The Best Man Read Out The Wrong Speech And It Was Better

He had written two speeches, because he is an anxious man who plans for weather.

Draft one was the safe one: golf, university, a joke about a stag do in Prague that we have all heard.

Draft two was the one he wrote at three in the morning after his father died, in the middle of all the wedding admin, when he was — and he told me this later, in a car park, crying — trying to work out what he actually wanted to say to his oldest friend before life did something else to either of them.

He read draft two. He did not mean to. He scrolled, he tapped, and he was two paragraphs in before his face changed and by then it was too late to stop.

Draft two says that when his dad was dying, the groom drove four hours after a night shift, twice, without being asked, and sat in a hospital corridor and did not say anything clever.

It says that the groom is not funny, which got the only laugh in the whole thing.

It says: "I do not have a toast about love because I don't know anything about it. I have a toast about turning up. He turns up. Marry that."

The room was completely silent. Not awkward silent. The other one.

The bride was crying. Her father was crying. The photographer — professional, cynical, has seen eleven hundred weddings — was, I promise you, crying, and still shooting, which is craft.

The groom stood up, walked round the table, and hugged him for what my wife swears was forty seconds, and I would say it was longer.

He never gave the funny speech. Nobody asked for it. The stag do in Prague remains unlitigated, which is probably for the best.

He sent me draft one afterwards, out of curiosity, and it was fine. It was good, even. It had a callback.

Nobody would have remembered it by Christmas.

Instead, four years on, at a christening, a woman I have never met came up to me and said, "Are you the one who was at the speech wedding?"

Yes. I am. We all are, forever.