Well done Meghan Markle for planning a speech at her upcoming royal wedding. More brides-to-be should follow her lead, says Sharon Griffiths.

Respect to Meghan Markle. When the actress marries Prince Harry later this year she apparently plans to give a speech. Excellent. We're all for brides speaking up for themselves instead of blushing prettily while men speak for them over their heads.

And as her audience will include her new grandparents-in-law, The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, I am in total awe of her confidence. I mean, would you? No, me neither.

I've been to a few weddings where the bride or the bride's mother have given speeches. I believe I spoke at my own wedding but as the reception was in the back room of a pub with a gaggle of rowdy journalists, drink may have been taken. It wasn't exactly a traditional do.

Odd, isn't it, that as women claim their equal place in the world, weddings seem to get ever more backward-looking and expensive and brides again reduced to helplessness, handed from one man to another.

So if a royal bride can do something to change this idea there's hope for us all. We might realise at last, that even a bride can be an independent grown-up too.