More wedding news: Inevitable disappointment?

You may have problems: If you are jobless, your woman, your man, your feral kids, war, diseases and pestilence are all causing you grief – well, take it from Penelope Goldstream, who is still planning her wedding, it can all get a whole lot worse!

Does it ever pay to put all your eggs in one basket?  Are you setting yourself up for disappointment or a blessing in disguise?

Does a verbal agreement not mean anything to anybody now or am I simply too naive to take somebody’s word alone as a promise to do something?  You may have read a previous diary chapter of mine entitled ‘Looking without looking’; if not then I’ll give you a quick update.

Last year I went on holiday to Ibiza and happened to stumble across a great male solo singer and guitarist.  I approached him, asked him to be my wedding singer and we exchanged contact details to discuss further.  I gave him all the necessary details, asked his price and he merrily said he would love to do it.  In my mind that was a done deal and I didn’t look any further for any wedding entertainment.

A few months had passed when out of the blue I received an e-mail from him.  Admittedly it was an e-mail the length of a short story, so he must have cared a little bit?  He said that he was looking for a career change and he may be moving location.  Frankly at this point I didn’t care about his career change.  The bottom line was that he could not confirm the wedding date.  His exact wording was ‘If you can wait until August then I’d be able to confirm for sure’.

For a few minutes this was the end of the world for me.  Seriously, does this man think I will leave something as important as wedding entertainment to only 4 months before the wedding – certainly not in my world! At that stage it was only 10 months until the wedding and I’m without my wedding entertainment.  The term bridezilla springs to mind.

I had to go back to the very beginning, laboriously searching for entertainment options, ordering demos and desperately trying to find somebody who fits the strict criteria.  Weeks passed and I still had nothing apart from 23 useless demo tapes stacked in my kitchen which in today’s world wouldn’t pass basic GCSE music.  How some people think they should be paid for singing is beyond me.

After contemplating knocking the wedding evening on the head altogether due to the lack of suitable artists, I finally came across a young man who goes by the name of ‘the wedding singer’.  He was perfect.  I spoke to him on the phone and as he could actually hold a conversation rather than just grunting, he was well on the way to being hired.  He sings live songs, provides disco entertainment and doesn’t even charge any extra for the cheesy disco lighting!  Thank goodness for the internet because without it my wedding would be nonexistent.

It’s been 6 months since first finding the singer in Ibiza to where I’m at now with the wedding singer and I can’t help thinking that I could have dodged all of this unnecessary strife.  I’m an intelligent person and I should have realised that a guy living in Scotland who bases his career on singing in a bar in Ibiza over the summer months is hardly likely to be wedding singing material.  I can’t help coming back to the age old saying ‘if something is too good to be true, it probably is’.  I’m not saying that you can’t stumble across situations like this because I’m sure it has happened in the past and worked out perfectly.

I’m confident I have a great wedding singer and I have a written agreement from him so I shouldn’t find myself in the same situation in 6 months time!   My future note to self is don’t put all your eggs in one basket because there could be something much better out there; it’s simply a case of looking in the right places.