LET'S DANCE
The sun came out just in time for features director Lucy Slight and radio broadcaster Clint Roberts’ rural Bay of Plenty wedding
Lucy: Writes for a living, is an extroverted introvert, loves cooking and sticky chai tea, has too many pairs of shoes but won’t stop buying more.
Clint: Talks for a living, is an extroverted extrovert, loves eating Lucy’s cooking and drinking ice-cold Heineken, has too many pairs of shoes but won’t stop buying more. Lucy and Clint tied the knot at Old Forest School in the Bay of Plenty on February
2 of this year. Clint dropped a knee (and Lucy promptly made him get up) at Mission Estate during a surprise weekend getaway to Hawkes Bay in November 2016. And from the sounds of it, everything in between those two dates was pretty breezy. Wedding planning isn’t actually that hard, if you ask Lucy…
Acouple of months after getting engaged, I stumbled across Old Forest School during a routine wedding-venue internet surf. I’d found dozens of locations by this point but none
of them seemed to quite hit the mark. The maximum capacity was too low, you had to bring in too many elements yourself (portaloos? No thanks!), or you were required to eat their food and drink their booze — and we knew that could end up costing a small fortune. The only box that Old Forest School didn’t tick was the Auckland location, but once we thought about how fun it would be for our guests to have a weekend away, we were sold. So much so that we booked the venue without even going to see it. I guess that pretty much sums up how we went about our planning: Find it, enquire about it, lock it in! If you give yourself too many options to choose from it can all get a bit overwhelming and we didn’t want our wedding to end up consuming us. As the creative director of our household,
I put myself in charge of logistics, securing suppliers and taking care of the planning. As the chief financial officer, Clint would occasionally ask to see my costs spreadsheet — but was pretty game to go with the majority of my ideas.
Looking back on it now, I’m so grateful that we had such amazing suppliers and a venue that ran like a well-oiled machine, because it allowed us to just enjoy the ride rather than getting stressed out. I guess that’s my best piece of advice for anyone in the throws of wedding prep — trust your suppliers and don’t sweat the small stuff. If that thing you desperately want isn’t available, just move on and find something else. Talk to other couples who have had their wedding at your venue and get their supplier lists and recommendations. Follow wedding traditions if they feel right to you and flag them if they don’t. We decided to forgo a wedding cake in favour of a Mr Whippy truck with all-you-can-eat ice cream, because I’d lost count of the number of times I’d seen cake go to waste at weddings. And I don’t regret not getting that cake-cutting photo for a second.
In the lead-up to our wedding day
I was feeling really anxious about being the centre of attention — a position I don’t naturally feel comfortable with. I went online and read first-person accounts of how other people dealt with their anxiety around the day and they all said the same thing — when the wedding day rolls around, all your worries will go out the window. As a storm raged outside the day before, I had a whole new set of fears, but those people on the internet were right. Come February 2 I was back to being as cool as a cucumber and my husband-to-be was the one who ended up with the nerves!
Walking down the aisle and seeing the smiling faces of all our friends and family is still one of my favourite moments from our day, and arriving back from our sunset shoot to see a queue for the Mr Whippy truck about 30 people deep was hilarious. And of course, being able to call my boyfriend “my husband” for the first time was right up there, too.