A Friday afternoon in Edinburgh's Old Town — and a first for me too.
Rebecca and Cameron married at 2pm on Friday the 19th of July 2024, in a wood-panelled room at Riddles Court, tucked just off the Royal Mile. It was my first ceremony in Edinburgh — every other wedding on this site has been Glasgow, Ayrshire, the West Highlands or the islands, so this was new territory for me. Cameron stands 6'6" and spends his working life as a Metropolitan Police inspector; Rebecca leads product development for a giftware company. Between them they'd travelled a fair distance to get to that room — geographically and otherwise — and it showed in every laugh from the guests.
Their story
It started on a work night out on the 8th of November 2017, at the Falcon Pub in Clapham North. Rebecca clocked Cameron early on but wrote him off — surely too old for the friend she assumed he was there for. His mates had other ideas and got him up to the bar to buy her a drink, and Rebecca, never one to leave things to chance, ran him through a quick set of pre-screening questions before she'd even consider it — single, for a start, being non-negotiable. He passed. Their first proper date was at an Indian restaurant, and from there it moved quickly through the normal chaos of a new relationship: a festival at Wilderness in August 2018, a trip to Ibiza with friends the following month that ended, memorably, with Cameron locked out of accommodation with his mates after a night out gone on rather longer than planned. By October 2018 Rebecca had met Lochlan, Cameron's young son, and the two of them built a proper bond of their own — a houseboat trip with a large, good-natured dog called Moose the Mountain Dog among the highlights. Somewhere in there they each turned up on British television without the other's involvement: Cameron on a BBC series following Metropolitan Police officers at work, Rebecca on a Channel 4 show about furniture restoration and upholstery, her long-running hobby. Then came 2020, and lockdown together in Folkestone — the kind of stretch that breaks some couples and quietly confirms things for others. Rebecca and Cameron say they didn't just get through it; they thrived. They went on to settle in Kent, joined a rowing club together, and now share their home with a dog called Toto.
The proposal
Cameron proposed in Krakow, in the November before the wedding — dinner first, then a walk near Krakow Castle where he got down on one knee. He didn't go for anything conventional with the line either: "will you be my bestie for life?" was roughly the gist of it, which tells you most of what you need to know about the tone of this relationship. Rebecca said yes.
The ceremony
We kept the Scottish elements front and centre even though the room and the guests were mostly unfamiliar with them — a quaich, the two-handled loving cup, poured by Rebecca's dad and Cameron's uncle and passed between the couple in front of everyone. The secrets they'd shared with me in the run-up got their laughs in exactly the right places — the kind of detail that only lands because it's true, and that I could never have written for a couple I didn't actually know. By the time we reached the declarations and the rings, the room — panelled walls, tall windows, guests packed in for a Friday afternoon in the Old Town — felt entirely theirs.
Planning a wedding at Riddles Court?
This was my first ceremony at Riddles Court, and my first wedding in Edinburgh full stop — so I won't pretend to the same depth of venue knowledge here that I've built up over years in Glasgow and the west of Scotland. What I can tell you is that a historic, wood-panelled room just off the Royal Mile makes a genuinely lovely backdrop for a humanist ceremony, Scottish traditions like the quaich translate beautifully whether or not your guests have ever seen one before, and I'm very happy to travel through to Edinburgh for the right couple — it's arranged individually rather than being part of my usual patch, so just get in touch and we'll sort the details. Couples marrying away from home, or bringing family down from England, will find the paperwork more straightforward than expected.