First Scottish couple married in humanist ceremony celebrates 20th anniversary
Two decades ago, a Scottish couple became the first in the country to marry in a humanist ceremony.
Karen Watts and Martin Reijns said 'I do' at Edinburgh Zoo on June 18, 2005, and made history as the first couple to have a legally recognised humanist wedding.
The couple, who are still going strong after 20 years of marriage, said family and friends were 'bemused' when the couple told them their ceremony plans. STV News Karen Watts and Martin Reijns have been married for 20 years.
'They were quite curious, but they loved it. Our guests said it was such a memorable experience for them to see a humanist wedding,' Karen said.
'They still talk about it, it was a really special day,' Martin added.
Karen and Martin said the secret to their happy marriage is 'compromise, acceptance, and of course, love'.
They were the first of 82 couples to tie the knot in humanist ceremonies that year after they were legally recognised.
Since then, the ceremonies have exploded in popularity, with over 50,000 couples opting for a non-religious ceremony. Supplied Karen Watts and Martin Reijns said 'I do' at Edinburgh Zoo in June 2005.
Humanist celebrant Ivan Middleton, who also served as Secretary of Humanist Society Scotland during the campaign for legal recognition, said: 'Our case was simple: under European human rights law, humanists with a non-religious belief system deserved the same rights as religious believers to legally marry.'
In 2019, humanist marriages overtook Christian weddings for the first time.
By 2022, there were more humanist weddings (9,140) than all other faith and belief-based weddings in Scotland combined.
Mandy Evans Ewing, one of the original twelve celebrants who is still conducting ceremonies today, said the beauty of humanist ceremonies is that every one is different.
'Humanist weddings are very personal, and that's a really important thing because we need to have rituals, ceremonies, and celebrations that are meaningful to us, and resonate with us, and that's why they are so popular.'
Get all the latest news from around the country Follow STV News
Scan the QR code on your mobile device for all the latest news from around the country
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Spectator
2 hours ago
- Spectator
Comfort reading for the interwar years
A prospective reader who chanced upon Recommended! without its subtitle might be forgiven for thinking that the six grim-looking portraits on the cover depict the Watch Committee of an exceptionally puritanical interwar-era seaside town. This would be a misjudgment, as, rather than being charged with censoring films or evicting courting couples from cinema back rows, Nicola Wilson's galère – Hugh Walpole, Clemence Dane, George Gordon, Edmund Blunden, Sylvia Lynd and J.B. Priestley – turn out to have made up the selection panel of the early 1930s Book Society. The subtitle is, of course, a wild exaggeration. Even at its high-water mark, the Society's membership was in the low five figures. Victor Gollancz's propagandising Left Book Club had many more subscribers and shifted thousands more copies. On the other hand, the bestselling Walpole, Priestley and their colleagues had undeniable cachet. Gordon was the Oxford Merton Professor of English; Blunden a poet-don; and mesdames Lynd and Dane well-known figures of their time. To the average middle-class subscriber of middlebrow tastes they offered a failsafe route into the mainstream literary culture of the day. Wilson, who teaches publishing studies at the University of Reading, where many of the relevant archives are stored, might have been expected to take an academic tone. On the contrary, her style is informal to the point of chatty. Everyone is referred to by their Christian names, and James Joyce and Nora Barnacle's wedding party is described as a 'proper do'. Happily, when she isn't coming across like a guest on The One Show, she offers a fascinating guide to bygone concepts of 'taste' and how you went about bringing them to the wider public. Naturally, the tocsin of commerce sounds loudly. While the Society tried very hard not to look like a publishers' cartel, there were bitter disputes about the panel's keenness on books issued by Gollancz, William Heinemann and Jonathan Cape. At the same time, all those present were conscious of their duty to broaden their subscribers' sensibilities, and genuinely left-field choices such as Kate O'Brien's Without My Cloak (1931) could sometimes be found rubbing shoulders with less challenging work by A.J. Cronin and the popular historian Arthur Bryant. That said, E.M. Delafield's The Diary of a Provincial Lady and its sequels looks far more representative of the Society's approach than, say, J.M. Denwood and S. Fowler Wright's Red Ike: A Novel of Cumberland. There were times, as Wilson acknowledges, when a selection could save a writer's career. Graham Greene, in lowish water after the failure of his second and third novels, had his prospects transformed by the surprisingly narrow (three votes to two) emergence of Stamboul Train (1932). Even then there was a corking row when Priestley, by this point no longer a selector, read a proof copy and imagined himself libelled by the portrait of the bluff, pipe-smoking, Dickens-obsessed northern novelist Mr Savory. Thirteen thousand bound copies had to be unstitched so that Greene could make the necessary changes. Wilson is careful to salt her history with biographical sketches of the major players. Lynd was always obliged to balance the demands of her professional life with looking after her hard-drinking journalist husband Robert; Blunden frequently had to take the measure of an increasingly complex emotional round. Much of the tension which enveloped the Society as the 1930s wore on had a political subtext: Cecil Day-Lewis, who joined the committee in 1937, was a paid-up communist; Blunden, once war was declared, found his pacifist sympathies seriously in question and had his college rooms turned over by MI5. The postwar years were less hospitable to the kind of literary culture that Walpole & Co had peddled in the era of Stanley Baldwin. Daniel George caught something of the changing atmosphere in his review of Brideshead Revisited in the Society's newsletter of May 1945. Evelyn Waugh, he noted, seemed 'determined to wring our hearts with lamentations for a past shared by a precious few'. Recommended! is an engaging piece of publishing history, even if Wilson has an irritating habit of scrambling the names by which her subjects were known at the time. Thus Heinemann's majordomo A.S. Frere appears as 'Arthur S. Frere'; Margaret, Lady Rhondda, the feminist proprietor of Time and Tide, is 'Lady Margaret Rhondda'; and F.R. Leavis's redoubtable wife Q.D. masquerades as 'Queenie D. Leavis'. Critics often complain that books of this kind are too soberly academic for the general taste. This one could have done with more sepia and less gloss.
Spectator
2 hours ago
- Spectator
Style, wit and pace: Netflix's Dept. Q reviewed
Can you imagine how dull a TV detective series set in a realistic Scottish police station would be? Inspector Salma Rasheed would have her work cut out that's for sure: the wicked gamekeeper on the grisly toff's estate who murdered a hen harrier and then blamed its decapitation on an innocent wind turbine; the haggis butcher who misgendered his vegetarian assistant; the Englishman who made a joke on Twitter about a Scotsman going to the chippy and ordering a deep-fried can of Coke… It would get lots of awards, obviously, but I doubt it would do that well in the ratings. But you needn't worry about Dept. Q (Netflix). Though it is set in a police station in Edinburgh it bears about as much relation to contemporary Scotland, Scottish policing or indeed Edinburgh as, say, Midsomer Murders does to real-life English villages. Perhaps this is because – based on a novel by Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen and originally set in Copenhagen – it derives from the Scandi-noir genre where every other person in the bleak, washed-out countryside and pullulatingly corrupt modern metropolis is either a bent City bigwig, an occultic serial killer – who wears antlers on his head while drawing runic symbols in blood – or the disturbed victim of some Terrible Family Secret that will only be unravelled after a series of long car and ferry journeys to remote islands where no one wants to answer questions. Our hero is DCI Carl Morck (Matthew Goode), whose statutory unique quirks are that he's stupidly clever, incredibly grumpy and deeply traumatised having been shot in the head by the same masked gunman who crippled his colleague (and only friend) DCI James Hardy (Jamie Sives). Everyone hates him; he hates everyone in return; but you'd definitely want him solving your case, even if it's impossible, such as the one he's investigating here. I feel bad about describing it because it might give away the game about the rather ingenious temporal device that furnishes the first episode with its satisfying final twist. (Skip to the next paragraph if you don't want it spoiled.) Essentially, a woman barrister (Chloe Pirrie) has gone missing on a ferry and her case has been closed because there were no leads or witnesses and she is presumed dead. In actual fact though – oh, the horror! – she has spent the last four years imprisoned in what looks like the metal hull of a ship, where she is psychologically and physically tortured by a vicious old woman and her sidekick who bear her some-as-yet-undisclosed grudge. See what I mean about our being in Scandi-noir territory? This is the sort of crime almost no one ever commits in real life because even if they had the motive the logistics would be just too complicated. That's why, having hit you with this bizarre and deeply implausible scenario, the rest of the book/TV adaptation has to work so frantically hard to provide you with the convoluted psychological and organisational rationale necessary to persuade you that this hasn't all been a huge waste of your time and credulity. Not that I'm really complaining by the way. Just like with Slow Horses – whose set up this resembles quite a lot – Dept. Qisn't really about the tortured MacGuffin of a plotline but about enjoying the company of loveable misfits. Besides Goode's adorably hateful antihero detective, these include: Akram Salim (Alexej Manvelov), a deceptively gentle soul who used to be in the Syrian secret police; DCI Hardy (now bedbound but at least if he can still help solve crimes it might suppress his urge to kill himself); DC Rose Dickson (Leah Byrne), with her big red hair, bright red lipstick and mental-health issues. They work together in a dingy basement, forgotten since the 1970s, and, handily, have a decent budget because the cabinet secretary has apparently decided that it's good for optics if there's a dedicated department for solving cold cases. All the other characters are, of course, similarly messed up. The missing woman's brother William (Tom Bulpett) has mental-health issues on account of having had his head stoven in by a mysterious hammer attacker; Kelly Macdonald's Dr Rachel Irving – aka meet-cute love interest – has been off men ever since jilting her bigamist husband at the altar; Morck's teenage stepson wears a mask and plays death metal at full volume while playing video games, etc. Yes, the crime bits are bit warped, morbid and voyeuristic (for my tastes anyway), but the cast are great, and it's adapted and directed with such verve, style, wit and pace by Scott Frank, you can hardly not enjoy it – nor wish they'd get a move on with Season Two.
Spectator
2 hours ago
- Spectator
If you think all orchestras sound alike, listen to this recording
Grade: B+ These are gloomy days, so here's a burst of melody and colour to cheer you up. Back in the LP era it wasn't unusual for classical recordings to be put together like a concert that you might actually want to hear: a sequence of works by different but complementary composers, offering the possibility of a happy discovery. Come for the Strauss, stay for the Reznicek – that sort of thing. This lively new disc from the Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic adopts the same principle. The unifying theme is early-20th-century eastern European nationalism – the folksong-collecting variety, not the Archduke-assassinating kind. But it's the opposite of monotonous. The Bartok is brusque and peppery alongside Kodaly's cheerful nostalgia, while Enescu's folk-fiddles flash and dart in the sunlight (the opening theme of his Romanian Rhapsody is based on a drinking song: what's not to like?). The centrepiece is the Frescoes of Piero della Francesca: a luscious, colour-saturated triptych of tone poems that might be the finest symphony Martinu never wrote. Anyway, the Turkish players go at this music with a will – wide-eyed, occasionally splashy, but sensitive to each shift of mood and texture (and in this repertoire, there are a lot). It's marvellously translucent. Harps ripple within chords, the strings are springy and supple and the bassoons have soil under their fingernails – in all, a suitably tangy corrective to the jaded notion that all orchestras now sound alike. The Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic recently toured the UK, but I'm embarrassed to say that I'd never heard of their Italian chief conductor Carlo Tenan. If this recording is typical, he knows his stuff.
