If your name's not down...

I am making spreadsheet listing potential wedding guests. The guest list in fact. I have been spending quite some time on it actually – researching surnames and names of children, colour coding it into my friends, Kate’s friends and mutual friends. I’ve been putting in form fields indicating whether an invitation has been sent out, whether there’s a plus 1 to account for and if they’ve RSVP'd.
There’s a word to describe this. No, it’s not anal. No, as befits a former Bristol Uni Arts student, “Procrastination” is what I’m perfecting. You see with the date set and the venue booked it’s all getting a bit political. What I’m doing is basically trying to put off, for as long as possible, that horrible moment where we are going to have to choose which of our friends and relatives we invite to the wedding and who we don’t. Among my married and soon to be wed friends this is the moment that is commonly cited as being the hardest bit about organising a wedding. I can completely understand why. Manor Hall – our reception venue – holds 150 in its dining hall. A pretty decent size and actually room enough to hold all the friends we’d like to invite. So, potentially there’s no problem. The thing is, of course, that our friends have partners and children. This is where it all gets a bit tricky. Our friends’ partners are doubtlessly wonderful people, candidates for Nobel Peace Prizes the lot of them, while their children are clearly going to be perfect angels beaming back at us from the wedding photos in years to come. But many of them we’ve never met, and those we have we barely know, and so it won’t ruin the day for us if they can’t be there. Hence the dilemma: which of our friends gets a plus 1 (or in the case of some families, a plus 4)? Who gets crossed off the list to accommodate somebody known only to us as the second name on a Christmas card? It is, frankly, heart-rending – having to rank your friends, scoring them on criteria like how well we know then; how long we’ve known them for; how often we see them; how much fun they are at a party and (often crucially) whether they invited us to their wedding or not. Horrible compromises are made, along the lines of “they live locally – they can get a babysitter and leave the kids at home” or “they’ll know lots of people there, so they won’t mind coming by themselves”. We both secretly worry that the other is managing to sneak a greater proportion of their friends on the invitation list and we’re both secretly feeling a tad guilty about it. Then there are problems like the ex-couple who no longer speak to each other – do we invite him or her or both and just let them sort it out between them? And this is before we’ve even got on to the family politics….
Bloody hell.
At least we’re having a buffet so we don’t have to worry about doing a table plan. Or so we thought…