Hello lovely readers! We have a brand new series of early evening posts for you – we decided a few weeks ago that when we announced our new team of The Lovettes for 2015/16, that we wanted to schedule their posts as an evening read – it made sense, given we’ve taken on 21 brides to share their story with us. It means our usual daily schedule won’t be interrupted and that you have something new and interesting to read once you’ve put your feet up in the evenings 🙂 Yesterday, we introduced you to Kasia and Nick, this evening, it’s my absolute pleasure to welcome Amii and David. You’ll find more information about this couple and their plans to marry at the end of this feature. Enjoy!
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Well with only 86 days to go (nobody panic!) until our wedding, and being the first of the new Lovettes’ to get married, it’s probably about time I introduced myself and told you a little more about us.
David and I met 3 years ago now, although we have unwittingly been at hundreds of the same gigs and club nights over the years without ever realising.
We share a fairly obscure taste in music, when I say share I mean a 99.4% compatibility according to Last.FM (forgive me, I work in Marketing, I love the stats).
We’d been introduced before, just once at The Great Escape festival in Brighton through a mutual friend. I’d embarrassed myself by getting too excited about all the things we had in common, and David did his now patented ‘I’m too cool, I’m going to act completely nonplussed’ and I convinced myself he thought I was an idiot.
We’d seen each other in passing since then but he was just a very pretty, intriguing source of awkward for me after that night. Anyway, the real meeting was at an open-mic. He came down alone and sat on his own, I was sure he hated me by this point and I had nothing to lose so I was determined to make him realise I was great. I asked him to sit with me, and after provoking some conversation that’s when I realised that he didn’t hate me, he was just overwhelmingly shy and we were chatting like old friends within minutes. David played a cover version of Jens Lekman covering Paul Simon’s You Can Call Me Al. That was it, I was in love. We soon realised music wasn’t all we had in common, and from that moment I could think of nothing else.
Now I thought in the interests of equality, I’d let David give you his take on it. He says:
“I was working as an analyst in a high street bank, when I met you…
It was May, it was Brighton, and therefore it was the Great Escape Festival. I was doing my usual thing of darting between venues to catch all the bands I wanted to see, which is best achieved whilst flying solo. So there I was, in the Brighton Komedia to watch Ben Kweller, on my own. But wait, there was somebody I knew, the guy who runs the open mic where I perform to my adoring fan base/uninterested Guinness drinkers. He introduced me to a girl and the rest, as they say, is history. (But for completeness, I’ll continue).
Her name was Amii (spelt with 2 ‘i’s). I liked that. She complimented me on my Mountain Goats band t-shirt. I liked that. She asked me if I liked the band Okkervil River.
‘Err, obviously….’
I replied, or something similarly dismissive. Apparently I was acting quite aloof. Me? Aloof? Never! But my aloofness was concealing the fact that I knew I had met someone really special indeed, someone like no one else I had met before, someone who likes the same stuff as me! And she’s funny! And she’s beautiful! This has never happened before!
Just to seal the deal, I hung around with them for the rest of the night and said nothing.
Sometime later I returned to the open-mic, ukulele in hand, to wow my adoring fans yet again. And there she was so I deployed my patented tactic of ‘sit on my own and say nothing’. She wouldn’t have it, so I joined her at the table. What was I scared of? Was I terrified of finally meeting someone who I might fall in love with? We talked all night, and I did. And the rest, as they sa… …oh no wait, I already said that.“
David proposed to me almost exactly a year ago, when we were on a road-trip in California with our friends. I should at this point mention how considered David is, about everything. So considered in fact that it took him four hours to select the seats we were going to sit in on this flight, therefore what happened next was amazing, but utterly unexpected.
We’d spent our holiday travelling from LA to Santa Barbara, Big Sur on to San Francisco to Downtown LA and then finally ending up on our own in Santa Monica staying in a cute little beach house. I love photography and I’d said to David that I really wanted a picture of the Santa Monica beach at Sunset so David agreed and said we could go the next evening before dinner. We got dressed up for a fairly fancy dinner and headed to the beach, I was stopping every few seconds to frame the perfect shot and David seemed really quiet and I worried I’d been too irritating when all he wanted was to take in the moment. He suggested that we sat on the sand and watch the sun disappear behind the pier and to be honest I thought this was a bit odd, I didn’t really want to get sand on my dress but I obliged.
We sat down and he went completely silent, I asked him if he was OK and he handed me a note. Confused, I opened the note and it read:
Amii,
…. you marry me?*
(JoJo the Whale Print by Jaustin Ryan)
I didn’t know what was going on and David took my hand and put a giant plastic whale ring on my finger! I was still in shock at this point and he looked hurt and said “Is that a yes?”. And I composed myself and said of course! I got my real ring about a month later which was totally worth the wait having been picked by David and handmade by the lovely RockCakes from Brighton, but the whale still has a big piece of my heart.
I was happy to be engaged for a while before we set a date but David was keen to be married in 2015, so we set about looking for a venue pretty much straight away. I’m a keen feminist and was almost certain, as I’d told my Mum hundreds of times as a little girl, that I would never get married.
This meant neither of us had a set idea of what we really wanted from a wedding, but we both love our hometown of Brighton and knew we wanted to celebrate there. Once we’d decided on Brighton I was certain that I wanted to get married on the Bandstand on Brighton seafront. It’s such a beautiful building and I love the idea of taking our grandchildren to the beach one day and showing them where we got married. Once we’d booked this the ideas came thick and fast, and we wanted it to utilise local talent, so far everything is from Brighton or handmade by us and we really wanted our day to be heartfelt, relaxed and uniquely ‘us’.
There are so many lovely little touches and ideas we have and I cannot wait to share them with you over the coming few months. It’s such a privilege to get to share this exciting time with Love My Dress readers, this blog was such a source of inspiration of me in the early planning days. So, thank you for having me and I hope you enjoy coming on our journey with us.
Love, Amii x
A little background on Amii and David
As this is Amii’s first post for Love My Dress, we thought it would be nice to share some of her original Lovettes application with you all – to help you get to know her a little better. We’ll be doing the same for all our new Lovettes when it comes to sharing their first posts.
Amii Lanham: age 31
Wedding Date: 13th June 2015
Location: Brighton
Photographer: Devlin Photos
Find Amii at: Instagram (private), Pinterest
How they met: David and I have the same, fairly unique taste in music and have probably been to thousands of the same, under-subscribed gigs in our city of Brighton over the years and have never met so I’d like to think fate played a little part in bringing us together in the end. David was playing at an open mic I used to attend, it was a Sunday night and usually dead other than the regulars – some serious characters there, enough to make a documentary in fact, but I digress! David walked in carrying his ukulele in a little gig bag on his shoulder and before I’d even heard him play I would pretty much sold. He then played a cover version on our favourite Jens Lekman, covering Paul Simon’s ‘You Can Call me Al’. It was so obscure and I knew it, that in itself was more excitement than I could contain and I blurted out to him afterwards
“Was that you covering Jens, covering Paul?”
Essentially tripping over myself and my words to tell him how amazing I thought it was and David was his now trademark, nonchalant self.
“Yeah…”, he said.
I then started to reel off bands I thought he might like and gigs I wondered if he’d been to and, to my detriment I decided me must hate me because he just didn’t seem bothered. I left that evening fairly deflated, he must have only said two words. Oh well Amii, I thought, he must have a girlfriend that would explain it.
David then turned up to the Open Mic the week after, I smiled at him and he went to sit on his own again, I called him over to my table, insisting he didn’t need to sit on his own. He reluctantly sat down with me and we started chatting, which is quite a no-no at an Open Mic. Before I knew it we had talked over everyone’s set and I had worked out that David didn’t hate me he was actually just cripplingly shy. Over the ensuing weeks there wasn’t a day went by we didn’t speak and we both knew we were really onto something special.
About their wedding: Low key but surrounded by family and friends. Children in fancy dress, lawn games and Caribbean street food. Expect colour, laughter and sentiment.
David and I are very creative and also quite shy and so do not like a lot of fuss so we knew we wanted to keep our wedding fairly low-key but also personal to us. It was important for us that our friends had a good time and that the day felt like ‘us’ and represented the things which are important to us as a couple.
We booked Brighton Bandstand as a venue because we both just love it and it really cements our love of our Home Town as well as being able to point at it in the future to our Grandchildren and say ‘Grandma and Grandad got married there’. Our reception is in a little quaint village hall near where I grew up, which doesn’t ‘do weddings’ as a rule which was also important to us, we’ve got exacting standards and really want to be able to do things ‘our way’. Copsale have been brilliant, a complete blank canvas for us to realise our homemade plans.
The final piece of the puzzle was how to get guests from Brighton to Copsale in the middle of nowhere. When thinking about this, there was no other choice than my Dad’s 1952 Routemaster Bus. Some Dads have a midlife crisis and buy a sports car, but as you may have gathered we are all far from normal. My Dad had a midlife crisis and bought a Bus. So that will ferry us from Brighton Bandstand to Copsale Hall in style, where we are trying to keep the whole day both handmade and local.
We are inviting children as lots of our friends have children but we are saying that they should all come in fancy dress to make for wonderful photos as well as being much more fun for them. I think fun would be the word I used to describe our day best. There will be lawn games made for us by my best friend Jim, a model maker. Caribbean street food supplied by Brighton’s Lickle Bickle, David Smale’s Pale Ale trail – a trip through David’s life illustrated by the beer he was drinking at the time, Mr Bake supplying the cake buffet. My Mum is growing the flowers. Brighton’s wonder-woman Joanne Fleming is making my beautiful dress. And I’ve been making handmaking woollen pom poms since April 2014.
Our invites go out this week and I have designed and made them all myself. They are comprised of an old 7″ record, with hand painted label in watercolour in a card sleeve and lyrics sheets of wedding information and a watercolour RSVP card with a QR code to take them to the wedding website I have also built completely on my own.
There are 60-80 guests which will feel intimate and personal I hope and out friends are DJing the evening as well as a guest slot of David and I going back-to-back! I’ve also been collecting all of the Swan Vases on eBay for table decorations and bulk ordering lawn Flamingos from America. Expect colour, expect laughs and expect sentiment.
What does marriage mean? Marriage to me is just a declaration of our love for one another, amongst our very best friends and family. A commitment to help one another through the good times and the bad, to tell my best friend that I love him and will stand by him forever, because he truly is the other half of me.
Favourite Hollywood Icon? I think she would be the manic pixie dream girl, Zooey Deschanel because she’s honest, fun and adorable and not afraid to be exactly who she is.
Favourite Love My Dress wedding: This one. It is just so colourful, and personal and fun, my perfect day!
