Distance Learning

It's sufficiently unusual for a person in their 20s to come to Swanvale Halt church when they don't have to for some reason that I take notice. Rebecca has attended the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass on a number of occasions. She and her fiancé live in the parish and are having their wedding banns read out later in the year, but not yet, and so she doesn't have to be there. In fact she was in church when I began reading them last August, and therefore able to point out that I was a year early in doing so.

I spoke to Rebecca on Sunday. She and her chap aren't around much at the moment, she said, partly because they have to go to wedding preparation sessions at the church where they are marrying - which is not Hornington next door (as it often is) but in Gloucestershire. We don't have long-distance weddings at Swanvale Halt because it's not a pretty rural church and so we hardly have weddings of any kind. At Lamford we used to get lots, but they were almost always from within the local area. Goremead, however, drew a variety of couples who were looking for the nearest 'nice old-fashioned' church to the sundry reception venues in the area which they'd already booked: the farthest-flung of these couples came from Balham. They didn't mind coming to do wedding prep in my sitting-room in Lamford, but I was always aware it was quite a jaunt for them (and they had to attend worship at Goremead to qualify to get married at the church).

But Rebecca and her partner already qualify to marry at the Gloucester church because she was born there. I wonder at the policy which makes them travel periodically all that way so a clergyperson can lecture them on the importance of Christian marriage or go through the details of their order of service. If it had been me, I'd have tried to persuade their local incumbent to do it. It's not as though I have much else on ...