Fuck. Nobody had told me there was supposed to be audience participation. As a child of two eighties rock legends, my upbringing hadn’t involved a huge amount of churchgoing. And, for thirty years, that had been fine. But right now it was making me feel that I was living one of those dreams where you discover you’re in a play and everyone knows their part but you. Also, you might be naked.

Fortunately, I was not naked. Unfortunately, the bishop was still talking. “God is love, and those who live in love live in God and God lives in them.”

And then somehow by some bullshit cultural magic, everybody was chanting again. Something something grace something something send your Holy Spirit something something that we may worship you now something something. The only bit I was really confident I got right was the amen at the end, and even that was pushing it.

“In the presence of God,” continued the bishop, “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we have come together”—crap, had they only just got to the we-are-gathered-here-today bit—“to witness the marriage of Alexander Antony Fitzrovia James Twaddle and Clara Isabella Fortescue-Lettice, to pray for God’s blessing on them, to share their joy, and to celebrate their love.”

How was there so much of this? How could there be so much of this? I wouldn’t have minded, but I’d never seen the slightest shred of evidence Alex was even remotely religious. So all of this pomp and weirdly specific theology about the union between a man and his wife being in a very real sense the same as the union between Jesus and the Church felt like empty ritual. Except no, it was worse than that. Here in this, well, this cathedral, it felt like a ritual celebration of power and establishment and orthodoxy. I’d heard it said that the Church of England was the Tory Party at prayer, but until I’d seen a wealthy nincompoop marrying an earl’s daughter in front of an actual bishop, I hadn’t quite realised how literal that could be.

Come back, drag vicar, all is forgiven.

By the time we got to the bit where the bishop was like, “First, I am required to ask anyone present who knows a reason why these persons may not lawfully marry to declare it now” I was half-tempted to leap to my feet and yell He can’t marry her. He’s already married to me just to make it stop. But I didn’t because despite outward appearances and years of practice, I’m not a complete bellend.