IT'S a strange thing to have to do, to put down on a piece of paper all the people that you know and love.

But it is even stranger to have to start putting people on that list who you don't love or even know that well.

But a marriage is all about two people, and their families and friends, coming together.

Drafting the wedding list is a difficult task. It is the steel work upon which you build your wedding. Its size will have a direct correlation to the cost of your big day. It is scary watching as each extra name is added. The pen goes down and the cost goes up, each little cash brick in the building of your wedding coming straight from your pocket. It can be hard to swallow, knowing that you're stumping up cash for someone you don't know that well. Even harder to write down that costly, yet mysterious, plus one.

I had no such concerns when we sat down to write our guest list. I was confident that I could get all my close friends and family onto one sheet of A4, maybe a couple of dozen guests. I figured I would be merciless, ruling out friend and family if they didn't meet my very high criteria for me buying them an expensive dinner.

We had toyed with the idea of getting married in New York but decided to stay in Wales so we could have all our family and friends there. What I didn't expect was to almost literally have all my family and friends there.

As we started working through the list I found that I'd quite underestimated how many close family and friends I had. Before I knew it I was having to draft up a reserve list for people I'd want to be there. Even worse, I was really agonising over who should come and who shouldn't. I found myself considering turning all my friends and family into a giant game of Top Trumps with things like length of time known, frequency of seeing and present buying ability all being rated and ranked to see who got the final seat on table 12. (I didn't actually do that by the way)

The realisation that I wanted half a dozen or so family members there added another couple of hundred to the bill. What I had expected would be a small select, elite, group of specially selected individuals was quickly becoming easier to get into than a Gary Glitter concert.

I was quite surprised when we finally tallied up the numbers and could see in black and white just how many people Lucy and I felt were special. Yes, it would cost a lot of cash and mean that we'd have to cut back on luxuries like food but we think it is worth it.