We recently visited my parents in Derby and Cat went to have another dress fitting. We also went to see the registrar to go over the ceremony and some questions we had. We saw the senior registrar who promised us that we were paying good money to them to make sure everything went without a hitch. On second thoughts, maybe that’s a bad thing. The good news is that he said we can sue him if it all goes wrong!

After that we went back to Mickleover Court to meet up with Tracey to finalise the plans. I think it is fair to say that we were both really impressed with her, she answered all of our questions and was very competent and came up with some great ideas. We have all but put into place the venue side of things – we just have to pay for it!! We also met up with the chair covers woman, and we have some ribbon to practise tying our bows!!

My outfit and Adam’s are now complete, the cravats having been the last item to get. We’ve not had our final fitting as it were, but I’m confident that everything will fit.

We’ve been in touch with our photographer who shall shortly be scouting out the venue. We’re going to try and meet with her when we are next in Derby to discuss the exact photos we want, and to ask her any final questions.

The only other progress has been my speech. I managed to start and pretty much finish it in about an hour, although I haven’t looked at it since. My fear is that everything I wrote and found funny, was down to tiredness or my appaling sense of humour!

Within the next few days, we will be running through every aspect of the day on paper to fill in all the gaps we might have missed. Things like the guestbook, which my mum has very kindly offered to look for. But I’m pretty confident that all the major things are sorted.

Besides which we have plenty of time to sort things out – looks at calendar – or maybe not…

We knew we wanted 19.2 caret gold (Portuguese gold is unique in that it comes in 19.2 caret rather than the 18 caret that is seen in the rest of the world) to match her engagement ring.

After trying many shops, we settled on 2 rings from the shop we almost got the engagement ring from. They are actually commitment rings, but I wanted a lightweight band, rather than anything chunky.

Fortunately we managed to order them to arrive before we flew back to England. They are made of white gold, and I think look really good (as long as I don’t get fatter fingers between now and June – I wanted a tight band).

Can’t wait to put them on for real!!

In the UK as well as many other places (all but Las Vegas) it is necessary to register the upcoming marriage at the Register Office. Cat booked an appointment a few weeks back and we went yesterday.

After ensuring we were who we said we were, we had to individually answer a series of questions without helping each other. This is more difficult than it sounds. Also, you have to let the registrar ask the full question without interrupting them. All these legal requirements seems a bit over to top to me, but I guess as long as we end up married, we’ll jump through the hoops!

£60 lighter, we walked out and need to collect our certificates in a couple of weeks. Anyone passing by the MK Register Office in the next 15 days can see our notice posted up!

Picking our venue was only half the battle. Once we’d decided where to hold our wedding, the next step was to let them know, so they could send us out a contract. We got in touch, and after lots of questions, emails bounced forwards and backwards, we got a copy of the contract in the post.

Apart from Cat’s name being completely wrong (mine was perfect which was unusual), there were still a few other things not on the contract that worried me (no drinks package, no sign of a discount for having a Sunday wedding etc).

More to-ing and fro-ing ensued, but I’m glad to say we’ve managed to get a contract we are happy to put our names on. We just need to know who exactly to pay, and where to send it to. Please, we want to give you money!!

My next tasks are phoning the registrar in Derby to make sure we have someone to perform the ceremony, as well as call the Milton Keynes office so we can give notice of marriage. Also I have to find wedding insurance. So it’s getting busier, and it will only get worse from here!

Last weekend Cat and I travelled up to Derby to try and find a venue to host our wedding. We plan to have the ceremony, breakfast and evening reception all under one roof, but there are a limited number of places registered to hold marriages.

So armed with a list of a dozen or so, we filtered out about 5 or 6 we really liked the look of (they looked nice and were reasonably priced!) and phoned up to book appointments to go and see them. In no particular order they were:

Derbyshire County Cricket Club – The England vs South Africa cricket teams were playing so it was a hive of activity. My dad would happily have stayed! The venue was very nice, and fairly modern. We’d have been happy there. The prices were quite low too.

The Stuart Hotel – A shambles. The guy showing us round couldn’t care less, and by the time the girl our appointment should have been with turned up, we were already mentally out of the door.

Derby Conference Centre – An ex-British Rail building, it is quite nice on the outside, but inside it was still too much like a conference centre to be a strong candidate for a wedding venue.

Coopers Arms – Very nice, I’ve been to a wedding there before. Just a bit too expensive, but a nice old house feel to it.

Pride Park – One of Cat’s favourites, more so that us so called Derby fans! Mark who showed us round was a star and couldn’t have been more helpful. We got a free tour of the stadium, I got to go out to the pitch, and we saw the changing rooms too. Would have been great to get married with the view of the pitch in front of us!

The International Hotel – The cheapest of them all, and you can see why. If money had been very tight, it would have been ok, but as it stands, we saw better for not a fortune more. Needs quite a bit of updating.

Mickleover Court Hotel – Perfect. Absolutely stunning hotel. Fantastic quality feel to it. And strangely, very reasonably priced. A winner all round. It had everything. Great looks, swimming pool and gym, free room for the bride and groom, and a lovely manor to take photos just around the corner. We knew immediately that this was the one, and it would have taken something incredible to dislodge it from our hearts!

We are just in the final stages of booking the venue and registrar for the day. Of all the venues we saw, money aside, the Mickleover Court Hotel really was the one that stood out for us. You can see more of it here – Menzies Mickleover Court Hotel. A perfect venue for the perfect marriage!!

I could think of several candidates that would fit the bill, but one name stood out from the rest. I’ve known this person for well over 10 years, and even though we have both moved about the country (and eventually ended up just a few miles from each other) we’ve kept in touch. He has been a good friend, and is one of the funniest people I know, although most people wouldn’t understand why I think that (well I find him hilarious, and that’s all that matters ).

He came over yesterday at my request, quite unsuspecting of any dastardly scheme, and we went out to dinner at Wagamama. It was there that I popped “the big question’, and fortunately he said yes. I dare say he was even rather chuffed I’d asked!

So without further a do, I’d like to say a big thanks to Adam “Johnno” Johnson from both myself and Cat, for agreeing to be my main man when the time comes. Thanks Adam!!

In all the excitement of getting the blog looking and working great, it’s easy to forget the real reason we made this page! So getting back on track, I wanted to show Cat’s engagement ring, and how we got it.

After buying our commitment rings in Lisbon last year, we decided to buy an engagement ring there too. They seem to have a better choice (English high street stores all seem to sell the same products), and the prices are slightly better as well. We first visited Rua do Ouro (Gold Street) which is obviously the place to start when looking for a gold ring.

We were looking for a solitaire diamond ring, in white gold (which I prefer over yellow gold every time) and have a low set diamond (most rings have a huge mount the stone sits on – probably to make the small diamond seem much bigger). Oh and all this for less than a king’s ransom.

The second shop we looked in had a fantastic ring that seemed to fit all our requirements, it even perfectly fit Cat’s ridiculously small fingers. Sadly it was over our budget. Plus having nothing else to compare it to, we sadly had to move on.

After looking in dozens of other stores, all comparisons came back to that first special ring. We agreed that every one we saw after that was always having to live up to the first one. To make sure we weren’t making it out to be something amazing when it wasn’t, we went back to the shop and looked again. It was still the best ring we’d seen. It was still very expensive.

We gave up for the day. The next day, after plenty of web research about diamonds (carat, cut, clarity and colour) we had a host of questions to ask the shop. Two phone calls later (over 2 days) and there was no contest. Screw bankruptcy, this was the ring we would always want!!

So off we went back to the store (we were up early that morning!) and asked to see it one last time. Cat handed over her plastic, and after a short scary wait wondering if being a foreign card was going to cause a problem, the magic machine stole all our money, and we were one diamond ring richer.

It’s the best ring I’ve seen (can’t get over the habit of looking at rings when we walk through town) and every penny is worth it. It’s so shiny and pretty!!

As the “technical editor” of this blog, I get to do all the fun behind the scenes things to make the magic happen. The theme we are using requires several images to be made for all the various locations they might appear, and each needs to be put in a specific folder. This would be a tedious exercise to do manually for every post we make, so I’ve found a great program (ImageMagick) and written a batch script. It automagically resizes an image to the correct size for each type of image we require, and uploads them to our website in the correct location.

So that means no excuse for not having lots of lovely images on our blog!

Sadly in testing, it doesn’t seem to be sending out any emails (a bit useless for an email subscription system!)

So if anyone does sign up, and doesn’t get the email (you’ll have to manually check the page for updates – just like in the old days when we were kids) could you add a comment to this, or any post, and hopefully one day I’ll get to the bottom of it!