The Last Wedding (like this)

It's not every wedding where the groom’s outfit gives rise to more comment than the bride’s, but on Saturday Adele’s gear was relatively standard (white dress, veil), while Cal’s included a leather top hat, black brocade jacket and pointy purple patent leather shoes. That wasn’t the only unusual aspect of the proceedings: as well as general covid-compliant considerations we were joined by Cal’s granddad in the form of a small wooden urn containing his ashes, were treated to his stepfather singing 'Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring', concluded the ceremony with 'Fly Me to the Moon', and, as Adele’s family were in sunny California, livestreamed the entire proceedings. For some reason the laptop didn’t recognise the external webcam so we had to make do with the integrated one but at least they saw something. In fact, as I mentioned, Swanvale Halt was probably as sunny as the west coast of the USA that day if probably not as warm.

Because Adele is a US citizen she and Cal had to be married by what is called a Superintendent Registrar’s Certificate, the legal preliminary you use for a church wedding where one or both party is a national of a country outside the EEA. They (ideally) get the agreement of a priest to marry them, then lay their case before the civil registrar who does all the paperwork; they take the said certificate back to the church as proof of permission to marry. Cal and Adele are the first couple I can remember doing this for in sixteen years, so it isn’t all that common though I have advised people marrying at other churches to go down that route. In theory a couple can get a SRC and just turn up at a church asking to be married, but in those circumstances a priest can tell them to swivel and any sensible registrar will want to know they’ve got that sorted out first.

Unless something very unexpected happens, Cal and Adele will also be the last couple to be entered in our marriage registers, because that entire method of marriage registration, in place since 1836, is coming to an end. Finally exasperated at having to harry parish clergy for their data, the civil registrars are now about to begin doing it all themselves. From the start of May, every couple marrying in a church will have a document filled in by the minister which will then be passed to the Registry as the basis for producing their actual marriage certificate. In the first draft of the legislation it was the couple themselves who were to be responsible for doing this: in a rare outbreak of sense which may be their most significant positive contribution to the life of this country in years, the bishops managed to argue that a couple who’d just got married were probably not the best people to arrange this and that even parish clergy were more likely to get it right, or indeed do it at all. There have apparently been some complaints about the inadequacy of the training we’ve been given about this quite serious change in what we do, and there is to be an online seminar in a couple of days’ time, but I didn’t think it was that bad – although I did do an executive summary for Marion the curate’s benefit which may have been a bit clearer. In fact I’d’ve been dismayed if it wasn’t.