Everything seems to be getting organised now

for our wedding (in November). A couple of excellent friends and I have spent some fun evenings planning my hen night. I hadn't realised until we started how much I hadn't been looking forward to sorting it out. One more task to add to the never-ending, ever-expaning list of things needing to be done. Anyway, Derya organised Laura and me into trying out restaurants, choosng menus, working out a fun activity for beforehand (some of my friends have small children, and a two-hour stint in a salon wouldn't interfere so much with their evening rituals as a full night on the town). We got it all sorted out, and people are responding.

We sent out the invitations about a week ago, and my parents are now receiving reply cards. They've got over half already. Mr W's parents' friends have mostly all responded saying they are coming. Our friends are being very slow at responding - when you're used to getting invitations in October for New Year's parties, you get used to not respoding quickly. Most of my parents' friends and family have responded, however, one of my dad's brothers isn't coming - no explanation, no note, just an "unable to attend" for him and his entire family. Which has shocked my parents. To be honest, it's shocked me a bit too. When we were organising rooms for people on preferential rates (months ago), my dad called his brothers to see if they wanted to be pencilled in - and this brother asked if we were inviting his daughters, my cousins (we are), and never responded on the room thing. So I guess we could see it coming. Whilst I'm pissed at him for not having the good manners to even call and explain, it does mean we're either a sizeable sum up on the budget (lovingly tended to by Mr W and my dad), or able to invite more people.

Yesterday I visited the florist and we ironed out all the finer details (what colours? what size? what time does she need to turn up? what percentage of her bill incurs VAT?). She'd sent me a couple of proposals, including some details I didn't agree with, so I'd trawled the internet, her website (she's fantastic, by the way - and does all kinds of fuctions), the three wedding magazines I've purchased over the past year, and came up with my own proposal. Anyway, it's all agreed now. This means I have to get in touch with Mr W's mother about her florist, and tell them what I want.

I have had my first dress fitting - for my top half. It didn't go great - they'd measured me incorrectly because I'm crooked, but I left my veil there to be sorted out. I'm borrowing it from Mr W's sister, and it's way too long right now. Putting it on was a bit like putting on my first fencing mask - I had problems focusing beyond the mesh. However, as with fencing, this disorientation only lasted a few seconds and then I was fine.

So, it's all coming together. I'm editing the Order of Service this weekend, have got to get Laura's shoes sorted out (she's wearing her own dress which happened to be exactly the right colour, so we're pushing the boat out on shoes!), sort out the caterer and complete my passport application. Mr W's doing all the dealing with the band, which is so incredibly helpful of him!

So, I'm spending the night with Laura, we're ordering pizza and shooting the breeze, and I'm feeling as though I'm on the home straits. I sense I'd better hold on to this feeling while it lasts!

Begone, foul procrastinatrix

Monday evening after work, I got home and decided I really should try on the headdress I’m planning on wearing to our wedding. It’s borrowed from Mr W’s sister. When she loaned it to me, nearly six months ago, I figured, to hell with it if it makes my oval face look like it’s a mile long, it’s a free loan and something else I don’t have to organise. I’d tried it on before and it hadn’t rocked my world, admittedly, but I decided that it would be fine. How in the name of all that’s holy I managed to overlook the fact the damn thing doesn’t actually fit, I’ll never know. Monday evening I tried it on, willing it to miraculously frame my face perfectly and still permit me to move my head without the thing falling off. Obviously, not being a deity, I don’t have superpowers so it hadn’t shrunk.

Damn and blast. And, of course, no Mr W to add a much needed sense of perspective. By the time he got home from work, I was well on the way to cancelling the wedding and booking a cab to Gretna Green.

I extrapolated from this one bad (headdress) experience that I’ll look like a pig in a sack in my wedding dress. My hair will look silly – especially with this particular headdress. My makeup will (I’m on a roll by this point) not hide the mahooosive spot that will develop two days before the wedding. I could go on. In fact, I will - I’ll share the inner machinations of a complete lunatic. I decided I wanted to ban all cameras apart from the official one, and I was going to hire a sniper to take out the videographer (note – these are being organised and, incredibly generously, paid for by Mr W’s parents. I’ve not met either photographer or videographer. Can you really see the stressball that’s me volunteering to have multiple records of a day on which I’m certain I’m going to look my ugliest?).

By the time Mr W came home from work I was in a toys-out-of-pram extravaganza. He successfully morphed from knackered-guy-with-serious-deadlines-at-work to future-husband-of-a-Jewish-princess, in a matter of nano-seconds.

“No, honey, you can’t ban cameras.” “You’ll have power of veto over all photographs and you’ll have had someone else to do your hair and make-up”. When he hears the “pig in a sack” line, though, he starts to smile and that helps me peel myself off the ceiling and get a grip. I’m unlikely to look like anything in a sack, unless you know of a vendor of ivory sacks with matching bolero jackets…

However it took until Tuesday evening when my best mate came over for me to properly chill out. She looked at the headdress in horror. This girl is good – she’s been my friend during my Laura Ashley phase (it was actually my mother’s phase but I ended up wearing the clothes), and is a good poker player. She can usually cover emotions quite well. Not this time – one look at her horror-stricken face and I knew it was a re-run of the day of the blue and green flowery shirt.

Tuesday evening was spent sitting on a sofa reminiscing about the 24 years we’ve been friends. Since the age of 6. On Tuesday we properly regressed and chortled at ourselves. When I had walked her back to the tube, I wandered around the area for a while, getting my head together, and resolving to stop procrastinating. Today I’ve finalised the order of service, booked my dry-run hair appointment, confirmed the shoes I bought are actually the nicest ones I could find, prepared a proposal for the florist (her job, but she hadn’t got it right and I’m not signing *anything* where the prices are preceded by the word “from”), made a shortlist of shops to visit (on Friday, natch) where I’ll probably find a lovely headdress which will restore my faith in the fact that maybe, just once, I’ll look OK in a photograph.

HaTikva - Hope?

"HaTikva", meaning "The Hope" ) was adopted as the Zionist anthem in 1897 or 1907 (depending on which website you believe), around fifty years before the Jewish people got their land back.

Click here for the lyrics and the translation, and you can even hear a rendition. It does sound like it's being played on a yamaha keyboard so loses some of the gravitas. If you really want to get into it, I strongly suggest this site which even has a Streisand version. Quite a good rendition actually. I've heard the tune before, as it is broadly similar to the tune of grace after meals.

However, the most moving occasion on which I've heard this was, without question, at Yad Veshem this May on my trip to Jerusalem. It was haunting. Yad Vashem is Israel's memorial to the Holocaust, and the website is pretty good. If you don't have time to go to the museum, go to the online virtual tour. It's not the same, obviously, but you'll see that at one end of the tour is a wall onto which a ten minute looped film is displayed. The film is footage (both video and stills) of pre-Shoah Jewish life, taken from many sources and blended together. You see Jewish families posing for photographs at weddings, very religious Jews about their everyday life, Jewish people doing everyday tasks.

The museum consists of a long prism-shaped open corridor, with rooms arranged either side so that to enter the next room you have to cross the prism. So all through the experience you can see and hear the film playing. Whilst we were standing, a group of at least twenty young soliders came in. All in army gear, some with guns, and some with backpacks with those annoying teddy-bear keyrings dangling off them (teenage girls the world over), and we remained close to this group throughout our passage through the museum.

Now, I had heard that Yad Vashem wasn't exactly Disneyland. I was prepared to find it harrowing. I just wasn't prepared for the way six million people stopped being "six million people" and became one plus one plus one all the way up to that awful six million. The film was an excellent way to bring home the impact on the fate of the individual as well as of the race, constantly reinforced with every exhibit. Standing there, watching these young Jewish people looking happy and smiling at the camera, and behaving in a normal manner, and then progressing through all the rooms.

This film had sound, and one of the audioclips was HaTikva. At first I didn't know if my skin was creeping and my flesh going to goose-bumps because of the fate of this happy bunch of Jewish children at religious school on the creen before me (most if not all would have died, quickly if they were lucky). Then I looked into the faces of a few children, at random, because there's a large number of them singing HaTikva, and I thought that there were so many children singing this anthem that I couldn't even absorb all of their faces, but that each of them, and many many thousands like them, died as a result of some genocidal bastard's idea of racial supremacy and pathological and irrational hatred of the Jews (some attribute this hatred to his having caught syphillis from a Jewish prostitute). It's just heart-rending. And you can guess what happened next - I was sniffing and blinking and surreptitiously wiping my eyes. Before we'd gone into room one. I wasn't the only one though - many were crying. I didn't look at the teenage soldiers (because some of them had big guns) to see their reaction though.

In all fairness my current reaction to hearing HaTikva would probably not have developed in such a pavlovian predictability to the hymn if we hadn't been able to hear it between each room, filled with exhibits.

The museum was full of artefacts - we saw burnt photographs recovered from corpses found by the Allies as they captured the camps. The corpses having been alive until shortly before the Allies arrived, deported to the death camps and bundled into ovens before the Nazis could even rob them of their clothes in their haste to destroy Judaism even if the cost was losing the war. Photographs of loved ones - when people were put on the train wagons for transportation to the camps they didn't have much space and necessarily only took the most treasured possessions.

That's what hurt the most, driving home the fact that each of these six million was a person with photographs of their parents, or a sibling at a Bar Mitzvah. There was even a reconstructed Ghetto street - complete with tram tracks (which marked the edge of, I think, the Warsaw Ghetto) and authentic intricate filigreed streetlamps. And an underfoot crate, with a glass viewing roof, containing *some* of the shoes recovered from a concentration camp. The owners obviously long dead. A beautiful and obviously very valuable diamond and emerald necklace, made for a Jewish man who saw the way the wind was blowing and liquidised his assets - converting everything he owned into this necklace with which he intended to somehow get around the system. He went to a camp, as did his wife. He survived - she was incinerated. He gave the necklace - representing everything he had owned (and he wasn't poor) to Yad Vashem - if it couldn't bring his wife back, what use was it? Then there are the talking heads - the gentleman reminiscing of the rabbis in his village calmly reciting the Shema as they stood in front of the trenches they'd just finished digging. The old lady remembering how her friend felt ill, and she begged her not to go and ask the soldier on duty if she could avoid working that day - only to see the friend walk up to the soldier, say she felt ill, then fall to the ground as he'd shot her dead.

Things like this can't fail to bring home the agonising fate of so many people (and by no means only the Jews). And if you're not feeling low enough, you emerge into the prism room between the exhibit rooms (arranged, by the way, thematically as well as chronologically), and you can hear the voices of long-dead children singing of "hope" years or months before being barbarically slaughtered. Consequently, it's not such a surprise that every time I hear the tune I'm reminded of Yad Vashem.

We sang HaTikva in shul on Sunday (this solidarity meeting) and it evoked the same feelings - even though it was being sung by adults it still has the plaintive quality you get with music written in a minor key.

Somehow I suspect my reaction to the anthem would have been different if I'd not heard it sung so many times in Yad Vashem - but it certainly makes me proud to be Jewish. Especially when today, the leaders in Iran are still calling to push Israel into the sea, and no-one seems to understand that the fundamentalist muslims won't stop at Israel - they'll be chasing back into Spain in an attempt to relive the glory days of Islam (in the middle ages), when the Crescent ruled from Turkey to Spain. The Jews are the thin end of the wedge. Binjamin Netanyahu (ex PM) was interviewed on Radio 4 yesterday morning, saying exactly the same thing. Why does Iram have missiles with ranges that put London within reach? Why not just build them to take out Tel Aviv? Watch it - the Jews will go first and then the slippery slope will increase in gradient.