Now there are venues all over, to suit all tastes. You can get yoked in a yurt, get wed in a woodland, come together in the Cairngorm and even do it in the donkey sanctuary. Honest. The big change is that people choose a location that makes them feel at ease, one that fits with their idea of who they are and what the event means to them.


Our recent ceremony was in a bright and cheerful café on the promenade overlooking the beach where a bonfire was lit. It was January so it was cosy inside, candle-lit with a humanist service tailored to the couple’s own design. It was intimate, relaxed and moving. Close up, you get a powerful sense of what those trembling vows truly mean to a man and woman.


And I’m a sucker for a Scotish wedding. First we all put coats on and marched up the road to the community hall led by the piper, signally to all that something was


12 February 2016


Tis rumpus has the benefit of making heaving, sweating wrecks of us all,


afoot. Folk can’t resist watching a procession and does anyone not look at the bride? I like the way even the froideur of the po-faced melts as ceilidh culture takes over. You can watch haughty aunts and auld yins birl round the floor in a frenzy and if ever you want to impress a foreign visitor, this is how to do it. Guests from the Channel Islands and Germany look amazed at the tumult and there was bearded Lorenzo, flown in from Rome, with the build of a centurion, swirling around in full Highland kilt.


The ceilidh has a life of its own. The mirth and fun grew fast and furious; The piper loud and louder blew; The dancers quick and quicker flew; They reel’d, they set, they cross’d, they cleekit,


You can sense how it was Burns captured the same fury in Tam O’ Shanter. This rumpus has the benefit of making heaving, sweating wrecks of us all, laughing at our exertion. It is, I think a great leveler – no one reels and jigs his way through an Eightsome Reel or a Flying Scotsman and retains his pious dignity.


Surely too, it’s the best way to start a marriage, with both partners bereſt of artifice, equal and, metaphorically, naked to each other and to those they love. That at least has never changed.


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