like it really matters as long as it works for them) were very nice about that: if’n you propose to get married in the Quaker tradition they set up a Meeting for Clearness – chiefly so as to make sure you know what you’re doing – and that was really good: they asked excellent questions about how it worked for us, and where we saw things going in the future, and coming out to them all turned out very well; we didn’t even require another meeting, which was an unexpected compliment, since it often takes two or three to ensure everyone is comfortable with agreeing to appointing a meeting for marriage.

It went a lot smoother than I’d expected: in advance, I was quite worried about the process, since the stakes felt pretty high, and what if we didn’t explain things very well? Someone (I forget who) noted that I was stressed about this in advance, and they suggested we could just keep quiet about being Poly, but that felt wrong to me: this is a damn serious thing we’re getting into here, and I rather think that an enormous lie isn’t the best way to kick the enterprise off… which is wherefore this post, y’see.

We don’t want people to turn up under the impression that us getting married is somehow an end to the poly thing, because it isn’t. I can’t see what’s down the line, of course, and I guess it’s possible that things might change at some point, but right now this works for us, so there’s no good reason why we shouldn’t carry on as we are.

Chances are if you’re not some random who wandered in by googling words in the nearest search engine, we probably invited you, and we’d like anyone we invited to come to the actual Wedding if they can. The party afterwards is pretty nice, I guess, but it’s not important. The Wedding ceremony is the important bit, with the commitment to one another, and the request for divine assistance in doing so, and all that, and the party’s mostly just there because once you’ve got all your friends and family to witness a marriage, it seems a bit harsh to just pack ‘em off without any supper.

Either way, now you know, and you’re perfectly at liberty to say something like ‘well, fair enough, if it works for you. Bit weird for me, though.’ Equally, you’re free to say ‘I think this is morally wrong,’ or ‘I don’t think you should get married if you don’t intend to be monogamous,’ or even ‘I don’t believe in God so asking God to back you would make me feel wrong’.

Understand that this post is to tell you what we believe and what we think, not what we think you should. So if you do feel – for whatever reason – that it would be wrong for you to come along and witness the actual marriage and ask God to back us up in it, then it’s perfectly OK to not show up to the actual Wedding bit.

The thing to remember is that at a Quaker wedding, being there for the actual Marriage part of the day isn’t just being part of the audience the way you might expect: you ain’t just there as witnesses, you’re part of the actual doings. Technically we marry each other, but blessed as Quakers are with a total absence of organised clergy, anyone who is present at a Quaker wedding is automatically a part of that marriage: you don’t just sign the certificate, you sign off on the entire enterprise simply by virtue of coming in.

If your objection is ‘It ain’t for me,’ that’s fine, but if you’re along the lines of ‘It’s not right,’ or ‘It won’t work,’ or something, I’m fairly sure we’d all be happier in the long term if you quietly excused yourself from the ceremony, and just came to the party afterwards.

We won’t mind, I want to make that clear. We won’t ask why, or say if you don’t make the ceremony, you shouldn’t get to come to the party: if it doesn’t sit right with you, then it doesn’t sit right with you. I don’t imagine you’re doing it on purpose, and – in the nicest possible way – I don’t really care why it doesn’t sit right, that’s your own private business, but I’m not enough of a bastard to ask you to sign your name to something you don’t believe in, and I’d ask that you do us the courtesy of not doing so just to please us – trust me, we’d prefer it.
So there you have it: full disclosure. Nobody’s walking into this blind, if I can help it.

Last week I rang up the exceptionally friendly folks at the Oxford Registry Office and booked an appointment for JTA and me to give legal Notice of Marriage. This is a hoop you have to jump through if you aren’t having a church wedding, and allows people the option to say things like “Wait! I have documentary proof that she’s his mother!” and thus put the kibosh on the whole thing*. We were booked in for yesterday lunchtime at 12.30, which should have given me plenty of time to cycle the 3 miles from my office into town.

Things started to go wrong when I got out to the bike shed at 12pm and found that someone else had put their lock through my brake cables, preventing me from getting my bike out. I borrowed the key for one of our crappy old office bikes, only to discover that the wheels were flat.

By now slightly panicky about making the appointment, I headed for the nearest bus stop. One of each of the types of bus I could have caught passed me on the way there. The rain, which had been a light trickle, had escalated to something akin to a monsoon and I was soaked – in spite of my umbrella – by the time another bus showed up ten minutes later. With 15 minutes to go until our appointment time, I was nervous but optimistic, since the bus journey usually only takes about 10 minutes.

Did I mention the rain? It was still getting worse, and as a consequence no-body wanted to walk anywhere and we stopped at every single stop between my office and the city centre (one particular loud group of foreign students got on at one end of Summertown and off again at the other end of Summertown, a mere two stops later). The journey ended up taking a little over twenty minutes, and poor JTA spent all of that time waiting for me in the street.

We raced across town as best we could, dodging the massive puddles, and made it to the registry office (an impressive old building near Worcester Street) fifteen minutes after our appointment time. I had no idea what to expect, and was rather afraid that we might get told off and have to reschedule.

In the event, though, it was fine. They were very friendly, and after a five minute wait a really nice lady took us upstairs and asked us the same few questions several times. I guess that was to make sure we weren’t signing up for a marriage of convenience, but it was slightly odd all the same. Especially during the bit when we were each questioned separately, and I nearly couldn’t remember JTA’s birthday…

So, yeah. Our details will go up online somewhere, and if no hysterical fantasists have come forward by the 24th of August we’ll be issued with little blue pieces of paper and have legal permission to wed. Exciting or what?

When we came out of the registry office, it had stopped raining. We went to The Mission and had delicious burritos. I don’t think that’s a legal requirement, but it felt right.

I really hate dieting. I like food, I don’t enjoy the feeling of hunger, plus I have to be really disciplined about it to ensure I don’t go down the checking-my-weight-every-day, only-consuming-45-calories-a-day, borderline-anorexia path (been there once before – don’t want to do it again). Furthermore, I’m sure I’m not the only person who finds that the minute I’ve decided to diet, my head fills itself with images of cream cakes, crisps and the like.

To make the whole thing more manageable (and less depressing), I’ve decided to try it for a month and then go back to my usual eating habits in March (I’m confident that the exercise will stop me piling the pounds back on again). The observant among you may notice this means I’m dieting for one month, and that one month just happens to be the shortest of the year…