Our podcast today is about weddings. I hope you will learn some new English words. There is a quiz attached to the podcast today so that you can test how much you know.
In England, you can get married in a church, or you can have a civil wedding (that is, a non-religious wedding). Until about 10 years ago, civil weddings always took place at a Registry Office. Nowadays, however, you can get married in all sorts of places – in hotels, in country houses, and in many mosques and Hindu temples, for example.
A wedding can be very expensive. One website that I have seen says that the average cost of a wedding in Britain is over £11,000. Here are some of the things that many couples will want for their wedding:
• a wedding-dress for the bride, and dresses for her bridesmaids;
• wedding rings for the bride and the bridegroom;
• flowers for the church or the place where the wedding is held;
• a reception (that is, a party or a formal meal) for the wedding guests after the wedding ceremony;
• a wedding cake;
• a professional photographer, to take pictures or videos of the wedding;
• a honeymoon (a holiday) for the newly-married couple after the wedding.
And there are lots more things to spend money on if you want to. Some couples want to hire a beautiful horse-drawn carriage, or a vintage Rolls Royce car to take them away after the wedding. Some people even fly to holiday resorts in Mexico or Thailand to get married, and their families and friends fly there too.
There is no such thing as a "typical wedding". Every couple getting married has to decide for themselves what sort of wedding they want – a religious wedding, or a civil wedding; a big wedding with lots of guests; or a small, simple wedding.
I went to a wedding last weekend. It was definitely not a typical wedding, but you might be interested in it. It was a Quaker wedding. There was no priest or minister to conduct the wedding, and no music or singing. The bride and groom and the wedding guests all sat silently together. After about 10 minutes, the bride and groom stood up and said that they took each other as man and wife and made their promises to each other. After that, some of their friends and relatives spoke about love and marriage, or read a poem or a passage from the Bible, or simply wished the couple every happiness together. The wedding lasted for about an hour. At the end, everyone who was there – about 80 of us – signed the wedding certificate as witnesses to the marriage.
And then – because we are British – we all drank cups of tea and chatted to friends and family members whom we had not seen for a long time. We went out into the garden of the Quaker Meeting House to take photos of the bride and groom. In the evening, we were all invited to a ceilidh. "Ceilidh" is a Scottish Gaelic word, which has become part of the English language in recent years. It means an evening of dancing, singing, story telling and poetry. The bride and groom cut their wedding cake, and we danced traditional English and Scottish dances until late in the evening. And then all the wedding guests, and the bride and groom too, did the washing up and helped to put the chairs and tables back in their proper places.
We had a wonderful time. Is this the sort of wedding you would like?
