‘It was wonderful,’ she told us. ‘We shared a glass each night and made the bottle last the whole fortnight.’
WEDDING PRESENTS
Get your thank-you letters written before the wedding. Once the pre-wedding momentum has been lost, you’ll never get down to them.
Don’t beef too much about the presents your partner’s family or friends have given you, even if they are ghastly. No one likes to be reminded that they are related to, or acquainted with, people of execrable taste. Try and keep a list of who gave you what, so you can bring those cake forks out of hiding when Aunt Agatha comes to tea, and you won’t, as we did, give a particularly hideous vase back to the woman who gave it to us, when later she got married.
Setting up house
MOVING IN
AT BEST A nightmare — as Dorothy Parker said, the one dependable law of life is that everything is always worse than you thought it was going to be.
When my parents moved into their first house, they arrived to find the electricians had all the floor boards up, the paint was wet in the kitchen, and there was an enormous pile of rubble in the garage surmounted by a one-horned, one-eyed stag.
Try therefore to get all major structural alterations done beforehand. Nothing is more depressing than trying to get a place straight with builders trooping in and out with muddy feet and demands for endless cups of tea. Even the smallest job will seem as though they’re building the pyramids.
Try to get shelves up beforehand; removal men unpack at a fantastic rate, and you’ll soon find every inch of floor space covered and nowhere to put anything. Don’t forget to get the gas and electricity connected. Buy plenty of light bulbs.