I've just come back from a weekend in Northumberland.

One of my best friend's handsome sons and his beautiful girlfriend were being married. After the legally required registry office ' do', the couple invited us to join them in a Humanist ceremony to celebrate their marriage, held in the garden of the bride's family home.

It was one of the touching weddings I've ever been to, the carefully chosen words reflecting who the couple are as people and what they bring to the relationship.

There was enough ritual and ceremony to give it a sense of meaning and weight and enough human touches to make it both movingly intimate and warmly engaging for the family and friends.

The vows were about loving and caring and mutual growth and support –much like church vows in many ways - but far more personal
without being mawkish or over worked. These were preceded by music and followed by readings from two of the bride and groom’s oldest friends – one was from a shared favourite book, The Velveteen Rabbit - from the bride and the reader, Katie’s, shared childhood.

I’ve enclosed the readings below because there were just so apt:

This one is an edited version of something written by Louis de Berniere:
Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion
That is just being "in love", which any fool can do.
Being in love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides.

Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.
You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part.
Because this is what love is.

And this from the Velveteen Rabbit:

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you.
When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get
loose in the joints and very shabby.But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

And the girl finished it off by saying, ‘I have never known two people who are more real in their love than Lou and Tom,’ and
that she was glad they had found each other and she was sure they would still love each other when their hair got rubbed off
and they had loose joints.’

.... there wasn’t a dry eye in the house!

The downside? Well I damn me, I think I’m developing an allergy to alcohol – annoying as I barely drink and so really enjoy the odd glass when I fancy it! On the two most recent occasions that I’ve had red wine & champagne I have been violently sick a couple of hours later. ( This is after I’ve gone to bed not at the 'do' - It seems to be triggered by lying down) The true misery I have to say has been compounded on both occasions by creeping back to bed feeling like death and lying there in the darkness listening to the man in my life snoring like an asthmatic walrus! So, there goes my louche life style!