The list of documentation for a civil marriage in Pinoso is not too onerous. Proof of identity and sometimes proof of address. Something to prove that you are free to marry – single, divorced or widowed plus a full birth certificate for each person. Foreign birth certificates need an apostille and have to be translated, by an official translator, into Spanish. That translated birth certificate can be no more than three months old at the presentation of the paperwork to the Justice of the Peace. On top of that we would have needed a couple of Spanish speaking witnesses when we handed over the documentation and later, at the ceremony, two more to sort of represent each side of the partnership. Obviously enough, we also had to choose a date and one of the available venues in Pinoso.
When we considered that, ostensibly simple, list of requirements we soon realised that it was going to be a bit of a paperchase. The ID and proof of residence things were easy but I'd never considered how I'd prove that I was, and always had been, a bachelor. The answer turned out to be by getting either a Certificate of No Impediment or a Marital Status Certificate from the British Consulate in Madrid. Different authorities ask for one or other of those two different forms. Maggie needed one of those too but also, because she'd been married before, she had to get a copy of her original marriage certificate from the General Register Office in the UK. It was one of the simplest and most obvious sounding requirements that set us on course to get married outside of Spain. We needed a translation of a birth certificate with apostille. Remarkable as it sounds the General Register Office was so slow to send out those certificates, in both our cases, that we feared that the delay caused by the GRO would simply cock everything up. Mix the GRO taking months to send certificates and the Spaniards demanding stuff translated into Spanish no more than three months old and we foresaw disaster.
We didn't make that decision straight away. We started to collect the paperwork together and the world kept turning as the GRO fannied about in getting the certificates we'd paid for back to us. By then my cancer treatment was well under way and my death didn't seem as imminent as it had a few months before.
One of the other possibilities we'd talked about was popping down to Gibraltar. There are a number of businesses there that will help with the organisation of the weddings - for a fee - because Gibraltar has a nice little business in quick and easy weddings without the need for Elvis impersonators. The wedding organisers will book the spaces, arrange for registrars etc. and to some degree process the paperwork. We would still need to have birth certificates, marriage certificate, proof of divorce and ID but, that apart, all we needed to do was to stay at least one night before or after the wedding in Gibraltar, and get a letter from the hotel we'd booked to confirm that. For exactly the same reason that the Pinoso arrangements had slowed to zero, because the urgency was gone, we didn't do much with the information that we'd got from the Gibraltar wedding planners.
Every now and again someone would ask us if we were still going to marry. In turn one of us would say, to the other, we should get married you know. Maggie too had suffered a couple of medical problems. I dug out the paperwork from the British Consulate and suggested to Maggie we should get on with it. Maggie countered by saying that it all seemed such a faff. We should go to Gib she said. Well, she never says Gib, I do, she says Gibraltar. I agreed. Much more of an adventure driving down to Gibraltar to get married, very John and Yoko. Besides, afterwards, we could have a few days in Andalucía. And suddenly we were back on task. I've already forgotten lots of the process but once we'd decided on one of the packages presented by the wedding planners -which ranged from very simple and basic through to all singing and dancing - and particularly when we'd handed over a couple of hundred quid to Sweet Gibraltar Weddings (what an odd name), it all became very real very quickly.
All along I'd thought of the ceremony as being jeans and t-shirt, saying "I do" and going down the pub for a beer to celebrate. Maggie had other plans. What about rings?, she said, Sweet Gibraltar Weddings want to know whether we will be exchanging rings. I said obviously not. We went to a jewellers the next week and bought wedding rings. Are we going to write our own vows?, said Maggie, Sweet Gibraltar Weddings want to know. Obviously not, I said, and we didn't. We didn't invite anyone along either but we did tell people when and where and very soon a couple of people were crystal clear that they would be joining us. Somehow, magically, that turned into eighteen people. No gifts we said, no reception we said, in fact nothing organised at all. Most of that sort of transmuted along the way.
Sweet Gibraltar Weddings checked, before we went to Gib, that we had all the documentation in place. With the stuff we'd got from the GRO and stuff we had naturally we had all that was required. British documentation was fine so no translation problems. The wedding planners also asked us other things like whether we had our own witnesses or whether they needed to drum some up. The only part that hurt was paying their fees. Oh, and the hotel. Paying for a proper hotel was a bit of a shock too.
The day before the wedding we were in Gib. We had an appointment with a legal rep, a Commissioner for Oaths, for Sweet Gibraltar Weddings. She collected together the paperwork in a sheaf which we then walked a couple of hundred metres down the road to the Gibraltar Register Office. The office checked it all over, asked about the number and type of marriage certificates we wanted – there was a charge of £35 for the ones with an apostille. We walked that stamped and receipted paperwork back to the Commissioner for Oaths. Apparently they had to do more stamping but we never saw it again. We left them to it and checked into our hotel. Our guests started to arrive in dribs and drabs. Some were in hotels, others in apartments. We had a WhatsApp group for anyone involved and it was amusing to watch as people arranged to meet or as they described the drama of landing on a handkerchief sized runway. There were quite a lot of us in the hotel bar the night before the wedding day.
On the day we put on our wedding clothes. My jeans and t-shirt had become a suit from the Outlet Centre down at San Vicente and Maggie had been shopping too. On the wedding morning Maggie and Jane went off to get their hair done, I hung around the hotel a bit and then wandered into town where I bumped into the newly coiffured on the main street in Gibraltar. Maggie already had a few of our cohort with her and, because Gibraltar is such a small place, a sort of natural coagulation took place. By the time we were in the shady square by City Hall nearly everyone was there. Maggie and I went to talk to the Registrar a few minutes before the 11.30 ceremony time. There was a photographer there, from the wedding planners, she gave us a buttonhole and a small bunch of flowers and introduced us to the Registrar. She checked we had witnesses and we were given a quick run through of what was about to happen. She smiled and grinned a lot. Most of the next few minutes is a bit of a blur. I know I fluffed one of the lines, I know I had a moment when the tears flowed and I was unable to speak, I remember doing the ring exchange too. But the very best bit, and one of those moments that I will never ever forget, was when it was suddenly all official and eighteen friends and family started clapping and whooping just for us.
The rest of the day went splendidly too. It just sort of worked as it should. Quite by chance there was an empty wine bar alongside the City Hall where we had married – it was a nice place, made even better when Beth settled the bar tab. We were on to a restaurant that Maggie had selected from reviews. It was a good choice. The owner was dead welcoming, the food was good and the price was very reasonable. The evening drinks place, down by the harbour, didn't quite live up to expectations but it was good enough. And that was the last of that and the start of something else.
Thanks Maggie, Thanks Anne and Robin, thanks Barry and Kate, thanks Beth and Stef, thanks Cheryl and Nick, thanks Claire and John, thanks Garry and Lynn, thanks Jane and Rolf, thanks John and Tracey and thanks Jonathan and Odd.
