Hopefully all those of you who read this blog will have read the news of our engagement from a tweet sent on Monday.
This has proven a pretty effective way of getting the news out – an awful lot of people have subsequently contacted us to say they’re happy, to offer congratulations and to enquire about dates.
We won’t be setting a date yet, and we are trying to avoid spending too much time thinking about it whilst one of us still has serious academic obligations that are supposed to be filling much of his time. That said, we’ll probably be trying to get along to a Wedding Fayre on Palm Sunday to see how the land lies. (“If they spell it with a Y, more people will come”)
This blog won’t transform into a wedding angst blog, rest assured. It’s almost impossible to write about within my personal blogging rule, which is not to talk about too much people who are not themselves living their lives online or in public. It’s one thing to decide to talk about the things I do and to talk about politics in public, but it’s unfair to drag other people into the public domain without their permission. (This is the reason, incidentally, that I do not use my fiancé’s name in full anywhere on the blog.)
So, some general thoughts on weddings and marriages in particular. Clearly as two men, we’re not getting married in a church. Bizarrely, I learned last year, that the Civil Partnerships Act is so framed as to prohibit even those faiths that were happy to marry gay couples from doing it. For example, the British Quakers were more than happy to recognise lasting gay unions, but are not allowed to get involved in civil partnerships.
I’m quite sad that this means we won’t be able to use any of those lovely hymns I spent my childhood as a choirboy singing. It might mean we end up having a singalong at the reception as a way of circumventing the rules!
Such little preliminary planning as we have done has consisted of browsing various websites of the hotels and other places near Nottingham that do weddings. And some things spring to mind: few of them mention any prices at all. Few of them refer to civil partnerships as an option as well as civil marriage. None of them is big enough to house our entire combined friends and families (although when we finally get hold of the prices, we may well have to viciously prune the guestlists and hope not everyone invited can make it!)
Hmm. Awfully big adventure, this.
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