Not Just A Wedding.
It may or may not have escaped your knowledge but a few weeks ago, toward the end of March, the blog squad and I made the journey down to the East English coast for the wedding of the year. If you follow any or all of us on Instagram you probably couldn't avoid the constant stories updates of the fun we were having, and all the photos that we posted on our grids after that.
I'm not going to talk about the details of the wedding, I think we did enough oversharing at the time and you can still catch loads of it on my Instagram highlights or on the hashtag #tildeathdouspart2018 which we all used. Effi also has been through the wedding from start to finish, from dress to budget to the finer details (like my illustrations, oh hey) which you can read all about on her blog - links further down the post.
Instead, I'm going to talk a little bit about how for us, it wasn't 'just a wedding'.
No wedding is 'just a wedding' of course. It doesn't matter if you've been invited as a plus one to a couple you barely know or whether you're dreading the details of the day - a wedding is a wedding and they always end up fabulous and if you're anything like me you always end up shedding a tear because you just love to see people in love.
But I worry that when it came to looking at us all having a boogie and sharing too many Boomerangs on Insta stories that it just looked like 5 girls having fun at a wedding. And I worry you didn't get the full experience. The full blown affect it had on all of us, and just what it meant to be there.
You might see us all on Instagram or on Twitter gassing about our friendship, about our Whatsapp group and generally being annoying about the lols and inside jokes we have. But take a step back and see it from our side. Sure we speak every day, hundreds or thousands times a day. Sure we've shared our deepest darkest secrets and our worst days and our best days and we've celebrated relationships, new jobs, new homes and life changes. But imagine what we had to say when Effi's family and friends asked "so how do you know the bride and groom?" (Or imagine our sneaky glances to one another when they called her by a different name!)
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"Oh well we're Effi's blogging friends"
"We went away with Effi last September"
"Well we actually only met Sam yesterday"
"Haha we've only actually met Effi once before"
"We organised an event together back in the summer of 2016. But actually she wasn't there"
"So we met over Twitter?"
You can only imagine the look on the rest of the guests faces, and the follow up questions. We rocked up, 4 girls nobody else had ever seen and busied ourselves helping set up the day before the wedding, were the first people to see the bride pull up at the venue, 4 girls who filmed and photographed the whole day, who danced when no-one else was dancing, who accompanied each other as plus one's and who came back the day after to help tidy away and then stole the bride for the afternoon for a Toby Carvery.
We were invited to Effi's wedding months and months ago and before we even knew we were on the guest list she was sharing all her plans with us, we helped her make decisions, I did all the illustrations for her centre pieces and seating plan and she convinced us a dress from eBay was the one for her (and she was right).
Effi deemed us important enough to make it to a guest list of her closest family and friends and Sam didn't bat an eyelid at having 4 girls there who he'd never met. They gave us their house plants that they can't take on their next big adventure in life and in a happy full circle of plants we bought them an Ikea giftcard as a wedding present so they could replace what they'd lost to our homes. And we all cried over it.
Effi's blogs!
I travelled 5 hours, Hannah navigated the worst M25 journey ever, Sarah endured my driving but provided snacks and Mel got to watch Les Miserables, all to be there to celebrate with them. We got to explore a part of Sussex we'd not been to before in the sweetest Air B&B and even though this time we didn't stay with Effi this time we slotted into life living together, albeit for a weekend, like we'd been roomies for years. We convoyed, we had chips, we had a bloody ball at the wedding and topped the whole weekend off with a dog walk on the beach and a breath of sea air.
We dressed up, we didn't hesitate for a second to travel down there and Effi and Sam didn't hesitate for a second to asking us to come and it was genuinely an honour to be there.
We might be all over your social media wanging on about our friendship but when it comes to actual real life we were basically a group of strangers brought together by an event organised over Twitter, a single meeting and thought important enough to go to one of the biggest days of someone's life. And how many blogging pals can really say that?
A big thank you to Effi & Sam for inviting us, trusting us to take photos and help set up and for throwing the best bash we've been to in years. We heart you.
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