Photo Credit: Kamil Janowski

On this day three years ago, I was not yet married. After a whirlwind year and a bit of unexpected romance I was hanging out in East London with the man I’d fancied since I was seventeen who was to become my husband the very next day.

This was not the wedding we’d been planning for months, the one where all our friends and family would be helping us celebrate. That wedding would be happening two weeks later, by which time we would have upped sticks and moved to Devon ready to start a new life together.

But the humanist celebration that was still to come would not make us legally married. We’d thought we’d just get that bit out of the way in a registry office initially, but when we discovered we could have a legal ceremony in Shoreditch House – where we’d ended up on our very first date – it seemed like too good an opportunity to miss.

We stayed there the night before, enjoying dinner on the rooftop and shunning the convention of spending our last unmarried night apart. We giggled nervously as we lay in bed looking over the night glow of London, realising rather late that whilst this wedding was not the one we’d poured all our energies into it was still the one that would make us married.

The next morning we were brought a pile of newspapers to mark the date, and I disappeared off to my favourite hairdresser Taylor Taylor where I’d made an emergency appointment a few days before. My dress had been a bargain from Very, and I’d splurged a little on blue shoes from Joules, but I’d realised rather late that a ponytail might not quite cut it.

Our immediate family joined us for the ceremony, held in a little side room off the bar with bare brick walls and music cued up on Leigh’s iPhone. There was a delicious lunch after that: I couldn’t tell you what exactly, but I know it was good. Then Leigh and I left everyone behind whilst we went for a walk around the surrounding streets with Leigh’s friend Kamil, a photographer, in tow.

I love the pictures he took to capture the afternoon after we got married. We were so in love, and just a little bit tipsy, and found ourselves caught up in a wave of surprise emotion on the day we had thought we were just satisfying legal requirements but were in fact cementing a bond that had been slowly forming over so many years.

When we were done we went back to join our families, had piggyback races in the pool and drank a few too many espresso martinis. It was a pretty awesome start to married life.

Tomorrow is our first third wedding anniversary. I’m looking forward to reflecting on how much has happened over the past three years, to drinking wine and making plans for our future. But most of all I’m looking forward to spending some quality time with my husband, whom I love.

Joining in with The Alphabet Photography Project over at PODcast.