Cressida Bonas: My perfectly imperfect lockdown wedding

I had a lockdown wedding. A 30-person, socially-distanced, sanitised church service was organised in under two weeks. Restrictions meant no hymns, no wind instruments and no speaking too loudly. A disappointment for a musical family. Not what we’d envisaged, but a more intimate and special day than we could ever have imagined. Imperfect yet perfect — a day we will never forget. Four days before the big day, I marched up and down Oxford Street on the hunt for a wedding dress. Finding nothing, I remembered an old Whistles dress I once wore for a James Arthur music video. I went home and found the dusty frock at the back of my cupboard. After some ironing, it looked good as new. Two days before the wedding, I woke up with a stye on my eyelid. It was red, bulbous and seemed to be growing. My mum recommended the old-fashioned Golden Eye ointment. That only made it worse. The doctor said it would need operating on after the wedding. Not ideal timing, I thought. ‘Well, it could be worse,’ the doctor said. How, I wondered.

The night before the wedding I stayed in a hotel with my family and my maid of honour. I went to bed with a cucumber compress on my eye. Morning arrived and we got lost on our way to the church. A supposedly 20-minute journey took an hour. We drove up and down a dual carriageway several times before eventually arriving at the church 40 minutes late. My dad seemed strangely quiet and I asked him if he was all right. He said: ‘It’s just like taking Sheba [his dog] to the vet.’ He didn’t want to do it, but knew he had to. He is very fond of my husband, Harry, by the way. But he didn’t want to let his daughter go.