A Guide To Your First 'Friend' Wedding (From Someone Who's Been To 26)

Richard Curtis started writing Four Weddings and a Funeral when he was 34 and found that he’d attended 65 weddings in the previous 11 years.

If you're in your early-to-mid 20s, it's likely that so far, the weddings you have attended will have been family affairs; low-key dos that require no more effort from you than boarding a train to somewhere in the Midlands, signing your name in a card your mum bought for the family, and spending the evening marvelling at the amount of Newcastle Brown Ale that Uncle Sean can put away.

As your 20s wear on, though, your letterbox will quite possibly experience a sharp uptick in wedding invitations as your friends begin to announce their engagements on their favoured social media platform. This is a very exciting time indeed, for both you and your friends.

But as someone older (certainly) and wiser (almost certainly not), who's spent the last several summers in a heady wedding haze, up and down the country and all over Europe, let me tell you that there is a big difference in the level of responsibilities that comes with attending your very first "friend" wedding. Faux pas are not only easy to make, they're almost a certainty.

Ahead, with a little help from Adamantia Leonidopoulou, a senior events manager who runs weddings at London members' club and hotel The Ned, is a list of practical things I wish someone had told me before I'd first struck out, starry eyed and carefree, all those 26 weddings ago...