A Selfish Venue

Every couple, when choosing their venue, have to take into account their guests. How they’re going to get there, how much it will cost them, and all that jazz.

But don’t worry yourself to death over it. Yes, it’s handy if your venue’s in the place where most people live, but what with universities and people moving for jobs, the chances are your loves ones, like ours, are spread out across the country – or the world. And people do expect to travel for weddings, take trains, drive long distances and stay overnight. The effort people will go to for a wedding is quite touching. I suppose it all comes down to – they just love you that much.

So don’t upset yourself worrying about them, but don’t go out of your way to make things difficult for them either so that you can have your fairytale dream. Common sense.

But here’s something which may not be common sense to everyone. Making things easy for the guests is not about proximity, but access.

What do I mean by that?

Well, we’re getting married in the centre of Oxford. It’s within 10 minutes walk of the train station, 5 minutes walk of the coach station and 5 minutes walk to a main car park. There are park and ride facilities and we even have a few parking permits for slightly more central locations, which we have mentioned (quietly). I think this means pretty good access. We have friends and family coming from Sheffield, Bristol, London, Wales, Germany, Malta and Australia. These are not proximate.

We’re also having a daytime wedding, so guests from the UK can come that morning, leave that night and are not obliged to stay over. Some of our friends are “crashing” at another’s place (as we have at least a couple of friends from Oxford). So they might have to spend a bit on travel, but they don’t have to pay for a bed that night – the cost isn’t prohibitive.

As someone who doesn’t have a car, I’m always noting that most wedding venues are crap for access. Not just inconvenient, but totally and utterly crap. They tend to be very out of the way, with no nearby train station, poor or not too close by bus services and expect all their visitors to drive.

I don’t have a car, and I think it’s a disgusting reflection upon society that I’m expected to. If we came in a car, someone would have to not drink, or we’d have to stay in the venue, or we’d have to park at a hotel and taxi in and out – all things which spoil enjoyment or significantly compound the cost.

I’m talking about manor houses, the bigger, more expensive and more picturesque hotels and other countryside resorts. They’re lovely, but they’re mostly very inconvenient for most people, and personally that’s a big deal to me. When I RSVP to a wedding I check that I can get to it.

Worse are the church weddings where you have a reception venue miles away and needs to be driven to – not a great idea if there’s alcohol after the ceremony, and again puts people under pressure to order taxis (yeah, because weddings never run over time, do they…) to ensure they make it on time. When everybody else is fighting for them too, of course.

The basis function of all this is, if your venue is out of the way, you are going to have to check your guests are okay with that too – yes, ask them for permission. If you don’t have enough people able to get there, it is your responsibility to help them. One popular solution is hiring a vintage bus to transport guests to the reception venue and to off-site better value hotels at the end of the night.

The other suggestion is carpooling. Your guests won’t all know each other, so it’s best to include something in the invitations. I’d recommend hosting a spreadsheet on google docs, asking drivers to fill in how many spare seats they have on offer, and those not driving to fill in requests for seats. Share and share alike. It would take you minutes to set up such a document and be hugely appreciated by all your guests.

Giving a Little

I thought I would take this opportunity to plug my gift list site. I’m very happy with it: it’s free, easy to use, and allows us to add gifts from anywhere online (so sadly no gifts from Poundland or Atkinsons, but it covers most avenues). It’s only downfall is that it’s pink.

marriagegiftlist.com (what was that? MARRIAGE, not wedding???) allows you to link to a page, select a picture from that page (for sites that don’t work you can download a picture and upload to marriagegiftlist.com from your computer, write in how many you want and how much they cost, and even rename it if you want to.

This fun function has led to “Egg Prick”, “Cock and Hen Divided Serving Bowl”, “Runcible Spoon”, “Beastmaker” and a few other treasures.

It’s live from the moment you start adding gifts. We can log on as a couple and see if anybody has bought anything (but not whom it was bought by until after the wedding date), write and edit the interface the guests will see, preview it as they see it and add or remove or repair links to gifts as we see fit. The guests can log on using the gift list ID and our emails, see what’s still available and how many we want, as well as our personal message. We can choose an interface for the guests, and they do have the option of ones which are not pink (hurrah!).

We’ve appointed a Gift List Manager to help guests with queries or problems, so we don’t know who bought what if they want to keep it as a surprise until after the wedding, and so we don’t have that extra bit of admin to worry about. We put her details in our invitations and they also appear on the site.

Not being tied to a shop, our imagination is the limits, and has led to the inclusion of some rather bizarre gifts, such as the archery kit (which we really really want, but nobody seems interested in), a toilet seat (which went in a flash) and a catnip mouse for our little Iris (which was very much appreciated, and is now bought).

We have a range of gifts from £29.99 ex postage to £1.10 for some kitchen bag clips (bought!). We know who a lot of the gifts are from, but not all of them. Some have sent them to our house, but not all of them. We even had to stop ordering parcels to our house so that we didn’t get confused with gift list items!

We have lived together for over a year. We do have a kettle, microwave, et cetera, but we’re still a young couple starting off and there are lots of things we want for our house, for our leisure or for our amusement – but not everybody realises you need egg poachers – so a gift list has come in handy, especially one which allow for such eclecticity.

On the other hand, I’m aware that asking for money for the honeymoon is popular, but fraught with the usual faux pas, awkwardness and possibilities for offence. People like buying you THINGS. They (mostly) don’t mind lists and being directed what to buy for you, as they still get to choose and don’t have to use much brain space.

Cheesy little poems in invitations on the plea of please give us cash are common. Some people set up a paypal system or website. Personally, I’m not so keen, as I feel to actually make a difference I would have to contribute more in cash (say, fifty quid plus) than I would spend on a present (maybe ten to twenty – twenty if we’re buying as a couple), and this would make me feel like the couple had higher expectations of me and were being a bit rude. So they would probably get a pretty card and a box of chocolates from me. But at least I wouldn’t buy them a toaster.

So this is why I wanted to show you this idea – a “Honeymoon Gift List”. I hope the lovely couple I have stolen this from won’t mind – it was originally posted up in a public forum, so I don’t suppose they will. In the linked example, Tom and Abby used Our Dream Honeymoon to create a list where people can “buy” experiences for their honeymoon, from woolly socks to keep their feet warm in their Lapland adventure to a Heathrow hotel. Essentially people just choose options and give you money by paypal, but it still offers the same novelties as a gift list, and shows your guests that they’re really contributing to the luxury of your enjoyment, not giving money towards their own reception dinner.

I would definitely recommend a list based on one of these two.

Registering Interest

So how do you get married – you know, the legal stuff? This was something we, like most people, had to find out about (not knowing off hand and all that), mostly through researching it on the web. So for anyone who still has any queries about it, here is our experience, and as many tips as I can think of.

Unless I’ve forgotten something, there are four kinds of wedding:

Humanist (Scotland only)
Religious (general)
Church of England
Civil

And they all have their own quirks!

Humanist Weddings

I don’t pretend to know much about Scotland’s legal system, but in general their attitude to weddings is better: more relaxed, less restricted and if you have a humanist ceremony they really invite you to make your wedding your own. You can have a civil legal wedding followed by a humanist ceremony in England, but the humanist bit alone isn’t legally binding – so it’s more like a blessing.

The wedding is conducted by a celebrant, and you can choose your celebrant freely, get in touch, have a chat and decide how much you like them. The celebrant will then tailor your wedding ceremony to suit, sending you ideas or extracts from other ceremonies to help you come to a decision. You can incorporate your own beliefs or belief system/s into your wedding, whatever they may be and however they tie in to established religions.

Usually, celebrants are happy to travel all over the place to perform their services, so you don’t have to restrict yourselves to those based locally. Fees vary, depending on the individual celebrant. In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, celebrants can choose appropriate fees within an agreed band, whilst Scottish celebrants have a fee decided by unifying organisation. However, this is not the full picture, because celebrants may charge additional fees, including an ‘appearance fee’ and sometimes the licences and certificates are charged outside the basic fee. If in doubt, ask.

Religious and C of E Weddings

Getting married in a church or other religious shouldn’t be taken lightly nor done to keep the family happy. This is a huge commitment – because you are committing your marriage not only to each other, but also to god. Lots of discussions touch on the hypocrisy of being married in church if you’re not religiousas though you are offending the church by pretending to be one of their followers (because the church would never pretend they had more worshippers than they do, would they? Ahem census data versus the British Social Attutides Survey). However, there is another aspect of it: if you don’t believe in god, and you promise in your vows to commit to god as much as to your partner, doesn’t that make your vows – and thus the foundation of your entire marriage – a lie? Perhaps I’m too scrupulous, but I couldn’t take my partner’s commitment seriously if they were lying in the same breath just because some man in a robe told him to.

The message is this: if you’re getting married in church, whatever your usual beliefs, on this occasion, mean it.

Now, if you’re having a religious wedding, you need to start by going to the church/synagogue/mosque or other building you wish to get hitched in, and they will do your paperwork. Talk to whoever is in charge there and discuss the requirements for a marriage. There are usually lots!

The building you get married in may be restricted by certain requirements. For C of E, you need to live in the parish for 6 months or have a personal connection to the place (e.g. your parents got married there/live in the parish). If these don’t apply, the religioius official will probably either say no, or make you jump through other hoops, such as regularly attending religious services there, to make you prove it’s not just all about the pretty building.

You also have some choice over who performs the ceremony. If you want someone other than the priest/vicar/rabbi responsible for your building to perform the ceremony, you have to have the agreement of another official to come and marry you AND ALSO the agreement of the priest/vicar/rabbi who would be the default. This means that if you sufficiently piss off your vicar, they can forbid you to be married in their church by anyone other than themselves.

If you have been divorced you will need to discuss this with them and they may make you do more hoop jumping, or insist on bringing it up during the ceremony (ouch). It is probably best to ascertain from the start where they stand over this.

Hoop jumping

If you’re not regular church goers, you may need to start going regularly before the wedding to show your devotion to the church and its community. This is especially likely if only one of you is of the appropriate religion. In the case of Catholicism, you will need to promise to bring up children as Catholics and you may need to keep quiet about living together! Some religious officials will insist on baptising an unbaptised/non-religious spouse, most commonly in Catholicism. However, this is not universal and depends entirely upon the individual establishment.

One thing you will be asked to do is to go to a marriage preparation class. For some religions and ceremonies this is compulsory, and for others it is merely recommended. This usually involves counselling to check that you know how to communicate, that you’ve thought about the implications in living together and that you have discussed/know what to expect from sex and contraception/childbearing (especially if you’re supposed to be virgins. I think this is compulsory in Catholicism, but a lot of the time someone comes to specially talk about sex, whilst the celibate priest just sits back and watches. However, in some cases you do have to discuss your sex life with your celibate priest. Erm… ew).

In general, religious weddings are the most expensive, but this isn’t always so. The cost of getting married in church starts at a base fee of £321.50, which includes your banns, the legal fee and your certificate. You can save £22 if the church you marry in and your home church are the same, as then your banns are only read once.

On top of this, most churches request a “donation” which brings the fee up to at least the £500 mark, and is very dependent upon the individual building. Flowers, bells, choirs/organists are all additional costs which will be added on top of this if you want them and will be subject to availability and priced up by each church to their own satisfaction. Fees can easily get to £700/£800.

If you are having a C of E wedding, your vicar may be invested as a registrar, and can perform the entire ceremony under the negotiated fee. If not, or if you are having a wedding under a different religion, you will need to get the registry office involved: your religious official will perform the ceremony and one registrar will be there do teh paperwork and validate the marriage. The fee for this is a little less than a civil wedding, as you need only one registrar, and will depend upon the fee guidelines in the county you’re getting married in. Sometimes your religious official will deal with the registry office for you and include the cost within their own fees – so it’s important to ask.

Civil Weddings

Currently, the only way for a same sex couple to marry is through civil partnership, although fortunately it does look like this may change soon. And plenty of opposite sex couples, like me and the Fiance, also marry civilly. And this no longer means a quick registry office tying of the knot!

You can get married in any registered building, although no room in any building can be registered for civil AND religious ceremonies – traditionally if there is a chapel that will be for religious ceremonies, and other rooms for civil ceremonies. Non-religious buildings may be registered only for civil weddings. Further, for a civil wedding you don’t have to get married anywhere near where you live or anywhere with an association to you/your family. So there is plenty choice.

And you don’t have to get married in a hotel! When we told our parents we were getting married, we were asked, “Hotel or registry office?” and our reply was “Neither!”

You can find out which buildings are registered at Direct.Gov, which is generally a very good place to go for advice on civil weddings. And if you don’t understand it, you can give them a call!

All sorts of buildings are registered – town halls, restaurants, country houses, conference centres and heritage buildings! – and despite what the myths say, you can get married outside – so long as the outside location is registered and within the confines of a registered building (there aren’t many!). In Somerville College, you can marry in the Fellow’s Garden, and some venues have gazebos or pavillions which are licensed.

Choosing a venue can be tricky, as you have to balance having the venue and having a registrar to bundle. For this, you have to give notice. When my uncle and aunt got married, they couldn’t do this until 5 months before the wedding, after they had booked the venue and everything else, so my uncle camped out outside the registry office and made sure he was first through the door to secure a registrar! Now you can give notice up to a year in advance, which takes the pressure off a bit. We booked our appointment to give notice in advance of the 1 year mark, and then turned up when the time came around.

So what happens when you give notice?

First of all, you need to make sure that you give notice in the district in which you live, not that in which you wish to marry, unless they are the same. This means that if you live in separate districts you will have to give notice separately. We actually gave notice in Oxford, then moved to Birmingham, but that’s okay. We lived in Oxford when we gave notice and thus have only had to deal with them. If you’re in this position just make sure you tell them your new address when you move, as it will help with the paperwork later on.

For giving notice, you pay a fee of £33.75 each, and a notice of your marriage is then displayed in the registry office for 16 days, so that if anybody wishes to object, they may (they won’t, don’t worry).

At your appointment to give notice, you will have to state the time, date and location of your wedding, and after you have given notice you can change the time/date but not the venue – or you have to give notice again! You will then get asked a few questions: first that you’re happy to marry and are doing so freely, then (each taking turns in going out of the room) your partner’s full name and date of birth, and occupation. You will also be asked for your own details and they will be cross checked. If you get something wrong they will ‘black mark’ you on the form, which means they will note it as an inconsistency. From everything I’ve heard, you can know none of your partner’s details except their first and last name and get away with it, though!

One thing there have been differences of opinions over is the subject of fathers. Traditionally, the woman would not have an occupation, so her father’s name and occupation would appear on her marriage certificate. Registrars will still ask for a father’s name for the bride, and sometimes for the groom. IF YOU DO NOT WANT YOUR FATHER’S NAME ON YOUR MARRIAGE CERTIFICATE, YOU DO NOT HAVE TO GIVE IT. I asked and was told it was unnecessary. I think they can also take an alternative “guardian”‘s details instead too, but none of this will be appearing on mine.

We were given a form to take away with us and fill in. This is usually requested back about a month before the wedding, but there’s nothing like being organised. It asks for details like the names you want used in your ceremony, whether you want any children mentioned, readings/readers (and copies of the readings to be checked), your witnesses and how you want to be announced at the end of the ceremony. It gives you the option to have your own vows or use some of theirs. The only legal compulsory bit are the Declaratory and Contracting words, for which you have to pick from their selection. You can pick any combination traditional/modern/simple, but you can’t change anything about them in the slightest, e.g. merging two versions. These words must be said before 6pm for the marriage to be valid.

Readings are very popular in civil ceremonies to pad them out and as an alternative to hymns; however, you are not under any circumstances allowed to have any god in them whatsoever. No mention of beliefs, no quotes from traditional vows (e.g. “for better for worse”)/calling your lover your angel. None of that whatsoever.

The number of readings you’re allowed again depends on your county. Oxfordshire are quite relaxed, and whilst there are 3 spaces for readings on the form they gave us, they’re happy for 3 short poems and a piece of prose. Some counties only have 2 spaces for readings. If you’re unsure, ask.

We’ve handed our form in – well, actually we scanned it into the computer and emailed it to save postage – but we didn’t actually finish filling it in! The registrars are quite happy for you to submit some information later than others, as long as they get to check it, so we haven’t decided on our vows nor how we want to be announced at the end of the ceremony.

On the wedding day itself, you will need two registrars: one to perform the ceremony and one to bookkeep. You have no say over who these are, but when they are allotted (usually 4-6 weeks before the wedding, depending on your county) you will be able to meet them or speak on the phone (and I suppose if they were incredibly offensive you could lodge a complaint, but you would then be randomly allotted a replacement, assuming there were grounds for your complaint!). Ours is allotted a month in advance, so I don’t yet know whether we have to chase up a meeting or whether we will be invited for one, but I have a sneaking suspicion it is the former!

The fee you pay for your registrars depends upon the county, time of year and day of the week – so getting married on a Saturday in May is around £400. Less if you get married on the premises.

Other Bits

It’s worth mentioning that other restrictions apply and vary between different kinds of ceremonies. The major one is photographs, and when you photographer is allowed to take pictures and move about. Churches are particularly bad about letting photographers take pictures during the ceremony, even with flash off. Some registrars/celebrants prefer them to stay seated (which is fair enough) and others are quite free about it. For our wedding, Oxfordshire are happy for our photographer to do her stuff, the only limitation being no pictures of the actual register – which is fair enough as it contains other couples’ details! Again, if in doubt, ask.

A Fayre Deal

So on Sunday I went to a wedding fayre at the Crowne Plaza hotel, Birmingham. This was my second wedding fayre – the first being at the Cotswold Lodge, Oxford, and very early on in our planning. This time we’re close to the end, so we told suppliers we were there for the finishing touches, which may be stretching the truth a little. We didn’t really have any intention of buying anything, but we decided to look, just in case, and cheifly we were there for an outing, a glass of champagne, and the general excitement of being an engaged couple out doing an engaged couple thing (it never occured to me that it would be worth going to a wedding fayre with anybody other than the Fiance, then again, he remembers someone at his old work whining about having to drive her sister to wedding fayres every weekend, so maybe nobody would want to go!). Then again, we went to the Cotswold Lodge wedding fayre with no intention of buying anything, and that’s where we found out about the rickshaws.

When IS the best time to go to a wedding fayre? When you’re at the venue stage? Or when you’re looking for photographers? Or jewellery? Surely things like jewellery are going to get sorted much much later than photographers? So perhaps there isn’t a right time or a wrong time (well, there is a wrong time: there’s before you’re engaged or when you’re already married)…

The Crowne Plaza Hotel stands in the middle of Birmingham, elevated from the street on top of a massive concrete car park. This wasn’t a very good start, and I wasn’t that impressed with the inside of the hotel either, though the bar was okay. On the other hand, I was very impressed with the management – the hotel representatives at the fayre were friendly and interested, very hospitable and welcoming. The kind of people who made me think: Yes! I’d love to leave organising something important in their hands: I’d feel completely relaxed and assured they’d do a reliable job, probably better than I would. And I am very, very highly stung. Or so I am told…

We also got two glasses of champagne each instead of one, and the second one was massive because they “might as well finish off the bottle”.

There were several interesting stalls at the wedding fayre, and we went round and chatted to all of them, but in a quick summary – there were some very nice but not especially exciting floristry, table decor and cake stands (we did get to try a cake, and I did admit we wanted to make ours and she gave me some advice), a singer, a guitar and flute playing pair, a rather fun DJ twosome who sounded veyr together about providing cover for emergencies and stressed that you could GET HOLD OF THEM, which is apparently a problem with DJs. There was a wishing well hire place, with a wishing well in our colours, a caracaturist who couldn’t spell “stationery” and a Sikh family business who put pictures onto glass (except it wasn’t real glass, but it looked like glass). There was also someone who made bridal jewellery, and although I said I didn’t like pearls, was very keen for feedback because it was her first wedding fayre. There was a woman called Karla Saunders who ran an exercise course for getting fit in the run up to the wedding and a few stationers I had a sniff around for final ideas for orders and table plans. Also, a couple of photographers.

There was also a rather interesting stall which caught my eye covered with fascinators priced from £5.99 and hair pieces et cetera. They will actually come to your house and let you try on all sorts of bits in a group of girls. They were called Fascination. They didn’t have a website on their card, though, just a telephone number. I loved the mini top hats.

Now, one of the photographers deserves a few extra words. This is Jon Keeling Photography – and whilst we’re not even considering them, I’m going to big them up. Why? Because when we told them we had a friend doing our photography they gave us something.

This:

You may need to open the image location in a new tab and zoom to read it – but the gist is, a helpful list of things to check through with your photographer to make sure the contract’s in order, you’re covered for eventualities and they have everything they need to do their job well – from the expertise to information about the venue. It is VERY comprehensive, and whilst we have gone through all this stuff already, it’s definitely worth checking off their list too.

I think it’s a great thing to do. In the end, if we make sure our photographer is good, we’re reassured because of the help we’ve been given, and will recommend them (um… like I’m doing now?), and if we’d found a fault in our photographer and decided we weren’t happy, we’d have someone we find trustworthy on hand (would’ve been a bit last minute for our wedding, but you get the idea). So anyway, I just wanted to say Thank You for this to Jon Keele Photography.