What does your wedding reading say about you?

Arts journalism, like crime, doesn’t pay. So I’ve been thinking of getting a side hustle. ‘You know about books and stuff,’ say friends who are getting married. ‘What should we have for our readings?’ If I can advise friends, why not strangers? By the laws of wedding economics — pick a number and add some noughts — I could make a marital mint.

We’d start with a couple’s questionnaire. No good my offering Rainer Maria Rilke if they’re more of a Purple Ronnie pair. Then a consultation over Zoom, before proposing something old, something new, something sonnet, something haiku.

It is, tentatively, wedding season again. Boris and Carrie kicked us off last weekend. I wonder what they went for? Catullus for him, Rachel Carson for her? When my husband Andy and I were married two years ago, we worried more about the readings than just about anything else.

The Bible bit was easy. Our vicar offered the Song of Solomon, the Marriage at Cana and ‘a perennial favourite’ Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. We chose sounding brass, clashing cymbals and the greatest of these is love. When it came to the personal readings, we hummed and hawed and dragged our heels. Nothing soppy was the first rule. ‘Not a cute card or a kissogram,’ as Carol Ann Duffy has it in ‘Valentine’. Nothing obvious. I sink a few inches in the pew every time a maid of honour embarks on the ‘roots underground’ passage from Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. Third rule: no old nuptial chestnuts. ‘Classic or cliché?’ asked one friend considering ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds/ Admit impediments’.

Nothing with the rumple of bedsheets. No John Donne: ‘Busy old fool, unruly sun.’ No e.e. Cummings: ‘i like my body when it is with your/ body.’