Certainly the most opulent wedding I’ve ever been to.

We headed up to London on a Saturday – something of a rarity for us. It always seems like a good idea until you get to the station. This weekend’s problem was all the trains stopping when they were still five miles outside of the city, tipping us out onto the tube. Not unexpected, but tiresome nonetheless.

We still got to the hotel in time to get changed, eat lunch and break the toilet (in fairness it was already on its last legs) and tube it down to the RSA. That’s the Royal Society of Arts. Very snazz: painted walls, stylish decor and busts (stone variety) on every corner. I went there years ago for a party, but that was confined to the vaults and we didn’t get to see the best bits then. Today we did. They got married in the Great Room, a theatre wrapped in the skillful daubs of John Barry, and his Progress of Human Knowledge and Culture.

Everything was perfect. The string quartet, the staff, the food, the company. Ems was dressed in the most fantastic shoes and dress; Luke in a suit and basketball pumps. A bit like Doctor Who. Perhaps most impressive, though, was the speeches, given in both English and French without a flaw, and spoken like true natives.

The champagne flowed on through the night as we moved back down into the vaults. There we cracked open the huge stack of cheese that was their substitute for an English wedding cake, and the traditional mountain of sugar-spun balls that batted for France, until we left just gone 22h.

What a shock it was to leave such refined surroundings and return to the faulty wiring in our hotel, with its malfunctioning heater, plastic cups and noisy, noisy corridors.

Accommodation aside, it was a fantastic night, and great to see two good friends so well suited and so happy together.