I'm not going to say where, as I don't want it becoming a shrine to the amount that I drank on the occasion ~ though suffice it to say there are few settings so suited to pretending you're Hugh Grant just for one day, working the throng in a Panama hat.
Working ~ or gliding ~ left to right and top to bottom, staff prepare the courtyard for canapés, champagne and oysters in the aftermath, whilst over at the parterre celebrants gather whilst the Grande Dames retreat to the shade where they and I discuss how Paris was never the same after the death of Marcel Proust.
Meanwhile the MC hammering the decks has flown in from Ankara for the occasion, where not far hence he did the same for Aston Villa following victory in the Europa League... they drank, he adds, until eight next morning. I ferry him from the hotel to the venue, which was likely the low point of his day.
The bride had farther to process than you'd expect from the average aisle, where temperatures would equally be unlikely to hover at thirty-five degrees. But on to the ceremony, brief enough for the assembled not to wilt faster than a bouquet. During this the couple recited in English how they met, and what they meant to each other. Neither are native speakers, English though having displaced French as language of love... as I suggested prior to being removed.
Thereafter it was on to the relative cool of the chateau, where for the moment I was lost in the world of Brideshead Revisited and its bright young things: languishing in the quad prior a louche progress toward the hall, with bow-ties discarded during an equally leisurely culinary procession.
Ed. Google tried to re-spell it 'Birdseed Revisited'... an altogether better treatment so far as any budgerigar reading this will be concerned.
