Almost 41 years later, Phillip, now a successful businessman, flew into Athens from Los Angeles to get married as parts of Greece once again burst into flames. Wildfires began on 18 July and spread quickly over the following weeks, adding a further complication to an already complicated wedding.

Since late last year, there has been an ongoing, and fraught, North American-Hellenic culture clash, as my LA sister-in-law Christina struggled with the communicative and organisational foibles of Maria*, one of Athens’s most elite wedding planners. Eventually, she had an epiphany: she would hire an LA wedding planner to “help” the Greek one.

Enter Alania: optimistic, fastidiously groomed and possessed of remorseless focus. “Leave it to me,” she beamed over Zoom. “I’ll sort it out in no time.” One week later, she reappeared. Bereft. “I don’t know what to do,” she said forlornly. “She just won’t listen.”

I told Christina that Greece is not LA; that the planning would inevitably be chaotic, but that this is normal and everything would be fine on the night. And it was. What I did not realise was how it would make me think, not only of family but of nation.

When you are a Best Man, you have various vague, small responsibilities and a single, large, clearly defined one: the speech. Over time, I have given several Best Man speeches, and, as a writer, which is to say a minor egoist, addressing an audience who has no choice but to listen is my idea of an enjoyable evening.

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But this one was different. This was the hardest speech I ever had to write. My brother and I have not had a traditional family background (distant, often absent parents and so on), but through it all there has always been the two of us. And even when we are apart, living on different continents, we are together. How, then, do you give a speech about your baby brother — the person you are closer to than anyone else in the world?

The answer emerges from the understanding that weddings are about many things. They are about love and partnership and friendship and family, but they are also, I think, about something else equally powerful: the passing of time.

Greece is a country that is inescapably tied to the concept of time because it is inescapably tied to history and myth, and therefore of course to memory. It is also perennially associated with fire. Homer speaks of wildfires in The Iliad: “And as when consuming fire falls upon thick woodlands and the witching wind beareth it everywhither and the thickets fall utterly as they are assailed by the onrush at the fire.” Thucydides is even clearer, writing of “times past in the mountains when dry branches have been rubbed against each other a forest has caught fire spontaneously therefrom and produced a conflagration”.

In modern times, fires have become an accepted part of life here. Even before the Second World War, farmers would harvest wood to start tactical fires each spring to reduce the risk of larger fires in the summer. Since 1961, the fires have increased. A weak state is one factor, but so too is climate change. 2007 saw Greece experience more wildfire in one summer than any European country over the previous decade. Since then, it has experienced several, with one in 2018 claiming the lives of 103 people, which I remember covered parts of Athens, where I was living at the time, in pungent smoke.

As I stood up to make my Best Man speech, I saw our dad telling me and Phil about the brilliance of Greece — often deploying facts of questionable veracity (Athens being a world fashion centre was a prized example of the genre). I saw our mum preparing huge vats of Persian rice in our kitchen in London. I saw our stepfather, Rene, lifting Phil up onto his shoulders as we walked through Highgate Wood. For some reason, the memories did not have sound. But they didn’t need it. Everything was totally clear.

Then I told some stories. Of how Phil turned our garage in Swiss Cottage into a smoking den for all the teenage Jews within a two-mile radius, and of how every so often I’d had to go down and bellow at them to shut the fuck up. And then there was the five-figure sum Phil once spent on a mattress (after being assured that as part of the deal, people would be dispatched every six months to “service” it). Amusing and sometimes sad memories; wins and losses; Britain and Greece. Taken together, they form coherent life stories.

The fires were a dim light on various horizons as I went from a conference on Crete to the wedding in Athens. I thought about them midway through the reception when the sky erupted into plumes of variegated colour, and I saw Alania streak across the venue like a designer-clad Springbok. “They’ve started the fireworks early!” she roared, “get everyone over to look!” It was an impressive sight no doubt. After about a minute, though, word came through. “Hmmm, it turns out they’re someone else’s fireworks,” she said thoughtfully. “You can tell everyone to go back to their seats.”

Thirty minutes later, ours were launched. Thankfully, they were noticeably better. And as I stood and watched, I reflected on all the things that could have been done with the $20,000 that had just burst into light.

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In March 2021, our father passed away and, later that year, wildfires destroyed the olive trees in our ancestral home in the Mani in the Southern Peloponnese. Then, I reflected on memories of loss, of the almost literal burning away of our family roots. Two years later, another seminal family event took place as fire once again engulfed Greece. This time, though, it was not loss and death they heralded, but the birth of new (wedded) lives and their celebration. What has burned must necessarily regrow. New and often stronger.

And so it will be with Greece. Earlier this month, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announced that anyone who had their trip cut short on Rhodes due to the fires would a get a week’s holiday next year at the government’s expense. New memories will be made. There will be at least some relief to the trauma, and the political questions that will inevitably follow.

As for the wedding, it was, in the end, a triumph: for our family and friends, for Phil and Christina, and, of course, for both wedding planners.

*Name has been changed.

It used to be the case that couples were not allowed to marry during the hours of darkness. This was to ensure that members of the local community could see who was marrying who, and could publicly acknowledge the new status that the couple had within the community. A wedding was a civic and public event, held in the parish church right in the heart of the community. Notice of a forthcoming wedding was published by banns in the church on three Sundays so that everyone knew. There wasn’t an invitation list for the ceremony because everyone was invited. It was in the church, after all.

The secular world has no such equivalent to this open space. Community has morphed into a byword for your WhatsApp group, for those gathered around a common interest or identity — the Colombian Community, the Lesbian Community, the Star Wars Community — rather than a shared and inclusive local space where all are welcome.

This week, the Law Commission proposed a set of reforms to Marriage Law that would enable couples to marry where they like — not just in licensed venues such as churches, registry offices or licensed premises. Soon you will be able to marry on the beach or in your garden, at a theme park or in McDonald’s — provided the presiding official thinks that the venue is safe and dignified. And yes, don’t be so snobby, of course there will be people who think McDonald’s is sufficiently dignified. The pool of people who can conduct a wedding is also being expanded. The Elvis impersonator wedding is not that far away, so long as it accords with your own deeply held beliefs.

All this is just another step along the road to the privatisation of marriage. Marriage used to be a community event; it is now a private ceremony. The Law Commission has also recommended abolishing the requirement for “open doors” at a marriage ceremony. “In fact, only some religious weddings and civil weddings are required to be open to the public, and that rule was a legacy from 17th century restrictions on Protestant dissenters meeting for worship,” says the report. As a legal requirement, that may be strictly speaking true, but the idea that a wedding was a public event goes back much further than that. But where there were once banns, now you will be able to fill in a form online. And the vows themselves can be made up to reflect whatever it is you think you are doing.

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One advantage to these new proposals is that they will break the monopoly that the register office has had on secular weddings. Hitherto the register office heavily policed their ceremonies, refusing to allow the introduction of anything even faintly religious. I was once asked by a secular friend to say a few words at his register office ceremony. Having learnt what I do for a living, the panicked registrar demanded a copy of my address so that he could put a red line through anything that may allude to the divine. I explained that I extemporise. This too was refused.

New proposals also include the possibility that the ceremony can be conducted by an interfaith minister, allowing those of different faiths to incorporate elements of their own traditions into the same ceremony. As someone in a mixed marriage myself, I appreciate the inclusive intention behind this proposal, but I do worry that it creates a pick-and-mix approach to religion where no one faith is allowed to speak for itself and in its own way. All this creates a kind of spiritualised Esperanto, with different religious traditions existing to add a little bit of local flavour to an otherwise homogenised spiritual gloop.

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But we still have a problem with modern wedding ceremonies, even in church. The best of weddings are so joyous and life-giving in character that the following is going to seem churlish; but still, the reason most vicars prefer funerals is that they speak to the end of the self, while weddings are a display of self-promotion — captured and relayed by the ever-present videographer. All this is especially problematic given that the essence of love is that it’s not all about you, which is why the “all about me” wedding feels like a threat to marriage itself. But such considerations are now pushed aside: the church is a venue to be hired, one more thing for the ghastly “wedding planners” to book alongside the florist and the videographer.

Having spent the last ten years in a church that had been substantially redesigned by Nazi bombers, and thus was no great looker, a move to a beautiful 18th-century church in the leafy suburbs of Kew has reacquainted me with the deep world weariness that attends the modern wedding-as-stage-set. The other week, mid-service, I was firmly encouraging the wedding photographer not to stand immediately in front of the bride and groom as they said their vows. He told me that as they had booked this venue, they could do exactly what they liked.

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The problem with all of this is not just that the vicar has lost control of his or her own church, but rather that the wedding ceremony becomes something so much smaller, suffocating under the centripetal gravity of the me, me, me. The liturgy of the traditional wedding is supposed to articulate the idea that when two people give themselves to each other in love the world becomes a more expansive space, not least expansive enough for the nurture of children — a job that requires more training in selflessness than anything else known to humankind. None of this is prefigured in the kind of vanity project that is often justified by — and demanded by — references to “my special day”.

There is nothing all that surprising about the Law Commission’s suggestions about marriage reform. They track the spirit of the age, which is, I suppose, their job. And they give couples more control and more choice over what they do — which is slightly ironic given that choice is one of the things that people give up a lot of when they get married. A simple wedding is one of the most beautiful things in the world. A wedding where everyone concerned, even the bride and groom, are turned into props in some overwrought and self-absorbed drama is one of the most nauseating.