Last week, we took a look at how upcoming changes to the lockdown rules would allow weddings to take place – albeit with some fairly chunky strings attached. And now the changes have come into force, let’s look at how you can make the best from the new limitations!

Keep numbers Down

The new rules state that you can only invite thirty people, including all of your catering people. But this might be a feature rather than a bug.

According to a famous anthropologist named Robin Dunbar, we can each only really be friends with 150 people, of which only around five individuals are really close friends. That means five friends each for you and your other half. Add plus-ones, and you’ve got twenty. Invite your parents and close relatives, and you’ll pretty much be at that magic thirty.

Go for strings

If you’re inviting fewer people (as you should be), then you’ll be able to make your budget go further. And this means you might be able to bring in some fancier entertainment.

A string quartet might have seemed unthinkably fancy a few months ago; now it’ll give your wedding a touch of low-key class. Bowing an instrument doesn’t require spraying spittle in the air in the same way as woodwind, brass, and singing does. What’s more, it’ll make things a bit more intimate and (dare we say it?) special.
Naturally, your other entertainment can be social-distancing compliant. We recommend photo-booths – as they don’t require any kind of intimate contact at all, but then we’re slightly biased.

Go for fancy food

If you’re shopping for a hundred and fifty people, and you were going to spend forty quid a plate, then you can just as easily spend two-hundred quid a plate on thirty people. This is going to put you fairly comfortably in Michelin star territory – provided that you can track down a sufficiently swanky caterer in the available time. Obviously, a set menu is better than a buffet in the present climate!

Pick a Warm Day

An outdoor wedding is one where the risk of transmission is far less than it is indoors. You should therefore look at getting it done somewhere in the open air, if you don’t have any particular religious commitments. Some couples might even go so far as to do it in the garden!

Less Drinking

If ever there’s an excuse to overindulge with alcohol, it’s a wedding. But alcohol and social distancing don’t really go very well together. After a few too many, many of us might be inclined to throw our lockdown nerves out of the window and begin hugging one another as though there isn’t a rampaging virus still at large.
There’s a simple way to get around this, and that’s to serve less alcohol.