Reading the Banns

I'm not sure if they actually do "Read the Banns" - the proclamations of marriage - any more in churches given that the last time I was actually in a church was in 1991 for my sister's wedding.

Well in any event, some 21 years after that wedding, I'm having one of my own. Yes you read that right, Mrs Dracunculus is going to become the real Mrs Dracunculus in September.

You might ask, after having lived together for 18 years, why we are bothering. Well quite frankly it's for tax reasons. We're both getting to the stage where there's the odd grey scale just by your left horn, the twinge in the wing joint and thing that goes "ping" in your back that's your bodies' way of telling you that you're quite a long way from having hatched. Now as we're not currently married if either of us shuffles off this mortal coil and goes for that audition with the Choir Invisible the remaining one will be landed with a monstrous inheritance tax bill for the half of the house the other one of us owned. If you're married, everything just transfers to the surviving partner with nothing to pay.

So you can see we're doing this for the noblest of motives, keeping our cash out of George Osborne's grubby hands.

Yesterday we did the modern equivalent of reading the banns which is called "giving notice". This involves schlepping down to a registry office which is all painted institution beige and waiting the obligatory local government 10 minutes past your appointment time whilst sundry tattooed landwhales crawled through the door and went "wanna register a baby so I can get me benefits, innit" at the receptionist. Once seen we get asked a bunch of questions some of which I could see the relevance of (like "are you related" - this is Norfolk we are talking about here^*) and some I could not, like "What was your father's profession" - I mean what has that got to do with anything?

Half an hour later we're done and 70 quid poorer and in three weeks we get out chitty that says we can do that "I do" stuff.

However whilst I was waiting to see the registrar I was watching one of those little TV Screen advertising thingies which was flashing up adverts for wedding car hire, funeral services and the like. One was for, I kid you not, wedding insurance. You can insure your wedding, I assume from being jilted at the altar or something. Anyway this advert said the average wedding cost £20,000.

Ours won't, mainly because it's us plus my sister and brother in law as witnesses in Swampland reg office first thing on Saturday morning when it's 50 quid instead of 250; then back to behind the water pipes for Tattinger and nibbles.

Who said romance was dead.



^* Chatting to the registrar apparently they have had cousins asking to marry. "We had to get the books out" she said - apparently it's two blood lines of separation.