Wedding & Funeral Celebrant | Writer
About Me
I'm a Wedding and Funeral Celebrant, helping families and couples to create meaningful life ceremonies in Surrey, Sussex and Hampshire since 2017. I came to celebrancy with many years' experience as a professional actor and writer so am compassionate and easy-going when meeting families and couples. Whether at a funeral, memorial or wedding, I'm able to speak with calm confidence, adopting the appropriate tone to genuinely engage people in the celebration of a couple's love or the commemoration of a person's life.
With a passion for stories and story-telling, I also write up the memories and biographies of local people, giving extensive interviews with them or their families to generate the text and collaborating with a local designer to create legacy books, also offering professionally narrated audio recordings of life stories.
My Story
I grew up in Manchester then moved to Scotland to study English and Philosophy at Edinburgh University, graduating in 1998. For ten years I lived in Glasgow, training as an actor in 2003 and working mostly in theatre, radio drama and narration for the BBC and narrating commercial audiobooks. I have also written for professional stage production and BBC radio. In 2010 I was lured south by unexpected romance and now live with my wife, daughter and lurcher puppy in Haslemere, on the borders of Surrey, West Sussex and East Hampshire.
Always drawn to the stories of people’s lives, I wanted to help others share precious memories and stories of their loved one at a time when it matters most, so I retrained in 2017 as an independent funeral celebrant.
After five years of working closely with families and funeral directors in Surrey, Sussex and Hampshire, I was asked by Cate, the daughter of a man whose funeral I’d led, to be her wedding celebrant. I confessed to Cate and her fiancé Paul that I’d never done this before. They didn’t mind. . . but I did! So I studied the wonderful, comprehensive training for celebrants offered by life transition organisation, Agnostic Scotland. Cate and Paul made their choices of ritual and vows, scripts were written and re-written and the result was a joyous occasion. This was the start of my work as a wedding celebrant. It is always a privilege and a pleasure to be trusted with the story of a couple's love and their hopes for their future life together.
Just as every wedding ceremony should begin with the couple's choice of tone and content, so every funeral ceremony should be led by the family's needs and wishes. I always encourage families and couples to take their own view and approach to what is included on the day. But I offer any advice required and all the necessary practical support to create - and make space for - genuinely personal tributes to life and love.
Last year, I was asked if I’d ever written a longer-form tribute to a person’s life. The question came from the 94 year-old widower of a local teacher whose funeral ceremony I’d led in 2024. Again, I had to confess to being a novice. But it was perfect timing because I’d been wanting to harness my skills as a writer and celebrant to create longer-form tributes, memoirs and life stories for local people in Surrey, Sussex and Hampshire. After 12 hours of interviews and the shaping of Alan’s story into prose, the fascinating events of his life have been committed to the pages of a wonderful legacy book, produced by designer Michèle Frost. It has been a privilege to set down the story of his life for the benefit of his daughters and their families.
I continue to work professionally as a voiceover artist and narrator of audiobooks from my home studio, where I can also help you make a record of a loved one's life-story in an audio tribute set to photos.