I know it’s traditional to begin with an embarrassing story from the groom’s past, and I have the advantage of having known James for twenty-three years, so the real question is where to start. James grew up on a farm and I used to visit him on Tuesdays. My parents were friends with his grandparents. We kind of bonded over this, because my parents were unusually old and James’s parents were dead, so he lived with his grandparents on his mother’s side who weren’t much older than my actual parents. I don’t think James particularly liked me – it was one of those friendships imposed from outside. You have such little freedom as a child. We’d spend those Tuesday evenings wandering around the unused spaces of the farm, not really saying much to each other. I remember one day I wanted to see how far I could push my tongue into this keyhole. It was an old keyhole in a trap door at the back of a disused barn. So I lay face-down on the dirty floor and pushed my tongue into the keyhole. It was a bronze keyhole – so it tasted of blood and the sea. I forced my tongue in as far as it would go. Then I stood up. ‘You have to do it now,’ I said to James. James was all, ‘Why would I want to do that?’ and I was like, ‘Well, if you’re too much of a coward,’ and James was like, ‘Fine then, I’ll do it. Even though it’s weird and stupid.’ There were some labourers behind the barn, working on a fence and they had one of those old white paint-spattered radios and it was playing a love song. So James lay in the dirt and hay, as I had just done, and forced his tongue, twisting it here, constricting it there, until it was fully extended and the whole of it was inside the old bronze lock. I could tell by looking at the side of his neck that he had stuck his tongue in the lock a lot further than I had. And then something dreadful happened. James’s tongue got stuck. I suppose it had engorged and got kind of snagged on some mechanism of the lock.

He couldn’t make a sound. If it hadn’t been for me he might have died there. Eventually the labourers came into the barn for supplies – they’d stashed some fence posts in the far corner – and I started shouting for them to come over. After laughing at both of us for a while, they sawed him out. But he had to walk back to the farmhouse holding a big square of wood to his face. When James’s grandparents found us, on the path in front of their house, they laughed. His grandmother took us into the kitchen and sprinkled bicarbonate of soda on James’s tongue, as if this sort of thing happened all the time. And it just retracted into his mouth like a slug and the lock mechanism and eight inch square of wood fell on James’s grandmother’s foot. He felt terrible about that. It broke her foot. She had to wear a giant cast and bandage for months – looked like a cartoon foot, and old bones don’t heal so fast. That was when the farm started to go downhill, which was maybe a coincidence; the government weren’t making it easy for agriculture in those days. It can’t have helped. I’ve never admitted this before, but I was strangely aroused by the whole thing. To this day seeing somebody with their foot in plaster brings it all back to me. But this isn’t about me. I know that James will be very happy with Anna because he has a gift for happiness born of, and he won’t mind me saying this, low expectations. I’ve always thought the best gift anyone could receive is being severely bullied at school. Not to the point of attempted suicide, but, you know, almost. Once school is over the victim will be grateful for everything. Everything that happens to him, even the saddest things that happen to a man, will seem infinitely richer, more dignified than what his tormentors put him through. Every morning he will leap out of bed in joy realising that he doesn’t have to spend one more second in that place and with those people, even if he is to spend that day putting figures into a spreadsheet. He will thank God for every line of data. It’s a gratitude which, I’ve observed, never quite leaves the victim for the rest of his life.

I wish them all the best. The first time I met Anna she was one of James’s students. A year later she was one of his postgraduate students and now she’s his wife. She was drinking a latté in a tall glass with one of those ridiculous long spoons. She had on a denim skirt and black tights, which, as an ensemble, has always driven me kind of rabid with lust. I asked her how the Film Studies was going. She told me about the film James had made the class watch and she said it was weird.

‘What do you mean by weird?’ I asked her.

It was about a man talking to his bank manager, she told me. The whole film’s set in a back room of a high street bank, and the man is pleading with the bank manager for an overdraft extension. He says his wife is sick. ‘My wife is sick,’ he says. ‘I can’t go into work because I have to look after her, I have to make sure she doesn’t try to,’ he tails off. ‘She’s very depressed,’ he says. ‘I realise you don’t care and that it’s ridiculous to even tell you this, but have you ever seen someone depressed? Actually clinically depressed?’

The bank manager says that he hasn’t.

‘It’s like every Tuesday is happening at once,’ says the man. ‘Like her head’s been stuffed with sand and bits of wood and glass. Like that little white mouse in Tom and Jerry cartoons who’ll blow up the world if he falls over, and I have to run around, like Tom, catching her. So I can’t go into work and we’ve got behind on the rent.’

‘The thing you have to realise,’ the bank manager tells him, ‘is that the bank is not your friend. I’m not your friend. And I feel for you, as a human being, I do. But there’s nothing I can . . . I have no influence over the events in your life.’

‘We’re going to get evicted,’ the man says. ‘This is just one month, is what I’m asking for. One month is all it’s going to take. An extension, not a loan, an extension on my existing overdraft. In a month she’ll get better, I’ll go back to work, you’ll get your money back.’

‘I understand you,’ says the bank manager. ‘And I love you as a human being. I love you like a brother. But it’s not my money.’

‘But you have power over that money,’ says the man.

‘I’m no more than a minor actor,’ says the bank manager. ‘A bit part. The scriptwriter? The director? That’s the money! Maybe this film will make it clear for you.’

And he puts a blank DVD in a slot on his computer and spins the flat monitor around so the man can see it. And the computer plays a film to him, and that film becomes the film we’re watching.

‘Oh, a film within a film,’ I said. ‘How original.’

At this point Anna had crossed her legs and I was covertly staring at her legs, alternating between a fixed point on the floor and her legs in a manner I hoped wasn’t too obvious. But I was more distracted from her description of the film within a film by the fact that the film up to that point bore an uncanny resemblance to my own life three years ago when I was living in Cardiff, right down to my set of analogies for clinical depression. And I wondered who the film had been made by and if they were an acquaintance of James (who tended to set texts written by his friends) and whether James had given or maybe sold him the story of my life three years ago and it felt like a little ball bearing had appeared towards the bottom of my rib cage, that it would rattle around for the rest of my life.

‘And that’s how it ends,’ said Anna.

James arrived just as she said it; at that point they either weren’t seeing each other or were doing a good job of keeping it quiet. He asked her if she’d gotten hold of the film for next week’s seminar and she said yes, and that it was weird.

Anyone who knows James knows that he’s also a poet and a critic of poetry, and I wanted to end on a little dramaticule.

I know many of Anna and James’s new friends are agents of one kind or another, so I want you to consider this a kind of pitch. And if you think it’s crass to use your best friend’s best man speech as an opportunity to angle for work, you’re obviously not a writer. I want you to picture James, the film scholar and minor poetry critic, sitting in his office, an office lit by standing lamps and full of film noir posters. An office on the fourth floor. He’s sitting there, office hours long passed, and he’s holding a poetry magazine. He looks up, looks at the camera and mouths the word, ‘Bastard.’ James then puts down the poetry magazine and goes to sit at his typewriter. He sits there, writing a letter on his old typewriter, and the letter begins, Dear arsehole. We see him typing that from the POV of a typewriter mounted camera. It’s kind of an affectation, writing on an old Harris Visible typewriter, going clackity-clackity-clackity and causing some pretty mean repetitive strain injury in the long run, and probably speaks volumes about the kind of person James is.

And if you were credulous you might say it shows James is a wistful man, ill at ease with the modern world and technology. But if you were less credulous you might say that’s exactly what James wants you to infer. That he’s the sort of person who would freely admit his writing on an old Harris Visible was an affectation. The same way he talks about his brightly coloured scarf, the Nabokov novel protruding from his coat pocket which he will have arranged (maybe stuffing some tissues or keys underneath the book) so that the word NABOKOV protrudes from the pocket and is clearly readable. Or he’ll have deliberately put it upside down and backwards so that nobody can see what the book is. Except once this really hot girl of Russian extraction started talking to him because of the Nabokov novel, so these days he’s more likely to stuff the pocket so that the word NABOKOV is visible above the pocket, the flap which he’s never sure what you’re supposed to do with, folded behind it. But the point is he’d openly tell you all the above, including about the Russian girl, Anna something or other, who isn’t actually Russian.

The same with the gold filtered black cigarettes he pays heavy import tax on, even though they look the same as Sovereigns, which are kind of an OAP brand – not that he would mind if someone thought he was smoking an OAP brand of cigarette, partly because why the hell should he care what they think anyway and partly because it possibly comes across as defiantly unfashionable. It implies that he doesn’t care what you think about him. But that’s the thing – here James looks diagonally down and to the right, the direction he always looks in when he’s about to say something self-deprecating, so as to avert his gaze (this in itself something of an affectation). It’s as if a little invisible creature were dictating the message to him from the floor in a language only he can perceive and react to, a little invisible creature who wants him to appear to be the most self-conscious man who ever lived, it would seem. A little anthropomorphised hedgehog-like demon with long, spiny eyelashes. Because that’s the thing, he might say, that’s the thing with standing out from the crowd: you end up falling in with the crowd trying to stand out from the crowd, who are, let me tell you, even more insufferable than the crowd you’re trying to stand out from. And James is writing to a rival critic who’s just published an out-and-out desecration of James’s latest book (or latest “critical tome” as James might intone with mock gravitas) in one of the leading poetry journals in the country, a journal which amounts to a cruelly public platform for the rival critic’s views and a journal which, James has it on good authority, the rival critic only gets published in because he used to be fuck-buddies with the managing editor (“no one ever got rich underestimating the incestuous connivance of the poetic community” is a select sentence from James’s opening paragraph of the letter he’s writing to the rival critic). This rival critic, who’s just destroyed James’s reputation, who’s made it so that James’s name will now be synonymous with “bad review”, who’s basically black-balled him for all but the most trifling vanity journals, once praised another poet (James recalls now, a sneer hooking his left upper lip) for likening his dying brother’s eyes, or the flesh around them, to the flesh of the testicles, heralding its “tremendous, courageous visual honesty” (‘Yeah, right, “courageous”,’ said James, out loud, when he read that, ‘Christ.’), which James, a good friend of the poet in question’s brother as it happens, found more than a little crass. Well, James has a few favours of his own to call in, the rival critic might be surprised to hear. And now it’s payday, James says out loud, a little unsure of himself, payday for those favours.

And James’s latest critical tome, it doesn’t seem totally irrelevant to point out, is called The Recantations and explores the theme of “forgiveness” in contemporary British poetry, all of which is actually going to be pretty hard to dramatise on screen in any meaningful way. But nonetheless is the stuff of life, unvarnished and of which I wish both Anna and James a lifetime. Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like you to raise you glasses to the bride and groom.