Detail from my dress, the day after the wedding.

Twelve hours before, this dress and me were standing shivering in the dark by the back door. Everything had gone well, the day was fantastic, one of the Best Men offered to give us a lift home just after midnight, and then…

Then, first, we got pulled over by the police. And not even a car, but a van, with four police officers who thought the Best Man was driving a bit oddly. The teetotal Best Man, who had “hesitated a bit at the junction back there”, on a road empty other than us and the police van. But once you’re stopped, you’re stopped, so they took him off to the van for questioning, and they left us to roll our eyes and laugh and wait.

So we waited, and we waited, because it takes a long time to run a check on a numberplate on a Saturday night, and then the police said “oh, never mind, it’ll be fine, just go home”, so all was well and we went home.

And then, second, the lock on the back door jammed.

It isn’t our back door. It’s a communal door out from the corridor of the main house to the back garden where our little house is, and it had been playing up for a while, and that night it had finally decided to surrender to entropy. Jammed, totally. So there we were, staring a door, with the vague hope that it might unlock from the other side with a key if we could get round there, and the knowledge that the other side was a ten-minute walk down a muddy, potholed, unsurfaced and pitch-black road, in the rain, and then a climb over a twelve-foot solid plank gate.

My husband did the walk and the climb, over the gate in his kilt and Prince Charlie jacket that now needs a bit of a dry-clean and some general reassurance about life, and I waited in the corridor. Barefoot, because my shoes had been discarded as broken and useless several hours before. Rain-soaked. Cold. But happy.