OK… the suntan is now fading, but I’m stll mentally in Goa! We know it well enough now to have found some fantastic hidden gems, including a couple of places ideal for getting married in absolute style. None of them are anything like the big five star hotel wedding packages where everything is done for you and it can be hard to get privacy and/or that exact wedding experience you’ve dreamed of. Our finds are more like ideal wedding backdrops and everything else is down to your (or our!) imagination and planning. So they’re only ever going to suit some couples but for the right bride and groom it will be perfection. (Drop us a line if you think that’s you!)
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I guess most people saw on the news/heard on the radio/read on the web the latest stats from the ONS demonstrating a near 10% fall in UK weddings between 2004 and 2005. Shock! Horror! According to The Times the Tories are using the ‘evidence’ as a stick to beat Labour about their anti-marriage policies and Jenny North, head of public policy at Relate, suggested the cost of weddings was to blame. Divorce Lawyers suggest that men might be shying away from marriage because of their perception of unfairness if the marriage fails.
But I think the dramatic (10% in one year!) fall is down to more prosaic matters. The ONS themselves say the measures enacted 1st February 2005 against sham marriages might have contibuted, but nobody seems to have thought a little deeper and found the obvious answer…
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It seems to be very fashionable at the moment for the media to take an interest in ethical weddings, and of course every journalist has a very different take on what constitutes an ‘ethical wedding’.
Last week saw a vicar fairly local to us having his book profiled around the media (Revd Andrew Body, vicar of Chobham, and incidentally chairman of Family Life and Marriage Education (FLAME), has written “Making the Most of Weddings”) which aimed to “blow the whistle on commercialism”. How about buying a second-hand ring, borrowing a wedding dress from a friend or using a CD player instead of a DJ for your music? Of course the book covers a lot more interesting territory, but the CofE does summarise the book as “the real investment has to be made in the relationship itself”.
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Well, in common with the rest of the world, we’ve started a blog… not sure yet how often I’ll find time to post anything, but I hope to do so as often as I can think of something interesting to say.
There is quite often something interesting that flips up on the news (anybody note the CofE report on ‘ethical’ weddings this week?) and we quite often have little ideas that are probably not worth creating a full page on the website yet, but might take somebody’s interest enough for us to investigate further (fancy being a guinea pig?).
I can also have strong opinions (but you won’t always hear them as I want to keep my business!) so please feel free to comment if you feel the need!
