Four years ago, on a sunny Saturday in September, I went to my best friend J’s wedding in Dorchester. Josie was marrying R, the love of her life, after a long engagement. They were (still are) clearly nuts about each other.

I was three days off starting my MA in Manchester, and had taken a few days holiday in Dorset - mores specifically, Portland and Weymouth - just reading and mooching around on my own, staying in cosy B+Bs with enormous over-stuffed double beds and never getting up for breakfast. It was heaven.

I got a room at a posh hotel in Dorchester, for the night after the wedding, and the night after that, paying far more per night than I could afford. When I rolled up to the town on Saturday morning, I trundled my flightcase to the hotel, checked in and got changed. I wore a long blue dress the colour of a summer sky on a hot, hot day, a wide-brimmed hat and a pale green shawl to keep out the cold, though there wasn’t any. No time for lunch, so I bimbled over to the old church where the wedding was to be held, and found some other university friends - or rather, acquaintances.

J and I had met at university in Liverpool - we’d ended up sharing a flat in the first year, and made a fast and firm friendship. She was studying geography, I was doing Spanish and Anthropology. She played octopush. I played silly buggers. She was hard working, diligent and committed. I was brilliant at doing sod-all and then turning in amazing essays and exam results, which used to piss her off immensely. She had slightly dodgy taste in music (Pat Methany) but then, so did I (Silvio Rodriguez). We didn’t share a group of friends, though, beyond the handful that hung around the flat scrounging tortelloni and cookies.

So at the wedding there were a small group of people I half-recognised from her course, people who’d shown up at our flat pissed after the pub once or twice, and who I couldn’t put a name to. We congregated in the shade of a big gravestone and talked about nothing.

The service was a typical wedding service - half in English, half in German, moving and sweet and yet sort of strange to see my friends standing at the front of a church and 120 people in posh togs, speaking publicly about a very private emotion. J was the first of my close friends to get married, and it felt strange but not entirely unpleasant, like a bacon and jam sandwich.

After the service, there were the requisite photos to be taken, and then it was announced that the reception was to be held in a village called Toller Porcorum, about sixteen miles away. I don’t remember how I got there, but I suppose I must have cadged a lift from someone. I don’t remember much of the reception, because there was dinner and champagne and plentiful wine, and then there was dancing - and I seem to remember flirting with a good number of the others at my table of unmarrieds - in a marquee in a field next to a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere.

A lot of people were staying at the farmhouse, and others had cars to whisk them back to Dorchester, but by the time I noticed it was late and I was tired and more than slightly tipsy, most people had slunk off into the night, including the bride, and it was too late to get a cab. I know this, because I found a phone in the farmhouse kitchen and called a cab company, who didn’t answer for the first 37 rings, and then laughed at me when they did.

Stuck in Toller Porcorum in silly shoes and a flimsy dress, on a cold September night.

I just wanted to sleep. It was one in the morning, and just about everyone had gone. I thought I’d find a nice corner to huddle up, maybe a sofa or so, and wait until morning to get a cab home. My feet hurt from dancing, and my head spun with wine. Every single sofa I found seemed to be already occupied, and so I ended up stealing wine-stained tablecloths off the tables in the marquee, and curling up in a barn, with hay and animals and strong smells in attendance. Oh how very biblical - no room at the farmhouse. Good thing I wasn’t pregnant.

I slept badly, and when dawn crept in like a stranger, I found the phone again and called for a cab, which ambled by half an hour later to take me and my puffy eyes back to my overpriced but exceedingly comfy and empty hotel room in Dorchester. I needed to stop at a bank machine to get the money for the fare, because I was a couple of quid short of the £15 fare. The driver pulled up to the Midland bank in the middle of the pedestrianised town centre, and I stumbled out in my crumpled frock and daft heels, still clutching my hat, to the cash machine.

Please insert your card it ordered, so I did.

The screen went blank. It blipped. It hummed. It thought for a few minutes.

Please insert your card it ordered.

I scowled at it and said aloud, “I already did, you stupid bastard,” because I’d got to the point of the hangover at which you take everything personally. Nothing happened. It wouldn’t give me my card back, and I didn’t have enough money for the cab.

After some negotiation with the driver, I arranged that I would take a cab the next day from the hotel to Dorchester station - all 150 yards - and pay the extra bit of the fare then. He drove off, leaving me disheveled and feeling more than a little Tess-esque in the middle of Dorchester, penniless. Well, cashless.

I headed back to the hotel, ignoring the disapproving glances of the reception staff, and slept for a few hours. When I woke up at teatime, I was starving, and realised that without cash it was going to be hard to eat in Dorchester on a Sunday. I had my very-nearly-maxed-out Visa card, and about 20p in change. Exploration of sleepy Dorchester revealed that there was nowhere open that
a) sold food and
b) took visa.

Except, that is, Iceland, the frozen food supermarket. I bought a rock-hard quiche and stared at it, willing it to melt.

And then, genius, I found the cinema, where I could kill a few hours and eat popcorn and chocolate in peace for a few hours - though the drawback was undoubtedly that I was subjected to watching Air Force One. At midnight I got back to the hotel and ate half a chilly quiche. The next morning I marched into Midland and demanded my card. Then I took the most expensive 150 yard taxi journey of all time, and headed north to start my MA.

Weddings. Funny things. There seems to be something in the air at the moment - two pairs of good friends have just announced engagements this week, we’ve just past the first anniversary of two other friends’ nuptials, and I know someone who’s best man at another wedding in Dorchester this weekend, which I suppose is what has got me thinking.

Weddings. Fantastic, but slightly weird.