How One Vivienne Westwood Bride Planned an English Wedding Worthy of a Classic Rom-Com

Ever since I was a little girl, Richard Curtis has been my religion. Meet-cutes are my miracles, I worship at the altar of montages that span seasons and I faithfully believe in running across cities, over bridges, through airports, traffic jams, hospitals and press conferences, to give soaring, endearingly quirky declarations of love. My favorite genre of music is Romantic Comedy Soundtracks (Shania, Ronan, and The Corrs included) and, for my sins, my biggest crush (husband excluded) is still Hugh Grant. It’s almost comedic in itself, then, that I was the only one who didn’t predict that I’d marry the boy next door.

It wasn’t a choice, romance is in my blood. My parents met at a party in Paris, my dad there on a work trip and my mum spending time in the city as an au pair. She came to London for their second date and moved in that same night. Six weeks later, he was told he needed heart surgery and the night before, operation looming, she said, “When you wake up, let’s get married.” Max and I didn’t move quite so fast. In fact, I have fancied my husband for nearly 15 years—almost half my life, and mostly from afar. Sometimes when I look at him, I see him aged 18 and feel the same giddy rush of teenage emotions I did then. But if anyone had told me at that age that I’d be standing next to him at an altar, I’d never have believed it. I barely believe it now. I remember saying to one of my closest friends, “Did you ever think I’d end up with Max?” To which she replied, “Yes—everyone did. Except you two.” So when the stars finally aligned, we were eager to make up for lost time, because—to quote Billy Crystal’s Harry—“when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”

Equidistant from both our childhood houses, there’s a bus stop. It’s where we would awkwardly avoid eye contact as teenagers waiting for the bus to school, and later it’s where we would sneak out of the house to meet. So when, on our first anniversary as a couple, Max asked me to meet him there, it didn’t seem strange in the slightest. I got there to discover he had covered the whole bus stop in fairy lights and had a bottle of champagne waiting to be popped. My favorite part? He brought enough glasses so that anyone actually waiting for a bus could join us for a glass. Two years later—on top of a mountain in Japan, surrounded by deer—he asked me to marry him, and despite all the challenges COVID threw our way, and a “will they, won’t they” courtship to rival Ross and Rachel’s, we were finally married in September of 2021.

The night before the wedding, I saw my facialist Rhian Truman for a final treatment; concentrating predominantly on facial massage, she chiselled my cheekbones and left me almost luminescent. Newly sculpted, I had dinner with my immediate family in the restaurant my parents dined at the night before their own wedding over 30 years ago. Maggie Jones’s is dimly lit and deeply romantic; named, supposedly, after the alias Princess Margaret used to book her and Lord Snowdon’s favorite table there.