I got a call the other day from Catherine Salmond at the Edinburgh Evening News. She was writing a story because Elizabeth Bell, the wedding co-ordinator at Houston House Hotel, had got in touch with the paper to say that 1 in 10 of their weddings this year are going to be Humanist ceremonies. So we had a chat and talked about the reasons that so many people are choosing this way to celebrate their love. As it says in the article,


“More and more people are coming across this and saying it’s what they want,” explains Tim Maguire, a Edinburgh Humanist celebrant authorised to legally marry couples, as well as conduct funerals. Many, he says, stumble across Humanism by accident, looking for a non-religious, yet meaningful service, perhaps because the couple come from different religious backgrounds, or are older and have been married before, or because reading up about the ideals of Humanist strikes a chord.

“At a Humanist wedding, people feel they can express who they are and if they can make a promise in their own words, it makes it all the more powerful.”


I was pleased to see that she’d also interviewed Lindsay and Dave Rodger, whose wedding I conducted at Houston House last September, and Elizabeth and Bengtis Ericsson whose wedding I wrote about here.


The story made a lovely double page spread in the paper, and there’s a poll about Humanist weddings in the online version that you can read here.