Living a champagne lifestyle

Amazingly, it has now been a whole year since I got married. I don't know where the time has gone, it has just flown by. Saturday was our actual wedding anniversary, and we had a couple of nice things planned over the weekend which made it nice and special.

Our wine rack has been half full for the last year with bottles of champagne we were given as wedding presents (about five of them I think), and recently we were told that champage doesn't always stay at its best for more than a year or so. We therefore felt we had an obligation to start drinking it up, which in reality turned into us drinking four bottles of champagne in six days. It was actually really nice to do, as expensive champagne tastes very nice and is much better than the cheap stuff, and I was surprised to find how well it goes with a dinner of fish fingers, chips and beans. It is certainly a combination that I would try again.

On Friday we had a wedding reception to go to in the evening, for a couple who had attended our wedding last year. It was out on Pangdean Farm in Pyecombe, a very nice country venue with a converted barn with lots of wooden beams. I was particularly impressed with the unusual choice of wedding cake decoration:

and the bride's beautiful sort-of-French-style wedding dress that was made by her very talented mother:

A few friends of ours were there too, so we had a nice evening of dancing and feeling nostalgic about our own wedding.

Then on Saturday, our actual anniversary, we went for a lovely meal at Blanch House, a posh restaurant in Kemptown not very far from us. We'd never go there normally, it's a bit out of our usual price range, but Chris' Mum was treating us, and it was GREAT! It was lots of high class masterchef-type food like this:

and it was ever so yummy. It was also rather alcohol-fuelled, as we had champagne before we went, and then cocktails on arrival, and wine with dinner. It was all a bit of a blur by dessert I have to say, so we took a short detour home afterwards to sober up a little bit, and sat looking at our wedding photos together and feeling a bit gooey (that may have been the fault of the alcohol again though). And then we just had a couple more drinks in Vavoom before retiring for the evening.

I was pleased to find that I didn't have a hangover at all on Sunday, which I am going to attribute as well to the champagne being expensive, and to the six million calories I ate to soak it all up.

So that was it - one anniversary down, and only 49 more until our golden one. Hopefully they will all be as enjoyable as this one was (and I won't forget any of them, which is a very real possibility).

I'm back at work today, but am only doing three-day weeks through the summer, so hurrah only two days left until the weekend! It is Brighton Pride this weekend, and they are forecasting heavy rain for Saturday. Oh dear. Pride is really quite depressing and pointless in the rain, as it is meant to be a day of drinking in the sun and looking at topless boys (a microcosm of my entire life, in fact). If it rains like they're saying it will, I may not even bother going to the park during the day - I have mud at home I can squelch around in if I wish. And besides, I'll have more champagne to drink up.