Slips on the Critical Path

We don't get many weddings at Swanvale Halt. Brides, I suspect, don't necessarily warm to the idea of being confronted by the Co-Op when they emerge from their wedding ceremony, and try to go somewhere else if they can. That means I find myself organising the banns for couples getting married elsewhere far more often than I get requests for weddings here.

However, I'm also what is called the Bishop's Surrogate for Oaths for this area, which means that whenever couples are getting married in church without banns being read first, and have to apply to the Bishop's Registry in Westminster for permission to seek a Common Licence instead, they come to me to deal with the paperwork and swear and oath that what they're saying is true. The usual reasons for doing this are that one party is a foreign national, or that they live abroad where banns can't be read.

A third reason is that something's been screwed up in the legal preliminaries for the wedding. Yesterday I saw two couples getting married in local churches this coming Saturday who'd suddenly found out that something had gone wrong in their case: the first had moved a couple of months ago and forgotten to have their banns read in their new parish church, and the second live just outside the parish where they're getting married and didn't realise they had to have their banns read there too - the vicar's email had gone into a junk inbox. So they all needed a Common Licence which meant coming to me to swear an oath. Just to make things slightly more interesting, the lady of the first couple is a divorcee, meaning that the bishop had to give his explicit permission for them to apply for a licence (this is how the Church gets around some of its members disapproving of divorcees remarrying in church).

I'd spoken to the lady I deal with at the Bishop's Registry about the first couple and she warned me another case would be coming through. 'There's a lot of this at the moment', she told me with some weariness. 'People come back from holiday and clergy come back from holiday and find that something they thought had been done hasn't been.' The summer is definitely over.