If you google ‘Wedding celebrants, Surrey’, the fourth name to come up is ‘Lynda Bassette: With You for All Life’s Special Moments’. Farnham-based but willing to travel across the UK and abroad, Lynda also does funerals and baby naming ceremonies, so ‘the full wrap-around care’, as she calls it. But weddings are her favourite. Though divorced herself, she’s always been a true romantic at heart. ‘I’m in love with love!’ she tells her couples when they first get in touch.
She’s struggling to get her name more prominent on Google. It’s proving hard in a county where every other woman wanting a life-change seems to be completing the online celebrancy course and setting up as a sole practitioner. It’s a tougher market than Lynda expected when she gave up her job and literally ‘chose joy’ in her own life. When she went into HR 30 years ago, she hoped it would mean helping people but what it mainly involved was managing them out. That gave her grief. Celebrancy is a way of counteracting all that negativity. Now, she prides herself in making other people happy, even (in a weird way) if it’s a funeral. She reminds everyone that the dead person’s life-energy hasn’t vanished, but is all around us, in the energy of the air, of nature, of the earth itself.
One tricky thing, in this competitive market, is that the other Surrey celebrants – as Lynda knows from their Instagram accounts and from occasionally meeting them at PR events – are much more photogenic than her. They have straighter, whiter teeth, and somehow, they manage not to start perspiring from their armpits and cleavage after ten minutes in a sweltering marquee, as she always does in her size 16 navy Monsoon dress that never eclipses the bride’s cream or white.
Her website brings along a trickle of business, but not enough – even though her homepage photo is to die for. It depicts her standing between an ecstatic mixed-race couple, Roston and Kylie – he in tuxedo, she in strapless silk – at the climactic moment in a 2024 wedding at Great Fosters Hotel: the moment when Lynda said, ‘Nearly time for a kiss in married bliss, my little lovebirds!’, and the guests erupted into applause. That photo sums up the image she wants to project to the world: diversity, inclusivity, effortless elegance.
It’s addictive, that moment of release towards the end of one of her ceremonies. It makes all the hours of preparation worthwhile. And Lynda really puts in those hours. Thirty hours of in-person (or on Zoom) with the couple are written into the contract. She needs that long to get the full love story out of them and the full background colour on the relatives. Then she burns the midnight oil in the study of her Farnham new-build, shaping the story into a personalised script. Her ‘USP’ as she calls it, is ‘no cookie-cutter ceremonies: each one is individual, designed especially for you’. No more of that yawnsville ancient text from the Bible or the Book of Common Prayer, or whatever it was, droning on about God, and doing things reverently and soberly and obeying. The world has moved on.
The couples normally want to tweak the script right up to the last minute. She prints it off and puts the pages into her A4 ringbound faux-leather celebrant’s book.
It’s annoying that British law still insists that couples have to have an official civic ceremony first. So they’re really already married – which takes a bit of the drama away from what Lynda does. But the law may soon change. The government’s looking into it but knowing the way things move in this country, it might take a while. Registrars will fight tooth and nail to save their jobs.
When she’s feeling anxious about the future, she flicks back through her album of the 14 weddings she’s done so far (plus three baby naming ceremonies and four funerals). She gazes at the wedding photos (wincing at how large she herself looks in all of them). There was Kai and Janine at Crondon Park, Steven and Brett at Cain Manor, Cameron and Ella at the Guildford Manor Hotel… all gorgeous. And, truly unforgettable, there was one wedding where she did get to be a celebrant abroad, her life’s dream. That was Amir and Holly from St George’s Hill, Weybridge. Holly’s parents must be loaded as they booked a five-star venue in the Algarve for 150 guests.
The only downside of that one was that, when the family hammered out the contract, they flatly refused to include Lynda in any part of the reception – she wasn’t even invited to the cocktails and canapés before the sit-down meal. After all the excitement, all the magic, she was put into a pre-booked cab and taken back to a two-star hotel in town.
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