The year meme: 1999

[philmophlegm]

louisedennis asked me to write about what I was doing in 1999...



Well, on October 4th, I got married, to bunn, at Barnstaple Registry Office. So that was probably the most important event of the year. Wedding attended only by immediate family, followed by one week of honeymoon in the south-west. We were still living in Mickle Trafford then, but were already planning to move to Devon or Cornwall the following year (bunn to be nearer her Mum, me for the cheap (relative to Cheshire) house prices). So the first week of our honeymoon was spent staying at a number of different hotels and B&Bs vaguely looking for nice areas to move to. We spent our wedding night at the Watersmeet Hotel in Woolacombe, and subsequently stayed in Tavistock, just outside of Plymouth and Taunton, before arriving the following weekend at the Fallowfields Hotel in Oxfordshire where we had our reception.

I know it's a little unusual to have the wedding reception a week after the wedding, but we figured that nobody would want to travel all the way to north Devon. Oxfordshire was rather more central. We hired the entire hotel for the weekend. Lots of guests (although we were ruthless about not inviting obscure relatives just because we somehow 'had to'), live music in the form of a woodwind trio, big fireworks display and a very high quality four course meal. Most of the guests stayed the night nearby and the next day quite a few went clay pigeon shooting with us. After that we drove back to Cheshire and stayed at home for one night before catching the Liverpool to Dun Laoghaire fast ferry. The second week of our honeymoon was spent driving round the Republic of Ireland. Mostly the west. Father Ted country in fact.

(Incidentally, I'm staggered when I read statistics that say the the average cost of a wedding is £30-40,000. Ours, including a very grand four course dinner for all of our guests, not just a select few, and a big fireworks display came to less than £6,000. That includes honeymoon, dress, ring, cost of reception, clay pigeon shooting, live music and fireworks. What do people spend the money on?)


Unfortunately, all this honeymoon driving had to be done by bunn as another thing that happened in 1999 was that I had my second and last epileptic fit. I hadn't been diagnosed as epileptic after my first fit in 1997, but this time I was. I had to stay awake all night before being driven to a neurological hospital in Aintree, where I had electrodes attached to my head as I fell asleep. While asleep, I had an 'event' which proved that the fits were epileptic fits and that the trigger in my case seemed to be not getting enough sleep. I was prescribed Epilim, which I have taken ever since and have never again had a fit. I got my driving licence back after a year. Even though I couldn't drive, I didn't want to sell my beloved MX-5, so bunn got to choose from her MX-3 and my MX-5 whenever she went anywhere all year.


Work-wise, in 1999 I was an audit assistant manager at JOLF's Liverpool office right on the banks of the Mersey, just up the street from the World Heritage Site buildings (the Liver, the Cunard and the Port of Liverpool buildings). After two years of trying, I had finally managed to move from the big audits department to the Owner-Managed Business department. This meant I was working on the audits of smaller, more entrepreneurial companies. Having said that, I still didn't escape the Littlewoods audit. I was 'group in-charge' in fact - quite a prestigious role in theory because Littlewoods was the biggest client in the office. However, I generally found it to be quite tedious. A big part of my Littlewoods work was writing the audit highlights memorandum - essentially the report on our audit (not the auditors' report - that's quite different) that goes to management. I wrote the thing, but several more important people would review it and they would each have their own changes that I had to make. To compound the tedium, the report got issued not just to the board of directors, but to all the family shareholders. And there were about 40 of those. And we weren't allowed to take it to be printed at a print bureau because it was too sensitive. So many of my days were spent at a colour printer that could manage about a page a minute printing 40 copies of a 30 page colour document.

I did my first course presenting in 1999. A colleague had been asked to present the induction course for new graduate recruits (a week long course in the old Huddersfield office), but she didn't want to do it. I'd been asked to go and help with what became known as the 'Nazi Gold' job - attempting to identify the financial assets of concentration camp victims that had been seized by the German government and deposited in various Swiss banks. Whilst this sounded interesting in theory, I think I was clever enough to realise that what it would mean in practice was late nights spent in an office block in Zurich performing work that was actually very dull. So we swapped and I did the presenting.

I liked the course presenting, and I've done a lot since. Among the new recruits was one Greg Pateras, who would later leave JOLF to join the cast of Brookside, before having his character killed off, whereupon he returned to work for us. Greg helped me out on the Littlewoods social and environmental audit.


We were living at 46 Wells Close, Mickle Trafford - a little, modern end-terraced house in a small suburb / village just outside of Chester. It's roughly where Hollyoaks is supposed to be. Our cats at the time were Perl and Footnote, and during the year we added Java (version 2.0). Java version 1.0 was Perl's sister, who escaped through a locked cat flap within a week of us having her and was never seen again. Java version 2.0 was added to the household after someone called us a couple of years later saying that they had caught a stray that matched Java's description in the next village. It turned out to be a different cat, but as the new cat had obviously been living rough we took her home anyway. I think we still had Kebbo the rabbit, but 1999 might have been the year she died.


I reckon I'd just about finished buying all of Blake's 7 on VHS by 1999. I can't remember any specific TV programmes that I was watching. My computer gaming time was dominated by two games - Championship Manager (as ever) and the first Baldur's Gate. The Baldur's Gate games are still the best computer RPGs ever - miles better than the likes of Oblivion or Morrowind and making all the oh-so-popular JRPGs like the Final Fantasy games look like very simple games for kiddies (albeit with extraordinarily good CGI in the later games). Half-Life also came out in 1999, but I have a feeling that I didn't actually buy it until 2000.

However, 1999 was an important year in sport for me.

Not in American football, where the Raiders had another mediocre year. However new head coach Jon Gruden was putting the pieces in place for the very strong Raiders teams of the next few years. Quarterback Rich Gannon was signed in 1999, as was running back Tyrone Wheatley. But the 1999 Raiders lost as many games as they won.

In cycling, Lance Armstrong returned from cancer and won his first Tour de France, which surprised almost everyone at the time - he'd just come back from a life-threatening illness and before he got cancer he wasn't the sort of rider who would have been a Tour challenger anyway.

But the big sporting story of 1999 was of course Manchester United winning the Treble - Premier League, FA Cup and Champions League in the same season. Never been done before or since by an English club. In the Premier League, United finished a point clear of Arsenal. In the FA Cup, they took extra-time in the semi-final replay and arguably the best FA Cup goal ever (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrOyedpeZnk&NR=1) to beat Arsenal before polishing off Newcastle 2-0 in the final. And the Champions League - they beat Inter Milan in the quarter-final and Juventus in the semi-final. But for most of the final United trailed 1-0 to Bayern Munich. Until well into injury time in fact, when this happened:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYE6CRMKdLI&feature=related .

Comments

[bunn.livejournal.com]

At first I thought that we didn't have the MX3 then, I thought we took the Clio to Ireland. But on consideration, I think I'm thinking of our trip to Dumfries & Galloway, which would have been a year or so earlier.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

We definitely had the MX-5 on our honeymoon, because there's a photograph of us setting of in it in the living room!

[jane-somebody.livejournal.com]

There's definitely been a big inflation in the average cost-of-wedding statistics - I remember when I was looking at magazines when we were planning our wedding in '95/96 seeing figures of a bit over £10,000 as the 'average'. Which was staggering enough! (Of course, I was still a student at the time, and Skordh not long into his first job.) I don't know the exact figures for our budget, partly as a fair bit of it was paid for by parents (see financial situation as above!) but my estimate is about £2,000, maybe £2,500. Obviously we didn't have all the exciting things you had, just a straightforward reception really, but I admit that a big expense in our case was the dress (about £700). I know there were several potentially costly elements that we decided we could do without altogether, such as flowers (bar posies and buttonholes) and cars (we pre-booked taxis). Honeymoon was two weeks in Devon and Cornwall, as it happens - I do think that's where some of the 'average' money goes, on once-in-a-lifetime exotic luxury holidays, of the sort I'd hate anyway ;-) But yes, I can't imagine spending anything like £30,000 - you'd have to work *really* hard at it! Especially knowing yours came in at under what I might have guestimated - yours being pretty much my benchmark so far for high-end celebrating (no-one else has had fireworks and clay-pigeons) ;-)

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

From memory, we had pretty minimal flowers too. We had no need for cars, although I suppose the £6,000 didn't include the costs of petrol on our driving honeymoon. I wouldn't fancy the exotic honeymoon either. It would no doubt be too hot for me! Your dress cost more than ten times as much as Bunn's though.

Other savings: chainmailmaiden's earlier discovery that mead was traditional at weddings, not French champagne. That saved quite a bit. And we didn't have a troop of male friends and relatives dressed up in ridiculous costumes. Nor did we have bridesmaids in those special (expensive) dresses designed to make the bridesmaids look ugly compared to the bride.

The fireworks were certainly a luxury item, and came in at £1,000 for a seven minute display - £2.38 a second. And the food at the reception was rather more than the standard buffet or light meal. And of course the clay pigeon shooting!

Still I'm rather pleased that our wedding is "pretty much my benchmark so far for high-end celebrating" given that it was a lot cheaper than the average.

An old school friend of mine apparently had a £40,000 wedding a few years ago.

He was divorced eighteen months later.

[jane-somebody.livejournal.com]

Re. your old school friend - oh dear ;-(

Bunn's dress had rather more wear-again elsewhere potential than mine, too! I do feel a tiny bit guilty about spending that sort of money on a once-only dress, which was a lot more than I originally had in mind when I went looking. It was a classic case of falling in love with it, and then Daddy coming over uncharacteristically soppy and practically saying "if that's what my little girl wants that's what she shall have" (not something he's ever done in his life before or since, I'm happy to say.) And I do still really like it, so I won't feel too guilty!

Oh yes, we eschewed the French champagne too, in favour of a nice sparkling wine (Californian, I think) and we also had Skordh's dad's (rather good) homemade mead as aperetif. Ditto on the no morning-suits, and our bridesmaids' dresses specifically came from *non* bridal-shop ranges and were chosen largely by the women themselves. Thinking about it, another saving for us was on stationary, as we designed and printed both the invitations and the order of services ourselves, and I think they can be costly otherwise (obviously you didn't have an order of service at all, so that helped!)

I do remember seeing in wedding magazines a lot of utterly ridiculous and unnecessary fripperies that one could spend one's money on, such as custom-printed glasses, balloons, napkins and even match-books >_< I tend to think that weddings, and also having children, are the sort of things that you *can* spend almost endless amounts of money on, but that a perfectly good result (or in fact often nicer) can be achieved on a surprisingly small amount.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

This is a manifestation of something I think of as the 90% rule.

Something that is 90% as good as something else will cost 50% as much.

You can flex the percentages, but the general principle applies to so many things.