And a couple of months later, when Rhys Jones Bowen had suggested that since the entire office was invited, it would make sense to rent a minibus and drive everyone up together, I’d found that mildly cheering too. Then when he’d added that his friend had given us the use of his house to stay in the night before so we didn’t have to get up stupidly early to be on time for the ceremony, I was relieved. Because it was always good when somebody else took care of the logistics for you. It seemed like the lowest-stress big-event wedding I could possibly imagine. All I had to do was show up with Oliver at the end of work, and then we could all pile into a bus like we were going on a school trip. It felt, as Alex himself might have put it, jolly.

Except once we were half an hour into the journey, I remembered that I hated school trips. They involved putting a bunch of people who only knew each other in a very specific context into a very different context and expecting everything to work. And it never did.

We started out okay, with everybody upbeat and pally and helping each other load their luggage, but things quickly cooled off after we realised that most of us had brought somebody we knew better than we knew the rest of the group, meaning there was no real reason for us to interact as a group. Then they cooled off even more as each pair realised that most of the things they’d normally talk to each other about were things they didn’t particularly want to be airing in a crowded vehicle full of people who were strangers to one half of the couple and professional acquaintances to the other.

Even that would have been bearable. But then Rhys Jones Bowen insisted on starting a sing-along.

“Come on, you lot,” he tried with the kind of valour that led brigades of soldiers into valleys full of cannon. “You’re being a right bunch of gloomy Gusses. Everybody join in after me: ‘The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round…’”

“Isn’t that a children’s song?” I asked.

“Well, yes, but I don’t see why that’s causing you problems.” Rhys kept his eyes on the road but gave me a very expressive look with his shoulders. “Unless you’ve forgotten the words.”

Was I letting myself get sucked into a conversation I couldn’t get out of again? “I think it’s more just a bit embarrassing.”

“And I think that says more about you than it does about the song,” Rhys insisted.

From the back seat, Barbara Clench briefly stopped making out with Gabriel, her unfeasibly attractive, much younger husband. “I agree with Luc. We’re adults, we shouldn’t be singing nursery rhymes; it’s inappropriate.”