Annabel and Otis were married at Wadhurst Castle on Friday 24 July 2026, outdoors in the gardens, on a very warm afternoon. They had kept the date to themselves for a long time: the previous October, Annabel asked her maid of honour Kate to hold a day free and swore her to secrecy. We began with Annabel at The Annexe at Buttons Farm, before heading to Wadhurst Castle for the ceremony and staying through to the first dance.
The ceremony
Kathy, a deputy superintendent registrar for the Sussex Registration Service, led the ceremony with her colleague Jill, the registrar of marriages. “I’d like to welcome you all to Wadhurst Castle on this beautiful, very warm summer’s day,” she began.
Annabel’s father Adam presented her hand, kissed her, shook Otis by the hand and sat down. “Are you okay?” Kathy asked. “I think my eyes are sweating.”
The legal declarations gave everyone trouble. Otis lost his footing on “lawful impediment” and asked to start again. Then Kathy misread Annabel’s line, stopped, and started it over herself. “I’m very sorry. I’ve only been doing it for 25 years,” she said. “It’s hot.”
Ben carried the rings and opened the box for each of them in turn. They made the same promise, to love and to cherish, all the days of their lives, and Kathy announced them husband and wife in front of the gardens and everyone in them.
Adam and Kate
Speeches came with the wedding breakfast at 3pm. Adam spoke first. He called Otis “a kind and thoroughly decent person”, noted his loyalty to Hull FC, and said he never fails to point out when a State of Origin game is on the telly.
Of Annabel, he said she had “overcome obstacles with a single minded determination” from school through to her work as a journalist, that she is “fiercely protective of wildlife” and has “something of a reputation as a pigeon rescuer”, to her parents’ dismay when she tries to bring them into the house. He went back to a skiing holiday in Norway when she was two: an hour after they dropped her at the kindergarten, the resort tannoy started repeating “Annabel is searching for her parents.” The family moved to Jersey when she was four, and that is where she grew up and learned to drive on the island’s five mile road. She passed first time. Two days later she told him she had gone the wrong way round a roundabout. He finished by thanking his wife Sandy.
Kate, the maid of honour, opened with a rule: “every blonde needs a brunette best friend.” They bonded in year seven over the school project where pupils look after a bag of flour as a baby, and Kate is fairly sure Annabel would still be caring for hers if she hadn’t been talked out of it.
She also introduced the room to Mabel, the alter ego Annabel adopted on a trip to Amsterdam in 2017 after starting at the BBC and deciding she might be recognised. The wedding dress, as it turned out, was also called Mabel.
The Otis section was less flattering to him. They met at a conference in 2019; Annabel sent a follow-up email saying how lovely it had been to meet him, and he did not reply. She moved to Leeds, where they crossed paths again, and kept her distance because of the woman and child on his phone background, who turned out to be his sister. They worked together at Leeds Festival later that year. Annabel rang Kate the next day to report that it had gone badly and that Otis hated her. Then, last October, came the message asking Kate to keep everyone free on 24 July.
Otis, Ben and Tom
Otis apologised in advance for the state of his speech, on the grounds that he had been “rescuing a pigeon under Annie’s command a couple of days ago” and had not had time to tidy it up. He had seen the venue for the first time that morning: “What a venue. What a venue.”
He thanked Danny Farrand, who made the drinking horns on the tables, and counted off where everyone had travelled from: Hull, Jersey, Brighton, London. He thanked his parents, Nick and Diane, and then Adam and Sandy, who had let him live with them in Jersey while Annabel was elsewhere, in a house he could only fault for being “a whole ten second walk from the nicest beach in Jersey, and it’s just a bit too far for me.”
The story he chose for Annabel was about a Friday night when she asked if he fancied going ringing some birds in Wigan. They were out on a bog at six in the morning, mud over the ankles, listening to birdsong while a man quizzed the group on how to sex a long tailed tit. “I’ve never seen her smile so much in my life,” he said.
Ben and Tom were best men. Ben answered Otis in verse. They met at Leeds Trinity in 2012, “this bloke was just as wonderfully odd as me”, and he tracked the years of sofas and spare rooms that followed, including the room Otis earned at Ben’s house and lost when Ben and Emily’s first child arrived. On Otis generally: “He’d give you his time, his shirt, even his last quid. You just need to catch him before his phone’s gone dead.” On the two of them: “They’re perfectly matched in every way, except arriving on time.”
Tom has known Otis for more than twenty years. He went back to their English class at school, where Otis arrived belonging to none of the usual groups and within two months had the whole room, including a teacher who told him he could not be moved up a set because “we need you” in this class. His first memory of Annabel is an Austin Powers fancy dress party, where she was only expected to need a denim shirt and a headband and turned up in a bald cap as well.
The evening
They cut the cake just before 7pm and were announced back in for their first dance, joined on the floor before the song was out. Sky Knights played into the evening.
Credits
- Venue: Wadhurst Castle, Wadhurst, East Sussex
- Photography: Annie’s Wedding Photography
- Flowers: Wild Botanicals Floral Design
- Dress and suits: Vivienne Westwood
- Make-up: Jo Elizabeth Weddings
- Cake: Emily’s Mixing Bowl
- Catering: Vine and Dine
- Band: Sky Knights
- Cars: Charles Henry Bridal Cars
- Videography: Talking Fly Wedding Films
