Spent an hour this morning sorting through the weddings for this year. A new list arrived yesterday containing weddings not on the original list and removing three who were. Best not to ask!
Getting all our weddings in order and indeed legal is quite a task and we share them by and large so no one person has to do them all.
We have always done a lot of weddings here, due to the beauty of the church and its surroundings and of course it brings much needed money into our PCC coffers.
Even though the rules have been relaxed quite a lot we do sometimes have to send people off to the registrar for a special certificate. or a surrogate or even the Archbishop's special license.
Those are the ones we don't have to read Banns for.....all the others, those who live here and those with a qualifying connection we put in the banns book....
Its often quite hard to explain to young couples why we have all the legalities to observe but we do have to tie the knot properly .
In the old days reading banns in the parish they lived in, meant that people who knew them could raise an objection if they knew they already had a spouse still living and not divorced . Now its all a bit of a charade.
No one in the congregation ever knows of any reason in law why they might not marry....and I'm still waiting for the first objection....
Over the years we have had the wedding from hell, the reluctant bridegroom and the bride in the wrong church! Its all good fun and maybe one day it will be the subject of another short booklet....
In the meanwhile I try to make all the weddings full of joy and awe.
The legacy for that is that this summer I have five christenings booked in and more to come, all from couples I married during the last few years!
The paper work builds...but so does the considerable pleasure.....its good to see so many of them in church and looking forward to their big day.
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