While the average cost of a wedding now stands at roughly pounds 10,000. The costs are disguised by the fact that more and more people seem to be sneaking off to marry. If there’s one phrase that characterises mating habits of the Nineties, it’s “we did it quietly in a register office, with just our families.”

This hasn’t, however, got rid of the biggest individual cost: the honeymoon. In 1995, young lovebirds were spending pounds 3,000 and upwards on this glorified holiday and the trend seems to be ever more lavish.
There are three contributing factors in this, I think, apart from the obvious ones of cheaper air fares and the presence of a luxury holiday complex in every two-bit banana republic with the sort of wage rates that bring smiles to the faces of American leisure executives. They are female emancipation, the permissive society and, in this country at least, the Royal family.The third might well have had its hey day The Royals used to have rather low-key holidays.

Back home, I discovered that it was in fact plastic and made in Birmingham. Forget “Now wash your hands please”, this is the genuine “A Present from Gangland”.Personally, I always buy something genuinely useful as a souvenir. After a pleasant trip to Sweden a few years ago, I decided on an elegant Swedish glass pepper-grinder. You can just see them back home ushering guests into the loo and explaining in reverential tones that Ronnie himself might have wiped his bum on an earlier sheet from the roll.

As Russell Ash’s Top Ten of Everything records, the favoured items for klepto-souvenirists to pinch from hotel rooms are towels, teaspoons, ashtrays, pictures, bathrobes, hairdriers, kettles, televisions, ornaments and glasses, in that order. At Ronnie Kray’s wake last year, souvenir-hunters were even spotted trying to nick toilet rolls. And the cheap models of the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty, and Taj Mahal biscuit tins and the famous Leaning Tower of Canary Bloody Wharf.That’s only the legally acquired souvenirs. Presents from Everywhere have been with us for a century and a half, and we still go on buying them. In 1852 Charles Dickens, in Bleak House, mentions “A mug with ‘A Present from Tunbridge Wells’ on it” and Rudyard Kipling, in 1890, refers to: “a china mug wi’ gold letters – ‘A Present from Leeds’ “. There were 31 sheets of the speech that Washington distributed to eager souvenir hunters in 1789.