The Impossibility Of Confetti.

Or: Who wants a sliver of crispy cornflower in their eye?

Blog thoughts have been a little thin on the ground in the last few weeks. I went out with my blog catching net but the little blighters had the better of me. Even when I occasionally snagged a good one, the next day it looked either less impressive, or had evaporated altogether. Such is the way with blog ideas.

Doesn’t mean it’s been a quiet time. There’s been family stuff, house stuff, travel stuff, wondering why it’s always raining stuff. But mostly, and increasingly, there’s been wedding stuff.

We got engaged what feels like 38 years ago, and also last Wednesday ago, at the same time. But now it’s close enough to have us discussing it all day long.

Sarah and I work well together. We ‘divide and conquer’ as far as wedding jobs go. We have different skill sets and these compliment each other. I’m good at going ‘Shit the bed, we haven’t rung the taxi firm back to see if they can accommodate a shuttle service for our guests, both to and from the venue! What if they’ve run out of taxis? What if they don’t have anything big enough? What if it’s all an unmitigated disaster?!’

And Sarah’s good at going, ‘Paul, calm down, I’ve done it.’ At which point, I wipe the infant tears of chaos from my eyes and say ‘You are amazing.’

Divide, conquer, complement.

Told you.

The thing about planning a wedding is that no job on the to-do list can be crossed off without a mess of smaller decisions coming along behind it. Like a Great Dane at the front of a dog walker’s pack, followed almost entirely by yippy yappy little things.

For instance: confetti. Simple, right?

OK, so it needs to be biodegradable, but apart from that, how difficult can it be?

The process should go like this:

1. Decide if we want confetti.

2. If we want confetti, get confetti.

3. If we don't want confetti, forget about it.

We decided we want confetti. Tick. But it's when we move on to number two in the ‘buying confetti’ list above, that our problems begin…

With our High Street lacking a confetti shop, we take to the internet - a place where you can purchase everything. From a tongue-shaped, plastic cat brush you hold in your mouth so you can groom them like you’re another cat…

Wrong in every way.

…to, if you’re so inclined, a ‘haunted’ doll.

Literally available right now on eBay!

So how hard can it be to get stuff to throw into the air on our wedding day?

‘Biodegradable confetti’ returns just short of 200,000 hits on Google! Do we want paper or flowers or confetti made from the discarded feathers from angel wings? How the hell do I know? And how many handfuls are there in an £84 bag on Amazon?

(A friend of mine used to fill every birthday card with a gazillion bits of paper created using a hole-punch. You’d open the card and they’d go everywhere. All colours, all types of paper, from Christmas wrapping to newspapers. Oh how I laughed – even nine weeks later when I was still finding them in every room of the house.

How he’s ended up as my Best Man is a mystery I just can't explain.)

Flowers are nice, aren’t they? Everyone likes flowers. But are dried flowers as nice? They can be nice in a bowl with a pleasant scent - less so when someone mistakes them for a floral version of Bombay Mix.

But do we want thousands of them lobbed at us by wedding guests already tipsy on the welcome drinks we supplied to their empty stomachs - because we decided not to stretch to massively over-priced canapés? It could be carnage! What if I get a sliver of crispy cornflower in an eye? No thank you. If Mother Nature had intended dead flowers to be a part of a joyous celebration, well, at the very least she’d have pushed advertising literature through the door, wouldn’t she?

So, not flowers.

What then? Paper? Made by a hole-punch? Surely not? Oh, actually not. Made by companies. Companies who, for a living, make bits of paper for wedding guests to chuck at each other. Excellent. Oh. One miserable website furiously insists throwing paper confetti is literally the same as throwing dead trees at the happy couple, as that’s where paper comes from. And dead trees have been growing for years, while dead flowers have only been alive a few months, before they’re ritually slaughtered in the name of incomprehensible wedding traditions. Brutal. Blimey.

But sod it, I don’t imagine a tree has to sacrifice much more than a couple of low hanging twigs to make enough paper for our wedding confetti – it’s only a small affair. Paper it is.

Dear God, you have to order it by weight. How much weight is there in a handful? I suggest to Sarah that I could rip up the old phone directory (still sitting on top of the electricity metre, where the previous owners of our house left it), get several handfuls, throw them in the air and then weigh them..?

…

I’m fairly sure she’s ignoring me. I can tell when she’s intentionally ignoring me – she ever so slightly raises an eyebrow. Rude.

A little research reveals I am not the first person to wonder the weight of a ‘handful’, so I get a vague idea. But, before knowing how many handfuls you need, you have to know how many guests are coming. Good question. I’ve no idea. Shit. It was my idea to have a wedding app. Very modern, I know. Thank you. It collates and informs and organises to a level every groom-to-be should aspire to.

And if I could only remember the bloody password I’m sure it will be able to answer my question and I’ll know how many invitation acceptances we've had. Hang on, but will it also know how many are still question marks, how many have yet to reply?

Several password attempts later, I’m in and counting. There was definitely a way for the app to do this mundane task for me, but I set it up ages ago and can’t remember any of the functionality that made it such a ‘must have’ back then. Sigh. Damn, some couples sometimes answered only once, on behalf of them both and this means my numbers are all wrong. Then I lose count all together when I see one friend said they were 82.36% (sic) likely to attend. How the hell do I order for them? What if the 17.64% of them that fails to attend is their arms? The maths makes my head hurt.

Sarah un-raises her eyebrow and reveals she has a spreadsheet.

How, in the name of all that is holy, was I supposed to know that?!

Ah, apparently if I ‘ever listened to her properly’ or ‘opened the emails she sends me’ I’d know and have access to the aforementioned file.

I don’t know how clever it is to be right all the time.

So, we have numbers and we have researched evidence of the throw to weight ratio of a normal adult. I glance at our guest list, sporting more people on the dark edges of ‘normal’ than the annual meeting of a Haunted Doll Fanciers Club. I literally cannot be responsible for evil plastic toys or the average hand size of our guest list! I’m only a man!! And it’s just paper!!!

Sarah somehow decides these essential, wedding-ruining decisions can be bypassed with:

‘Shh, come pick some colours.’

Colours? Colours?! COLOURS!!!!! Confetti has colours? Who knew that?

Apparently ‘everyone’ knew that, according to my wife-to-(maybe, if she loses the tone and lowers the eye-brow)-be.

With my palms held firmly over the front of my face, I offer my choices based on the colours of the floaters dancing on the inside of my exhausted eyelids. Some of the colours are hard to define – that one might be ‘orange’, but it could just as easily be the colour of overwhelm and latent sobriety. The flashes of white? Despair, colour-mixed with feckless list-making...

Planning a wedding can really age you...

‘Cream. Pink. Green.’ Sarah speaks, as though to herself. It might be a statement. It might be a question. It might be her favourite Jelly Babies in order of preference. She glances at me. Ah, a question.

‘Yes.’ I say, absolutely incensed that once again, I’ve had to make the decision!

Sarah tweaks the spread sheet and I go and lie down in a dark room for an hour.

The next morning there’s an email telling us we’ve made a ‘brilliant’ choice regarding our confetti. That’s something. At least the company sees we mean business.

‘They want to know shades,’ says Sarah.

They want to know shades? Shades of what? Shades of cream??

But it’s worse than that. Each of our colours has four shades.

Let me remind you that these are bits of paper thrown into the air, some of which will be preserved forever in one or two of the seven and a half thousand photos our wedding photographer averages at each gig he shoots, but most will be trampled into the floor by lamas and alpacas wearing bowties and donkey’s wearing flat caps, all of which we will be petting a few minutes later!!

We choose. We press send. Tick. Job done.

That must be everything, surely? I may have lost a little weight during this mammoth set of decisions, but that’s no bad thing – who doesn’t want to squeeze nicely into their new wedding suit, bought optimistically a size smaller than the anxious-looking suit-seller recommended more than once?

I’m almost at the fridge, praying a bottle of rosé is still in there, like a coquettish mermaid calling me toward her rocks, when Sarah calls from the other room. I don’t fully hear her.

‘Sorry, what was that?’ I say, my mouth watering at the pink grapy goodness awaiting me within the silver confines of the fridge.

‘What are your thoughts about the place settings?’

‘How do you mean – ‘place settings’?’ I utter, feeling sphincters all over me tighten with worry.

‘For the guests’ names? Paper? Leaves? Wood? Sharks' teeth? Gold mirror acrylic place names? Stones? Small records with their favourite songs printed on them..?’

And this my friends is when I wept…