In his address, the bishop said that marriage is not a merely private event, and that this is one of its great benefits. It is shared between family, friends and neighbours. It reaffirms that there is such a thing as society.

This is particularly evident in a country wedding. We walked from the church to our house. The superb caterer was a farmer’s wife from the next-door parish, and most of her food was local. The beer (though not — perhaps just as well — the wine) was also from Sussex. We knew the churchwardens, the cake-maker in the village, and our dear friends from the hunt who procured and arranged the spectacular flowers (lots of artichokes). The station bistro let us park our cars in its spaces; the police specially delivered parking cones; the new village hall, which my wife Caroline had done so much to get built, was the site of the dinner and dance. The choir and soloist were virtually foreign, crossing the border from Wittersham, 15 miles away in Kent, but even in this case we knew the principals. Neighbours drove the bride’s family, stewarded the parking, filmed the scene, engraved the order of service, inscribed the invitations, played the organ, cleaned the house, tidied the garden, mended the drive and painted the windows at the last minute, worked open the west door of the church when it was stuck, and cleared up afterwards.

Only the ceilidh band, the marquee and the handsome portable lavatories came from more than 25 miles away. People were consistently kind, I think because they felt part of it. Leaving out family, I calculate that the labour of at least 78 people was directly involved, for 170 guests. A third of the guests lived within ten miles. The striking thing, in retrospect, is that we did not make a deliberate effort to source things locally: it just happened.

Having extolled localism, however, I should like immediately to contradict myself: one of the nicest things was that our son married a woman from 5,000 miles away. Hannah is from the state of Montana (147,040 square miles: 1 million people). So it was a shock for her family to come to Britain (80,083 square miles: 63 million people), and sad to leave their daughter in this crowded island.

Whenever Hannah’s family made speeches, they wept. Although this expressed grief at losing Hannah, it was also part of their joy and generosity about the marriage — happy-sad, not miserable. We were very touched, and slightly ashamed of the British way of pretending that everything is a joke. Without wishing to disparage the women of Britain, I feel more excited to have a foreign daughter-in-law than a home-grown one. Marriage as social cement (see previous item) is balanced by marriage as adventure and romance.

Spectator Diary