As for the style: white taxis cut an urban dash, or go for the personal touch with a model from the year you were born. For transport to the reception, open-topped buses stocked with champagne get receptions off to a memorable start.Where: London White Taxi Service (0181-958 7928); Original Sightseeing Tours (0181-877 1722).How much: White Taxis pounds 60 per hr, minimum pounds 90; bus, pounds 325 single journey.46HIGHCLERE CASTLE”My clients just stood in awe when they entered the front door,” recalls Liz Sexton. “Highclere is what castles are meant to look like.” She suggests the Gothic Saloon for wedding photos or ceremonies. “It has a sweeping staircase and a gallery on which musicians often play.” Although Highclere has a large capacity, it won’t dwarf your day: “it also manages to be intimate, with rich colouring and soft lighting,” explains Liz, providing all the ingredients for a fairytale day.Where: Highclere Castle, nr Newbury, Hampshire (01635 253210).How much: venue hire from pounds 5,000 plus VAT, menus from pounds 38.50.47THE CONSERVATORY, LONDON SW11An unlikely street in Battersea hides this jewel of a venue. Wend your way up a steep spiral staircase – infirm and unfit beware – to a rooftop conservatory filled with lush, exotic plants. “This is a unique venue catering for up to50 people for dinner or a cocktail reception,” says Liz Sexton.
A small terrace outside increases capacity and gives breathtaking views across the rooftops.Where: nr Albert Bridge, Ransome’s Dock, Battersea, SW11 (0181-874 8505).How much: venue hire from pounds 500.48SAMANTHA SHAWPictured above tending to the dress of Isabella Norman at her marriage to Timothy Knatchbull last year, Samantha Shaw has long been an in-secret of a discerning social set. All this will change when her designs for Sophie Rhys-Jones’s wedding are unveiled in a fortnight’s time, less than one month after her own marriage! Obviously a cool customer, 30-year-old Samantha describes her style as modern classic, and her main aim “to complement the best of a woman’s figure” – for which her background in life drawing and costume design has clearly stood her in good stead.Where: 32 Oakley St, SW3 (for more info, call 0171-287 4375).How much: from around pounds 2,000.49BOOT CAMPFiancees will love this stag weekend: great for male-bonding; low on creature comforts. Recruits rise at 6am for physical jerks with army instructors (lake dip optional), before a hard day’s activities. “These include an assault course, with a zip wire like at the end of the Krypton Factor, raft building, scramble bikes and pitches for five-a-side football,” explains Mike Wood, a hen- and stag-party organiser. If they have any energy left after that, then VIP treatment at a Norwich nightclub awaits, before bed in a bunkhouse or army tent. After a day of this, your intended will embrace married life with a vengeance.Where: call Freedom (0181-445 8687) for great hen & stag ideas nationwide. How much: pounds 110 for two nights.50CRECHESHowever broody you felt before the wedding, squalling during a service can put you off kids for life.
To make sure they’re seen and not heard, give them age-related talking books on personal stereos. Alternatively, enlist the services of a creche company to keep younger guests entertained, nannied – and, more importantly, out from under your Jimmy Choo’d feet. As for food, salmon en croute is unlikely to wash with the under-fives, so consult your caterers. Special menus equal contented kids, and will probably save you money.Where: Crechendo (0181-675 6611).
How much: prices vary, but for a three- hour London wedding with 15 kids, reckon on about about pounds 400.. We don’t know his name, but he was a member of the crew of a bomber plane. In a letter to a prominent clergyman he described his feelings of nausea when he realised that he was partly responsible for the “women and children down there being mutilated, burned, killed, terror-stricken in that dreadful inferno”. “Why,” he wrote, “do the churches not tell us that we are doing an evil job? Why do chaplains persist in telling us that we are performing a noble task in defence of Christian civilisation?”
This letter was not written by any of the crew who recently dropped bombs over Serbia, but by one of the air crew who attacked Hamburg during the Second World War. His problem was not that he was a pacifist – he strongly believed that Nazi Germany had to be beaten, and insisted that he was “prepared to do my bit to that end”. Rather, he was objecting to the way churchmen were describing the slaughter as “noble”. Why didn’t the Church admit, he argued, that “what we are doing is evil, a necessary evil perhaps, but evil all the same”?
Now that peace is in sight, we may be forgiven for wondering at the silence of the vast majority of our own clergy in the past few horrifying weeks.
