My big fat nightmare London wedding

Thanks mostly to Jane Austen TV adaptations and Richard Curtis films, we all know what a wedding should look like. There must be floaty dresses, giant hats, marquees pitched on rolling lawns, teeny-tiny churches, swirly disco lights and B&Bs. And so, paradoxically, the more urbanised British life becomes, the more everyone insists on rushing off to the countryside to get married.

I'm a Londoner, and so is my fiancé — we were both born here, educated in the shadow of Big Ben and we'll die here. We live in the best, most elegant and exciting city in the world, let alone in England — so what on earth is wrong with getting married right here?

But a London wedding has its pitfalls. There are no excuses for shoddiness. In the countryside everyone just expects to have to stay in a B&B run by amateur taxidermists or to sleep in a ditch. And when the caterer forgets all the forks, you can just roll your eyes, smile a rueful grin, and mouth "locals".

In London, the very best of everything — service, food, tailoring — is available. It doesn't help that my fiancé, Giles, is the restaurant critic of The Times. This means that the wedding breakfast, usually little more than a booze sponge, is going to be poked and prodded, judged and scrutinised.

Being in London means that the whole show has to be slick, urban, cool and, above all, modern. Yet so far my modernisations have been met with outrage.

For example, the wedding is this Saturday morning, at 11.30am, followed by lunch. Back in the days when a wedding was a wedding and not a giant disco — like a birthday party and New Year's Eve rolled into one — people got married in the morning, then had lunch and went home. In a bid to be edgy and new, I reached for this very old-fashioned formula.

"That's so early!" they all shriek. "I'll only just have got in."

I have also done away with coffee and pudding during the lunch; girls never want coffee and boys don't want puddings so the girls eat them all and then get depressed. Guests can order an espresso if they want and the girls can have some wedding cake, which is a carrot cake — because no one likes fruit cake and that's just a fact.

This has been met with total bafflement but pales in comparison with the outrage at my decision not to have a disco bit entirely.

"Wh-what?" cried my friend Chris, his face falling as if he'd been shot. "How can you have a wedding with no dancing? I might not come." "What else are we going to do?" cried another.

The answer is that after the wedding and lunch there will be a classic piss-up in Soho, hosted in the private members' club with the least sticky carpets. There will be a pianist and margharitas. But now I wonder if that isn't a mistake. Do I really want to witness the slow disintegration of my big day into dark Soho deeds?

Getting hitched in London also means we can't just haul up a giant marquee and invite 300 people. At our chosen restaurant, Galvin La Chapelle, there's space for 100, just about (if I sit on Giles's knee and everyone keeps their elbows in), which means we seem to have chosen a size of wedding designed to cause maximum offence to anyone not invited, or invited late after drop-outs. "Weddings," said my friend Sarah, "are funerals for friendships."

Just because we're in London, it doesn't make the usual inter-family argy-bargy any easier either. I have chosen not to invite a large chunk of my mother's family, who live on the opposite side of the country, or give a role in the ceremony to my youngest sister.

My other two sisters are loaded with children and couldn't care less about being involved but my father said he was "interested" (ie furious) that my little sister, who is 21, and at 5ft 10in towers over me, wasn't a bridesmaid. So I've hastily concocted a role for her taking my bouquet at the altar, so that she doesn't revolt by getting hammered at the reception and stage-diving into the cake.

By far and away the greatest surprise and shock about getting married in London is that it has been almost impossible to buy a wedding dress with sleeves. On any given day in any number of London shops you can buy a full-body rubber gimp-suit, your name spelled out in flowers, or a giant octopus with the head still on, but wedding dresses come in only two designs: strapless or like underwear.