Dress Code: Sorted by Salary

The invitation included a card headed 'YOUR COLOUR JOURNEY.' Mine said sage green. My cousin's said dove grey. We assumed some aesthetic scheme for the photos — brides do drone shots now; we are all mosaic tiles at heart, we joked.

The venue seating destroyed the joke. Gold-assigned guests occupied the two tables flanking the head table. Burgundy at the next ring. Sage green — me — at the ring after that. Dove grey held the tables by the toilets, and a final tier, 'natural tones', was seated in an adjoining room described on its door sign, with breathtaking honesty, as the OVERFLOW SALON, watching the speeches on a live video link.

It was my cousin's husband, an actuary, who cracked it, doing what actuaries do: he started asking people at each colour what they did for a living. Gold: a surgeon, two company directors, the groom's crypto friend. Burgundy: senior professionals. Sage: teachers, nurses, me. Dove grey and beyond: students, retirees, and — the detail that removed any doubt of intent — the groom's own grandmother, on a pension, by the toilets, in grey.

Colour-coded by estimated net worth. Radiating outward from the money like a heat map.

The revolution was quiet and total. During the band's first set, the sage and grey tiers executed an unplanned prisoner exchange: grandmothers were extracted from the peripheries and installed at gold tables, whose occupants — most of whom were mortified by their own placement once the code spread — welcomed them and sent champagne outward in compensation. The OVERFLOW SALON was liberated entirely; its inhabitants annexed the dance floor and held it all night, on the reasonable grounds that dancing is means-tested nowhere.

The couple noticed nothing until the photos came back. Every table's shot shows the wrong colours everywhere, defiantly mixed, grandmothers in gold seats — and not one photograph in existence matches the seating chart, which I consider the most beautiful data set of my life.