Elton John marries his long-term partner David Furnish

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/dec/21/elton-john-marries-david-furnish

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Sir Elton John and David Furnish have officially married – nine years to the day after they tied the knot in a civil partnership ceremony.

The happy couple and their sons, Elijah and Zachary, all wore dark blue suits and – as proved by an overnight Instagram photograph of their footwear lined up in front of the fire – very well-polished black shoes. The sons carried the wedding rings, and in Elijah’s case a toy white rabbit, as their fathers converted their civil partnership into a wedding at their Windsor estate.

Although friends, including the singer Ed Sheeran and the actors David Walliams and Liz Hurley, attended in person, millions more followed the day as social media guests. Elton John set up an Instagram account specially for the wedding and posted the red rose-festooned invitation with their entwined initials, and the text “Sir Elton and David Furnish request the pleasure of your company to celebrate their wedding”.

He followed that with an early-morning snap of a frosty garden captioned “nice day for a wedding”, and promised regular updates – and indeed they came: “The tables look stunning! We had red roses at our Civil Partnership 9 years ago and they brought us so much luck.” The photograph of the couple’s entwined hands with Elijah and rabbit was allegedly taken with Furnish’s phone by four-year-old Zachary.

Further offerings showed the guests taking their seats in a room hung with contemporary art, and the registrar rather alarmingly appearing to be inside one of Damien Hirst’s glass tanks – in fact she was merely standing in front of one holding a dove with outstretched wings, a piece called The Incomplete Truth.

David and Victoria Beckham’s son Brooklyn obligingly tweeted the menu, which included a beef pie and warm chocolate pudding.

It was more low-key than their civil partnership ceremony in 2005 at Windsor’s historic Guildhall, one of the first held after the law changed, which brought the town centre to a standstill. On that occasion hundreds of starry guests including Sarah Ferguson, Cilla Black, Ozzy Osbourne, Lulu and Ringo Starr were caught in a celebrity traffic jam trying to get through the narrow roads to the reception at the couple’s home in Old Windsor.