Speech by Phil Stevens

Speech Type: Best man
Speech Creator: Phil Stevens
Speech Date: Jul2007
Family, guests and friends on behalf of Nick and Jacqui, I would like to welcome you all to celebrate their wedding here today.

I would also like to take this opportunity to congratulate Nick on what a beautiful bride he has found in Jacqui and, if my own lovely wife weren't acting as her bridesmaid today I probably would.

I believe it is customary for the best man to subtly poke fun at the groom's character on these occasions, … but I don't do subtle. So, having spent several hours phoning around Nick's friends and family over the past few days, I have uncovered a wealth of stories of sex, scandal, decadence and debauchery sufficient to write several novels.

Unfortunately, I am not here to talk about Jacqui, so I'll just have to make stuff up about Nick.

Honestly though, despite my best efforts to unmask evidence to the contrary, I can only say that my research about Nick has only served to prove that he really is a decent sort of chap who inspires respect and admiration from friends and family.

From his humble beginnings as a rat catcher in Little England who cried at the near death of Balloo in the Jungle Book, I first met Nick as an undergraduate in Cardiff. I won't bore you with recollections of our undergraduate drinking though, mostly because Wernicke's encephalopathy prevents me remembering much of it.

But it was at university where the boy from West Wales became the man he is today. He was the first undergraduate medical student to be admitted as an inpatient during the Cardiff meningitis scare. He and I jammed together in the band for the undergraduate charity play.

It was also in these formative years when the Pony Club became aquainted with Nick's Jungle Book obsession when exposed to his bare necessities a trait which Jacqui ensures me endures today… amazing really, the detail you can see on Google Earth isn't it?

Nick also spent some of his undergraduate time in the shadier parts of Amsterdam, allegedly working. It was there where his neighbourly prostitute helped him pump his rubber after he helped her find her python.

It was really during finals that Nick and I got to know each other best. Whilst our colleagues earnestly read tombs on medicine, he and I revised the finer socioeconomic functions of Cardiff pubs.

We diverged after graduation and Nick joined the happy and close-knit community of Neville Hall Hospital in Abergavenny. Rosie and I owe much to his time there catalysing our own relationship – Thank you Nick.

It was also there where Nick became infatuated with a cool SHO whose suave approach to resuscitation involved multiple cigarettes and eye-bag cream between euphemisms that the patient was not dead, only encephalographically challenged.

It is no surprise either that her first impression of him was that he was just a grinning idiot. After all, he attempted to wine and dine her with lamb and Cumberland sauce – except, failing to find red currant jelly, he substituted sieved raspberry jam instead.

Despite initial impressions though, I applaud Nick now at the completion of his ambition to rob the lady of her fortune by way of marriage.

Between them, Nick and Jacqui have left a string of broken beds in South Wales. They have provided Rosie and I with incomparable dinner parties as neighbours of ours in Cardiff, not least of which includes when Nick nearly burnt his kitchen down making flambayed steak for me whilst Jacqui took my own wife out for her then Hen do.

It was a great loss to us when Nick and Jacqui finally left Wales. He has dedicated himself to following her as her career developed, so much so that he has now pre-empted her return to Scotland in the wake of MMC and MTAS.

So without further prolonging your hunger to eat, I would ask you all to charge your glasses and toast happiness to the bride and groom.

The bride and groom.