^ on the subject of trying to balance my knowledge with what my characters would reasonably know, I did some googling about VE elopement/annulment/divorce stuff when NCE first got hitched and then had to ponder how much of that Ben would ever have been exposed to as someone with no professed desire to marry.

A thing I learned was Gretna Green was ~the place to go~ because it was the closest Scottish city for most Englanders and the marriage laws in Scotland were more lax. So it makes very little sense for Hogsmeade-based characters, who are in Scotland, to elope to Gretna Green.

NCE did it anyway because Ben doesn't know shit & Melody had probably gotten the idea from some romantic book and just thought it was the thing people did.