Memorandum on Meals Marking a Partnership

TO ALL HOUSES MEM/1991/02

MEALS MARKING A PARTNERSHIP

1. Two people who have married, or who have made a life together in some

other arrangement, may ask their house for a meal. The house lays the

long room and cooks. Somebody reads something the two have chosen.

2. That is the whole form. There is no other part of it and no house is

to compose one.

3. The Institute does not officiate. It does not witness, register,

solemnise, or bless, and it supplies no form of words. Where there is

a legal marriage it takes place wherever the law of the place says it

does, and we have nothing to do with it and send nobody.

4. Nothing is entered. Not in the Record, not in the accounts of either

person, not in the house minute. The meal appears in the house diary

as a meal, which is what it is.

5. A steward present is present as a person at a meal and is not to be

asked to speak in any capacity.

6. The meal is available to any two people who ask. No house may decline

one on any ground except that the room is already taken, and a house

that declines one is to say plainly which evening is free instead.

7. Where a partnership ends, nothing happens, because nothing was

entered. No house is to mark that either.