We had planned the perfect wedding – and then one day in Sainsbury’s we made a big decision

Yes, I would have loved a big do and to have achy legs for days but all I really cared about was becoming Alice’s wife

‘We were one of the 260,000 couples that had to postpone their wedding due to the pandemic’ (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

This wasn’t the wedding I dreamt of as a child – although I’m not 100 per cent sure I really dreamt of a wedding at all. I certainly didn’t dream of being a bride. I wanted to be a pirate; but I think if I had dressed in breeches, a waistcoat and a captain’s hat a few weeks ago when we tied the knot, I might have returned home single.

We were one of the 260,000 couples that had to postpone their wedding due to the pandemic. I’m sure when you read that number you’ll be thinking the same thing as me: if you own a wedding venue you must be absolutely loaded.

In 2019, Alice proposed marriage and I thought it was one of her best ideas to date, putting a last minute trip to Disneyland Paris and Marmite with avocado on toast into second and third places respectively.

I was 33 and had been to my fair share of weddings. Some I’d loved; some I’d hated. I won’t be specific here as many of my friends are supportive enough to read my writing but we’d done enough market research to know the sort of wedding we wanted. We didn’t want to have to pretend to find God for six months to get “in” with the local vicar and we didn’t want a wedding that looked so posh it would put me on edge all day (I am very clumsy, I once upturned a whole table of drinks while trying to pet a Dachshund in a Soho cafe).

We wanted mates, great speeches, booze, to say “I do” in front of our nearest and dearest and then dancing, so much dancing that you’d physically ache for at least two days.

We (Alice) had organised the perfect day. Sadly not everyone thought so; one friend whose hobby is being a bit of a cow is very anti marriage as she thinks it is a horribly outdated ceremony and harks back to a time when fathers owned their daughters until they were literally “given away” to their husbands. She couldn’t understand why two self respecting lesbos were so set on having a wedding.

The main reason was that I love weddings. I love the speeches, the dressing up, the music, the amusing table names to remind friends that you’re a right laugh and of course the romance. And I don’t want you to get out your tiny violin but when I came out it was illegal for two women to marry, it was impossible. So now because we could, we wanted to.

The big day was to be in May 2020. Of course, we cancelled it in April and all of a sudden our dream wedding and honeymoon, alongside months and months of upcoming touring and filming, slipped down the drain. Like everyone else our lives were thrown into flux by Covid. But of course I’m well aware that thousands upon thousands had it so much worse. In my tiny bit of the world I had nothing to do but sit at home anxiously watching the clowns in Whitehall screw up every single element of the handling of the pandemic and tweet quips about driving to Barnard Castle while my industry was on life support.

I would love to tell you I used this time wisely to learn Spanish, or origami, or write a novel. But I didn’t. The anxiety really curbed my creative juices so I just worried and fretted and became someone with a tracksuit for best.

We spent months trying to work out what we should do; reorganising the wedding, doing a smaller version, cutting 170 guests down to 30 (which would have created a number of awkward phone calls I really don’t have the guts for).

While the two of us were walking around our local Sainsbury’s a year later we finally made a decision. Alice joked, “We could just do it with two people at the town hall, like it’s the sixties and one of us is pregnant.” Another one of her great ideas.

Yes, I would have loved a big do and to have achy legs for days but all I really cared about was becoming her wife. So that’s what we did. We stood for the briefest of services with two of our best friends, masked up, and said “I do”.

A few days after our wedding I got on stage to do my tour show for the first time in 15 months. All day I felt the old familiar nerves and excitement and of course those questions returned: Will they like me? Will I remember an hour’s worth of material? Am I still funny now I am a married woman?

I was a bundle of energy like a puppy and absolutely thrilled to be back on stage. There was only one person more excited than me that I was going back to work and that was Alice, who for more than a year had been my solo audience member and that’s a big ask, even for someone as supportive and kind as her. The show was a blast, the audience was fabulous and I am still funny*.

*Citation needed