Thursday

We make a start at 8am, ready for the hire-car people to pick us up in our vehicle for the weekend. Last night's sleep was, thankfully, largely uninterrupted by my wheezing and hacking cough for a change so we are both relatively refreshed. The hire-car man arrives at 9am and takes us to Bounds Green where we complete the necessary paperwork and head off to pick Nick up in Crouch End. With K at the wheel and me in charge of CDs, we drive first to Bristol to pick up K's sisters, then on to Devon, following closely the detailed instructions emailed out by the conscientious groom.

Shortly after leaving the A30 somewhere near Tavistock, the landscape becomes very rural indeed and we start hitting single-track lanes at a village called Sheepwash. The sun is out and it's a very beautiful day by the time - 5 or so hours after leaving London - we pull up at the stunning Buckland House, an enormous Victorian mansion set in 250-odd acres of land with views across the county.

As K is a bridesmaid, we have been given a room in the house to ourselves. The place is a sprawling, as-it-was building complete with pantry, false-panelled drawing room, library containing anthologies of 1890s society magazines and a fairly brilliant '3D picture viewer'. There is also a huge croquet lawn, boating lake and an adjacent church and graveyard. It's a pretty spectacular place to move into for a few days, and after having caught up with the bride and groom and assorted relations of theirs, I get behind the wheel of the Meriva and head back to the nearest town to do a booze run.

The rest of the afternoon and evening is spent lazing around on the grass outside, drinking beer and nattering away, while I watch some of the others messing around on the boat and canoe down by the lake. When it gets a little chilly we head inside and watch the second pre-election leader's debate on the small TV in the living room.

Before heading off to a nicely booze-soaked cough-free sleep, I start to think that I could get used to this lifestyle rather quickly.