Note: What follows is probably my longest blog entry to date. If you dare tackle its minutiae, may I suggest settling down with brew in hand first.

It’s not often I get dressed up smart. The last time was Chris of the Brennan’s wedding to Joanne. The time before that, Helen’s wedding to Mike. The time before that, Will’s wedding to Becs. So, the fact that I spent yesterday in a jacket and black trousers, and my best white shirt, can have meant only one thing: the marriage of Daniel Charles Norris and Sally Louise Rawlinson. Dan to my sister.

It was a fantastic day, of course, and it went by so quick, so I needn’t have brought along the packs of cards I thought we might have needed to hand to pass the afternoon. The whole thing, though, started on Wednesday night.

Emilie Ems had been in from Good Housekeeping with five mystery perfumes. She got us each to sniff them and rate them for a feature she was writing, and had been topping up the spray smells next to me for about an hour. So, I probably smelt very girlie by the time I got onto the train at Charing Cross with Paul, and headed south and east into northern Kent. Mum and Andrew met us at Gravesend, the end of the line, and drove us to our nasty chavvy hotel.

Ugh. It really was disgusting (and I’m allowed to say that, because the mother of the bride agreed). Its web site says it has four crowns from the English Tourist board, which doesn’t actually award crowns: it gives either stars or diamonds depending on the kind of accommodation being rated, so that really should have given us a clue. The site made it look beautiful, though, and as the place we had really wanted was full up, we booked in.

The rooms were large, but very poorly decorated. There was one bath towel between two. The coffee cups had grease in them - actual grease - that you could run your finger through and see where your finger had been. And they were having an over thirties disco, which pretty much shook the whole building from one end to the other.

‘Don’t worry,’ said the guy behind the counter. ‘You won’t hear that at your end of the coridoor.’

Except, of course, we did. It made my eyeballs vibrate.

‘I’m moving to the bridal suite tomorrow,’ Sal said. ‘Could I put my stuff in there tomorrow morning before we go off for the wedding?’

‘Hmmm… The Bridal Suite,’ said the girl behind the counter. ‘Do you know what number room that might be?’

I suspected, when she said that, that the bridal suite was probably therefore a room in which they had pushed together the two twin beds and painted the walls pink. It wasn’t too far off that, apparently.

Anyhow, we decamped to Rochester for dinner and had a very fun time eating pizzas and fish and telling the waiter that Sal was getting married the next day. Simple things. I sat next to Sue who somehow managed to eat all of her dinner, plus some of mum’s, plus some of Sal’s, so voracious is her appetite, and yet her bridesmaids dress is a size six and still had to be taken in because it was too big.

I’d not been to Rochester in years, but it was pretty much as I remembered it, and probably worth a repeat trip before too long. There was an enormous second hand bookshop there.

We had a fairly early night, in bed by half eleven, which gave us almost a full hour and a half to enjoy laying in bed listening to the entertaining fttp-fttp-fttp of the disco, and the neighbours upstairs constructing what sounded like a Revolution-era guillotine on a 1:1 scale.

Yesterday, then, the day of the wedding itself, we were up by nine eating breakfast (not bad for a day off work) and passed the morning drinking champagne in Sal’s room as she had her hair done and was poured into her sparkly white dress with long wide train. I’ve never seen her wear anything so big, or look so nice. Sue and Siobhan, her bridesmaids, wore swooshy blood red gowns, and helped with the more fiddly bits, like a frilly blue garter, which got around two of the old-blue-borrowed-blue requirements in one hit. They laced up the back of the dress with mum, then helped her down the hotel’s dusty back stairs to the limo that was to take them to the barn where she was to be married.

We followed on in a car behind; everyone else went on one of two coaches. The other coach plodded on behind, empty and looking rather forlorn.

There were 86 people sitting in the barn by the time we were ready to go, and for some strange reason I felt far more nervous about the fact I had to do a reading in front of them than I ever have been doing TV or radio. The nerves all slipped away, though, as Sal came down from the balcony and walked slowly up the aisle to where Dan was standing at the front. It seemed like no time at all that the ceremony was almost half way through, and Dan’s sister had done her reading - a Pam Ayres poem - and they were into the vows. All very standard love and comfort fayre, after which I was called up to say my piece.

It’s always difficult to judge how you do when you’re doing it yourself. Sometimes you can think you have read something very well, but got three or four words wrong. Sometimes it can feel like it was dreadful, when it actually came across OK. I’m aiming for the middle ground, then, when I say I think it was alright, although I could perhaps have spent a little less time looking at my paper and a little more looking at the rows of people out front.

Fortunately whoever had written my words (the byline was Author Unknown) had done a good job of it, and the lines flowed smoothly from beginning to end.

Sooner or later, we begin to understand that love is more than verses on valentines and romance in the movies. We begin to know that love is here and now, real and true, the most important thing in our lives. For love is the creator of our favourite memories and the foundation of our fondest dreams. Love is a promise that is always kept, a fortune that can never be spent, a seed that can flourish in even the most unlikely of places. And this radiance that never fades, this mysterious and magical joy, is the greatest treasure of all

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