Is a Provisional Booking Legally Binding ?

A new 'groundhog day' wedding adventure starts to unfold before me, I know where I'm going today (the same place as yesterday) and I feel it in my water that I will be booking a wedding date before the Eastenders omnibus starts. Even so, I raise myself out of bed and head downstairs.

Fruit & fibre cereal may well be good for me, but its bloody hard going eating it first thing in the morning. The bottom third of a bowl makes me feel like one of the Japanese game shows where they have to eat the rubber grips off of a full set of golf clubs before the goldfish swims through the pipe and into your trousers. Maybe I’m over doing it with the fibre and all these fresh vegetables I’m eating as part of my wedding-diet. Its one thing to be regular but its another to go through a roll of Andrex a day and half a can of air-freshener.

I check the Sopwell web-site once again, just to make sure that this time we really do have the date correct. It seems that today is the day for booking a wedding, so we depart for the venue for the second time in 24 hours. It’s a bit quiet in the car on the way over, I think it’s because we were thinking the same thing : ‘The venue was spot-on, I could see us getting married there – but I bet they haven’t got any dates we want…..”. We both had this fear and using the old scientific formula of ‘if you don’t talk about it, it might not happen’, we travelled in near silence to St.Albans.

About a week earlier one of my best mates, Paul, had sent out his first tentative email wedding invitation for 28th October 2006. Paul & Suze had got engaged on Christmas Day and had started in earnest the planning process of their big day. It really wouldn’t be good form to book our wedding too close to theirs and we had other events to consider, my parents 40th anniversary, my golf holiday, Christmas and not straying into 2007 as Pippa’s brother was getting married that year and I believe it’s a family tradition for only one sibling to marry per annum. With all these dates to juggle, finding a venue that we liked with available ‘marriage slots’ was going to be tough, we even tossed the idea around of a Friday wedding, but Pippa wasn’t keen on taking a day off work. To help simplify this vexatious matter I designed a simple ‘Potential Wedding Date Chart’ or PWDC as we called it, which neatly identified good and bad weekends, but also rated the good weekends to get married with a system of one to three thumbs, thus indicating our degree of anticipated glee if we were to nab such a date.

As we turned into the gravelled driveway of Sopwell, the mass of cars parked everywhere signalled either very busy wedding fayre or the cub scouts were round the back offering £2.50 car washes, either way parking was going to be a bastard. Parking for me is a bit like diamonds, I know naff all about it. Sure I know the basics about either driving into a space forwards, then using the ‘R’ gear to go backwards when you want to leave. But anything that involves moving and turning the wheel at the same time to get into a space I seem to find a little bit tricky, a bit like those windy metal things that beep when the hoop touches it that you had at the school fete. It’s a co-ordination thing, give me a parking slot with a space either side, even if I have to park half a mile away to find it. Eventually we did find a space (with a gap on each side) and the stroll from the car to reception was good exercise.

As we entered, we were greeted with by a toastmaster behind the reception desk, he was very friendly and jolly as he asked us to fill in a registration card. I smiled politely at him and whispered in his ear “You’ve got more chance of riding Jodie Marsh like a space hopper round the grounds of this hotel than you have of me paying you a hundred and fifty quid to shout dinner is served at my wedding”. Obviously I didn’t actually whisper this in his ear, it’s just that I have east-end gangster delusions when I wear my ¾ length leather coat out in public.

We wandered around the fayre in a fairly non-committal manner, not getting too close to the various people offering wedding services and products just in case they asked us when we were getting married or how many were coming etc, as we hadn’t got a clue. We did linger a little longer at a cake stall as they were offering what appeared to be free slices of chocolate cake, this made it worthwhile talking to the, what I guessed to be, a man and wife team of wedding cake makers. They talked about layers, stands, hand-made, sugar-craft, lemon, fruit, chocolate, individuals and leaving some for your first baby or something – this was all confusing so I just asked her “How much would a cake like that be” as I pointed at a random three-tier iced cake with flowers on it. “Three to four hundred pound, but you can go up to seven hundred with the decoration and if you have personalised icing”. It was like buying a Mercedes and being offered all the optional extras like heated seats at £1500 a pop. Now I know for a fact that just before Christmas, Sainsbury’s had a good selection of fair sized Christmas cakes at just under a tenner and I reckon that four or five of the Sainsbury’s cakes would feed just as many people as the ‘hand made, sugar crafted, marzipan statue’ in front of me. This was one of those times to keep one’s thoughts to oneself, through fear of showing my ‘wedding ignorance’ about such matters.

Eventually we joined a short queue of happy couples or brides to be with their parents who were waiting to speak to the wedding coordinator of Sopwell itself. Our turn came and we both started talking at the same time “We want to get married, were engaged and we'd like to, like to, what dates have you got free this year” we babbled between us. “Let me see” said Angela, as she flicked through her Letts diary of wedding bookings and consulted a flipchart of provisional bookings taken earlier. “I can do May the sixth, if that’s any good for you?” – that’s only sixteen weeks away I thought, no way on earth can we organise everything that quickly, well I’m sure we could if we tried, it was just a bit scary that it could be that soon. “We were actually looking for later in the year if you have anything?” Pippa replied, as she could see that the mention of ‘May’ had made me start to twitch. “I’ve got a couple in December and November, oh and I’ve got the twenty sixth of August, which is a bank holiday”, Angela responded as she made scribbled pencil marks on her booking sheets. Pippa and I stared at each other with that unified look of bemusement when you both wonder at the same time “Did you lock the back door or did I?”. We couldn’t actually work out if having a bank holiday wedding was a good thing or a bad thing, if it was a good thing then why was it available, had a couple booked it previously, then discovered that its bad luck to get married on a bank holiday and cancelled it? What the hell “Can you put us down for the twenty sixth please, both of us, thanks”.

Then we began to think of all the reasons why a bank holiday is not a good wedding day. Everyone will be on holiday, it’s probably half term as well, a lot of people book bank holidays in advance, but sod it we thought. It was going to be a dam site warmer in August that it would be in November or December which were our original thoughts and it also meant that Pippa would have to take one day less off work for the honeymoon.

After booking the provisional date, we made a couple of phone calls to close friends just to check that it didn’t clash with any current plans, so far we were in the clear. We had sort of lost interest by this point, we had got what we came for, a date, everything else now could wait a little bit. So we had a bit more cake that was going for free, I needed to save a bit of money as I was down to only £3.25 in cash in my pocket after being charged £2.50 for a cup of coffee only minutes earlier. When you’re engaged you can’t get away with just buying yourself a cup, you really do have to buy one each and Pippa didn’t like the idea of sharing.

After another circuit of the hall consisting of expensive photographers, creative wedding jewellery designers and suit hire, we decided to leave, our work here was done. The walk back to the car was very excited and bubbly, we were very pleased that in our first weekend of venue searching we had found and booked, albeit provisional, a wedding date. However we were barely 3 miles down the road when collective wedding paranoia kicked in, “We will have to get in touch with them tomorrow and arrange to go back over there, just run through things again, get something in writing and probably pay a deposit” insisted Pippa, with some obvious concern in her voice. “Don’t worry sweetheart, Angela wrote down all the details, she has our name in for that date we're sound, they’ll contact us in due course” I reassured her, but inside I was a bit worried that with all these people trying to book dates it would be possible to end up being double booked. And if the other wedding had more guests or promised to go for the champagne and not sparkling wine for the toasts, they would probably win favour with Angela and we would be wedding-less. I acted relaxed, carried on driving and tried to forget about weddings for a bit. We did have a date though, but how provisional was provisional?