The pilot refuses to get going until everyone is seated and quiet. When we take off there are raucous cheers. I am on a midday budget-airline flight to Ibiza. Louder cheers welcome the drinks trolleys which are noisily ransacked. Along from my seat a gentleman is reading The Spectator. It transpires we are heading for the same occasion.
The ceremony takes place on a raked clifftop amphitheatre on the beautiful and quiet north side of the island. Boiling sun, cliffs and glittering sea boast the backdrop. Assembled friends and family swelter in the full lamp glare of the sun. I keep my jacket on. Though this may sound like sunstroke, the ceremony is conducted by Benedict Cumberbatch. As he explains beforehand, he is a longstanding friend of the grooms and they have asked him to act as celebrant. Though he remarks that this may spell the descent of his acting career into doing children’s parties and bar mitzvahs, what follows is serious, poignant and beautiful. The couple have gone through a civil partnership in London before heading here for the public ceremony. The grooms’ brothers escort them in. There is music, a speech and two readings, including one from Walt Whitman by the deeply beautiful and pregnant Louisa Clein. Then Cumberbatch leads the couple in the vows and exchange of rings. At the post-cocktails dinner both families speak, as do both grooms and best men. There is a message from the Chancellor and not a dry eye as the mother of one groom, and then the father of the other, welcome a new son into their respective families.
I respect some opponents of gay marriage. But it has always seemed to me that once you accept that homosexuality exists, there is no decent non-religious reason not to permit equal civil rights, including civil marriage.
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