Arrrgh! Dresses! Arrrgh!
I really hate shopping. I have no idea how other women can find it a fun or relaxing activity. You're basically signing up to slog around a crowded town centre looking at an endless parade of fashionable mass-produced crap while being sneered at by a succession of moody teenaged shop-assistants. In spite of this, today Lucy and I went looking for Bridesmaids dresses. It was an epic nightmare.
The plan was simple: next weekend all of the bridesmaids will be in the same place at the same time. Clearly this was the best time to measure everyone and make final decisions on colour and style. However, to make the whole process quicker and easier an advance team agreed to run reconnaissance and find the best place to take the bridal party to try on dresses.
The first loss was batelf who developed a suspiciously convenient sore knee that prevented him from meeting us in town. Had we known the horrors that awaited us, Lucy and I would almost certainly have shot ourselves in the foot in order to avoid active duty. As it was we went bravely forth into the centre of Manchester with a piece of coloured ribbon and a mission.
First of all we looked in the 'formalwear' departments of the local department stores. This proved fruitless, since unless we wanted to look like a citizen of ancient Greece that had been inexplicably dipped in sequins there was very little available, and none of it in the correct colour or style. 'No Sequins' Lucy demanded, and I agreed that clearly sequins were out of the question. It seems that ruffles are very fashionable at the moment, in spite of making almost everyone and everything we saw with them look ghastly. 'No ruffles' Lucy demanded, and I agreed that while the bridesmaids are not allowed to look nicer than the bride, I had no plans to actively make them look like bracket fungus.
Somewhat daunted, we decided to look in the formalwear sections of regular high-street dress shops, in the hopes of their having something less awful but still slightly cheaper than the bridal stores. This proved a noisy and exhausting waste of time, and after a coffee and a slice of cake we decided it was clearly time to bite the bullet, damn the expense and try the actual bridal shops.
Now, I had an image of bridal shops. Naturally they were going to be expensive, because the mere act of appending the word 'bridal' to any product or service adds a hundred pounds to the price. I thought however that because of the exorbitant prices, the service would be excellent and helpful ladies would doubtless bustle about for us, making us feel excited about the upcoming nuptials. Perhaps there would be tea and biscuits, and long conversations about hemlines? Not quite...
The ladies behind the counter in the Bridal Shops reminded me very much of the battleaxe head-of-year I endured in high school. Plump, acerbic middle-aged women with perpetually pursed lips, they made us feel as though we were wasting their time by daring to speak to them. They abruptly told us that bridesmaids dresses are normally ordered six to eight months in advance (though of course a rush order can be arranged for double the price). They seemed amazed or horrified that we had already chosen a colour and style rather than letting them do it for us and in the case of one hopeless woman at the Celebration Village, informed us that they couldn't possibly get us dresses in less than four months time, no way, no how.
In the end, exhausted and dejected we fell back on the original plan of making the god damned dresses ourselves. We found a pattern for the exact style we wanted. We found a fabric in the exact colour we wanted. Best of all, the ladies in Abakhan were polite and helpful and bustled about for us finding exactly the things that we needed, doing complex mental arithmetic for us, and promising to order in anything that was missing by Wednesday. So now I have a big bag of cloth and gubbins, that needs to somehow magically transform itself into three shiny dresses before the end of September. Halp Please?