So, we're getting married, best ways to irritate all our guests here please

[Madascheese]

Well DP pitched up with a very pretty bit of jewellery yesterday and proposed! How excited am I?

Ooh - on that note, bindweed, send out all invitations addressed to 'Mr. X and wife' or 'Miss. Y and boyfriend', even if the people in question are far too old for 'boyfriends' or in homosexual relationships. If people turn up with same-sex partners, get flustered and offended about your neatly male/female organized table plans.

(I know someone who was a guest at this wedding. Genius.)

1. Insist the bridesmaids wear home-made dresses, ideally pinned together at the seams when time ran out. Make sure you yourself wear a beautiful, expensive couture number.

2. Buy bridesmaids' dresses two sizes too small, and insist they diet.

Ask your mother to say very loudly at quiet moment in front of the whole reception that you married the good looking brother then!

When the not good looking brother forms an amazing and one off band with some brilliant musicians and everyone is on the dance floor and its really amazing music, just what the bride and groom wanted as his present. Make sure that some guest asks the bride and groom if he can book them for his wedding but without the crap singer (said ugly brother!).

thederkinsdame we travelled from London to Newcastle for that very set up. Was a girl from work who I really really like and I know it was because the numbers just didn't add up if she invited everyone from work to the whole thing. It was our choice to go all that way, she was really touched that we made the effort and we had a nice weekend away.

Tips... ok, the worst idea I ever heard came from a, very intelectual, student of mine.

She and her fiance were highly against the "dance of the dollar" (you know, the one that whoever wants to the bride/groom, pins a dollar bill on their clothes). Anyhow, as they disliked the tradition so much they thought of getting a mannequin with wheels for the guests to dance with and pin their dollars in, the worst part is that they were convinced the guest would find it great fun and would join in...

I still feel like throwing up almost 20 years later...

Invite Marantha! She sounds like a right bag of laughs...

Invite guests from all over the world and then ignore them for the entire wedding.

Make sure that, if a good number of your guests follow a religion that forbids eating pork, that they are served pork based canapes. Don't bother offering anything else, if you don't tell them, they won't notice.

Do this at next morning's brunch as well. They'll love that.

Ban your new DH from speaking to his parents.

Also, if you do what I did and wear a short dress, that really seems to piss the traditionalists off. My SIL is still annoyed with me about that.

Also book it in the middle of January (preferably on your niece's 2nd birthday) and make sure it's in the arse end of nowhere and has no accommodation so that, if it snows, your guests have a long, perilous journey to get back to their hotel.

I rather like booking it on a public holiday (say New Years, or August Bank Holiday), in a tourist destination.

Oh hurrrah! Marantha approves of me not changing my name because we got married in the correct non name changing fashion

I just wrote out a whole ranty post then realised it had got a bit personal and identifiable so deleted it. I have to go and breath into a paper bag for a bit to calm down.

Make sure it coincides with a critical World Cup Qualifying game for England.

Make sure the vicar emphasises how much his church costs to run and how all donations are gratefully received.

Radiate neurosis throughout, including a 'hen night' where you anorexically eat nothing at all while your guests munch their way through three courses. Make it clear everything's been done on a budget - not in a 'soddit, let's just have a cava-based pissup' way but in a watery imitation of a posh wedding way, with a meal at 4pm which involves one glass of semi-sweet semi-sparkling wine. Make inaudible speeches.

I think the couple who had this particular wedding are now divorced but happily I have lost touch with them...

God we've all been to some crap weddings :o

Prof, clearly what is really needed is for the bride to give a speech asking all the married women who wore white and didn't change their names to stand up for the ritual humiliation.

Nowt like a bit of ritual humiliation to get a wedding going.

Have a gift registry at Harrods where the cheapest item on the list is a caviar spoon for 300 quid.

This has actually happened.

It's the only way LRD!

Prof, I've been looking on youtube for the bit in Sex and the City where Miranda's mother-in-law gets drunk and starts tearfully and publicly confessing that she 'wore white ... but I shouldn't have done. I had a white dress on the outside and my little Jackie on the inside!'

Love it. That would also be good - granny confessions about pre-marital sex.

OR - and this is another now-divorced couple - have lots and lots and lots of songs (sung by a choir) and poems (read by mates) about Lurve and How In Lurve you are.

This works best if your guests are secretly tthinking RUN FOR IT NOW GIRL IT'S NOT TOO LATE (DP and I were the only ones, I think, but our view has been Justified by History).

A rather odd velvet frock - reminiscent of curtains - made to your own design works wonders too. (Two weddings, one the one mentioned above, the other one that was actually quite fun. Both now divorced.)

Don't forget to book it midweek and then throw a strop because people aren't prepared to take their kids out of school for three days to travel to your wedding and back again, or take precious leave for it

On a more serious note. please please do tell your guests a dress code.

We did not. My DH said that 'everybody knows' what to wear to a wedding, and because I had been in the country for less than a year and had never actually met his friends, (so did not want to impose myself) I assumed he knew what the fuck he was talking about.

Some people came in morning suits, some in summer frocks, some in jeans.

Was bloody embarrassing for everyone, and they all assume that as the bride it is your fault.

a decade later and I am still getting it in the neck from my FIL about that one.

Congratulations!

Can I urge you to plan your big day to coincide with another family event?

I particularly enjoyed being decked out in puce taffeta and pawed by the drunken best man when I was step-sister's bridesmaid on my eighteenth birthday.

Above all, ensure that it is utterly devoid of any spontanaeity, pleasure and/or style. I've been to at least one slightly hectic wedding - the weekend before Christmas, we had to travel from London to Edinburgh with a toddler and six-month-old, all quite last-minute organisation - which was quite, quite lovely because they'd worked out carefully who should sit where (while writing their own speeches during the meal!), it was in the university library which is a gorgeous old building, there was a kids' corner where they could watch videos, and friends doing fire-juggling as you walked up to the library through the cold...you don't want any of that. Make it clear it's al about YOU and YOUR SPECIAL DAY.

Oh, hawaiian, how awful!

Read the 'Native American Wedding Blessing' then tell everyone how personal and special it is to you. Or the same with 'Let me not to the marriage of true minds' or the Corinthians reading.

Or (she says bitterly, searching for flights), plan your wedding in a foreign country 80 miles from the airport.

Favouritism in picking who is your bridesmaid also a winner. I suggest you opt for one set of nieces and not another.