Go With The Flo

A quick update on the practical arrangements:

The Town Hall is all booked for the ceremony, and we have paid the sizable deposit for the restaurant for lunch (so whatever else happens on the day – people are going to eat!) This only leaves a couple of loose ends now – the main one being over what we’re going to do in the evening.

The plan has always been to have a more informal ‘after party’, where people can join us after work and have a few beers. But finding a venue in Islington that can accommodate us has been really hard work. For some mysterious reason, bars that would normally be crammed to the brim with thirsty booze-hounds on a Friday evening aren’t too enthusiastic about allowing a relaxed group of friends to spread out and take over the entire place. Can’t think why…

All our favourite (slightly swanky) places wanted a good £5-£10,000 guaranteed minimum spend for us to hire out the place, which just isn’t an option. We did find a couple of places that would let us reserve large areas, but the added complication is we’d like to have a bit of live acoustic music as part of the evening fun, and that just isn’t an option when the other half of the pub would be full of noisy Friday night revellers.

However, just when we were starting to give up on the idea of doing music, The Florence (a pub right between the Town Hall and our lunch venue) got back to us and offered us their function room. It might be a bit of a squeeze, but they will let us do music and bring in our own food, and people can always spill into the main pub downstairs if it gets too crowded. So it looks like a very pleasant evening is on the cards. Can’t wait.

[EDIT: Now we’ve got the entire pub for the whole evening. Amazing!]