Ellis saw us at about five. He came over with a glass in his hand and looked at the top of that baby’s head, and I watched a man do arithmetic in roughly four seconds.
And he said: “Is that why you came?”
And I said no, and it was true, and he did not believe me, and he went back to his wedding.
And the speeches, which I sat through with a baby on me.
Ellis spoke for nine minutes. He said the word family eleven times. I counted, because I needed something to do with my head.
And at about minute six he did the thing that I think, in the end, is the most accurate portrait of that man that exists.
He thanked, by name, in front of two hundred and eleven people: his mother, Ondine’s parents, his best man, the venue — and Piers Yardley, “without whom none of this would have been possible.”
None of this.
He meant the wedding. He meant the flowers and the marquee and the string quartet.
Marguerite Oyelowo played that video in a room in the February and stopped it at minute six and asked me whether he had appeared to be joking.
