As every single one of my friends – and their spouses – is a tasteful soul, it goes without saying that every wedding I have ever attended has been the last word in elegance.

You do hear things, though. Of Balham-based chartered accountants behaving like Victorian land magnates by renting stately homes for their nuptials. Of multi-venue events in five-star resorts by the lapping shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Of women having to buy, rent and borrow ten dresses for the summer that makes up wedding season. I could go on.

So I am not surprised to read that one in three people is now turning down wedding invitations because they’ve become so expensive. The report from Tesco Bank states that, on average, it costs each guest £315 to attend a wedding, which really does tot up if you’re going to four, five, six weddings a year. Weddings abroad can cost a lot more – sometimes more like £1,000, and that’s before stag dos and hens are factored in.

When I proposed to my wife Harriet two summers ago, we had lived together for a number of years and had discussed, on a purely hypothetical basis, what our wedding would be like. Our friends need not have worried: we wanted a smaller wedding, which wouldn’t cost them a fortune to attend. We agreed that we didn’t want to have a sit-down meal, nor have dancing late into the night. Thankfully, Harriet didn’t start researching marquees or booking house-music DJs, and we proceeded to have a smallish wedding of about 110 guests, with carriages at 6 p.m.

My father-in-law is a celebrated illustrator by the name of Paul Cox – he drew some of the first colour covers for this very magazine, no less – so we were off to a great start with a beautiful hand-drawn invitation for all our guests.

I had spent most of my twenties living in a peripatetic arc around south London, before edging northwards with Harriet when we moved in together, making the area around Hampstead Heath our home, albeit in a series of cramped one-bedroom flats. So we were very keen to book a venue around there, and Burgh House – an old Queen Anne manse off Well Street – was surprisingly affordable. I won’t be so vulgar as to say how much it was, but the team there are incredibly friendly, and thankfully we only had the one ‘rehearsal’ meeting.

The one thing we didn’t want to stint on was the drinks. Prosecco has absolutely no business being served at weddings. I booked a pub, the Wells Tavern, for the overspill after the ceremony and speeches.

On the day itself, it was mind-meltingly hot, 34°C, and putting on my suit felt a bit like covering myself in tin foil before jumping into a baking tray – in my case the Overground for one stop, from where I then walked up to the venue.

Are men supposed to enjoy their weddings? The mixture of admin, small talk, big money and superfluous photography is both daunting and draining. But I can say definitively that I did enjoy mine. Harriet looked beautiful. Our friend Louis Ryan – who himself had a quite fantastic wedding in Sicily – played through the ceremony on the Blüthner baby grand piano. No one in my immediate family did anything particularly embarrassing, and the best man’s speech, in which my sophomoric high jinks were referred to elliptically rather than detailed meticulously, was incredibly funny. But looking around the room and talking to people afterwards, I could tell that everyone was genuinely enjoying themselves in a free and easy way. In the pub afterwards, Richard Curtis walked past, which did seem a little on the nose. We got a taxi at 6 p.m. and on to the Eurostar and our honeymoon in Paris.

We agreed that we didn’t want to have a sit-down meal, nor have dancing late into the night

Rather movingly, nearly everyone I had invited had come to a six-hour celebration, with quite a few people flying from overseas. While the prospect of me getting married must have been a surreal concept to some of my old friends, worthy of closer inspection, I do think that having a daytime event makes people likelier to come, as they don’t feel hemmed in.

At our wedding, the two respective parties of wrinklies diverged to separate dinner parties, and ‘the young’ went off to a number of different events, one of which culminated in a tactical vomit outside a nightclub in Deptford, which I am glad my aunt was not there to witness.

There was more gossip the next morning, which I enjoyed receiving via WhatsApp from our bed at L’Hôtel Rochechouart with only a mild hangover.

In many ways we had an old-fashioned wedding, which I would heartily recommend to anyone who has become recently betrothed. It is obviously much cheaper – food is the number one expense – and it felt nice for us to have our wedding without gurning interactions between the generations of guests. You don’t have to perform a dance as a couple and you have such little time with your friends and family that you don’t get stuck on conversations. The oldsters feel like you’re paying them a homage and your friends feel like you’re doing them a favour.

Some of our pals have said that our wedding was an inspiration, which I think is a bit too much, and in one respect, we have been a garish failure – 12 months and a week since we got married, we have still got a few thank-you cards left to write.