You Are Cordially Not Invited

The venue manager told us our little show must go on, with or without some puny G20 summit coming to town, so last week’s crisis is averted. Now our wedding invitations are finally ready to go out.

Do you like them? Well, you can’t have one. You’re not invited. We can’t afford to feed you.

My bride-to-be is in possession of all kinds of wedding planning rules of thumb, the source of which remains obscure to me (but it’s probably a combination of our mothers and aunts, magazines and TV shows).

One rule says that six to eight weeks’ notice is enough time to send out the invitations, but of course that means by the time you stick them in the mail, everyone has already heard the details and figured out whether they can attend. Some of our guests are heading from places like England and Australia. If they were just finding out now about the nuptials at the end of June there’d be no way they’d make it.

So really the invitations are just for show, which is precisely how women want it.

Another piece of womanly wisdom holds that around 80% of your guests are going to RSVP in the affirmative, so it’s relatively safe to budget accordingly.

In our case that means expecting 105.6 guests, of whom around eight will be too young to drink booze and a handful more don’t drink despite being old enough to. The end attendance better cleave pretty closely to that figure, because if we get many more, we won’t have enough food to go around and the booze bill will run way over budget.

My fiancée tells me she’s seen shows in which the bride and groom are forced to rip open envelopes in search of cash to pay the caterers and musicians and whatnot on the very night of the wedding. She wants to avoid this at all costs.

But of course, if it came to that I’d be the one embarking on the mad cash hunt. One of the reasons you get yourself a husband is so there’s someone around to do your dirty work.