Aisle be seeing you......

This week Kate Takes 5's Listography is on the subject of weddings. Apparently there's some big do going up London today but never mind that, I'm here to talk about a different wedding. Mine.

Kate asks what five things would you would change about your wedding?  Simple....

1.  Nothing

2. Nothing

3. Nothing

4. Nothing

and finally,

5. Nothing

How, I can hear you all ask, did we manage to achieve the perfect wedding?  Easy peasy. We invited no-one except my parents. There was no falling out over bridesmaids, no arguments over flowers and colour schemes, no battles with the Mother of the Bride for control. I guess the only downside was that there were no presents either.

It wasn't always going to be like that.  My father is a Freeman of the City of London which confers on me, along with the right to drive my sheep across London Bridge and the right to be hung with a silken rope should the situation ever arise, the right to get married in St Paul's Cathedral. As an impressionable young gel it was a standing joke among my friends that I was going to have this big f**k off wedding at St Paul's with a rent-a-crowd of several hundred, Jeremiah Clarke's Trumpet Voluntary (cruelly nicked from me by some Princess type  before I had the chance to use it) and a banquet in the Guildhall.  It was planned down to the last teaspoon for years.

Fast forward several years and I met The Husband. He's already had his own big f**k off wedding. He used to do fashion shows for Zandra Rhodes and so she had 'designed' his wedding. West London was still recovering! Sadly, it wasn't a happy event and the decree nisi was already being discussed by that same evening.  Any mention of weddings bought him out in hives.  Any mention of a wedding in St Paul's bought on a bout of hyperventilating (figuratively speaking of course).

When the time finally came for us to tie the knot, his family were in the middle of one of their many feuds. I told him if they couldn't all grow up and get on with each other they weren't coming. That planted the seed. What if nobody came?  The more we thought about it, the more it made sense. In the end, we told no-one what we were planning with the exception of my parents who were to be witnesses. They'd already done big wedding for my brother and sister so I think my father was quietly relieved not be have to slit another artery to pay for it all.

We got married in November, on a beautiful sunny winter's day.  I wore a fabulous appliqued copper velvet longline trouser suit and carried flowers that my mother's friend, a Chelsea exhibitor, had made for me. My dad drove us to the Register Office. The Registrar was a little surprised to see such a small wedding party but she got into the swing of things, projecting her voice during the vows as if she was at St Paul's which provoked an unforgiveable fit of the giggles in the bride and groom. We even had music.

Then we headed off to a Country Club and had magnificent lunch and copious amounts of champagne. It couldn't have been more perfect. I shared it with the most important people in my life and that was all that mattered.

The following , week our family and friends received beautiful embossed cards telling them we had got married. Some were shocked, some a bit peeved, most were glad not to have had yet another wedding list from John Lewis to wade through.

I guess there are maybe two things I might change. My brother's sodding camera would have worked - I have not one wedding photo - and I might have got the date right on the beautifully embossed cards. It has led to confusion to this very day.

St Paul's? Pah! Who needs it?