What a speech from us reads like.

Invented example, written to show the style

Good evening, everyone. For those who don’t know me, I’m Jamie, and I’ve been Tom’s best friend for twenty-two years, which, as he likes to point out, is longer than I have ever kept a houseplant alive.

Before I start, a few thank-yous. To Sara’s parents, Helen and Richard, for a beautiful day and for making all of us feel so welcome. To the bridesmaids, who look wonderful and have kept this whole operation running to time. And to Tom, for asking me to do this. I said yes immediately. I have regretted it daily since.

I have known Tom since we were eleven, when he turned up to his first football practice in his school shoes and scored twice. That is Tom. Wrong equipment, right result.

It has been the pattern of his life. He took his driving test in his dad’s car with a wing mirror held on by tape, and passed first time. He went to his first job interview in a borrowed suit two sizes too big. He is still there eleven years later, and they have given him a team of his own. He has never once been properly prepared, and somehow it has never once mattered.

I did have a whole section planned about our holiday in Malaga in 2011, but Sara’s grandmother is sitting at table two and she has been very kind to me today. So let’s just say Tom learned two things on that trip: that sun cream is not optional, and that a moped will not go up a hill with two grown men on it. We pushed it the last mile. He insisted on steering.

Then he met Sara, and for the first time in twenty years I watched him plan something properly. He booked the restaurant. He ironed a shirt. He asked me, very seriously, whether one rose was romantic or a bit much. Sara, I can tell you now: he bought twelve, panicked, and gave eleven to the waiter.

For the record, they had met two weeks before that, on rival teams at a pub quiz in Bristol. Sara’s team won. Tom’s came ninth out of nine, and he still maintains the music round was rigged. On the walk home he told me, very calmly, that he had asked for her number, and that he was going to need my help with something. I did not know yet that the something was roses.

Here is what I want you all to know about tonight. Tom has spent his whole life getting away with not trying very hard. With Sara, he has never stopped trying. He learned to cook, or at least to cook more than toast. He remembers her mum’s birthday. Last spring he ran his first half marathon, because Sara was running it and he wanted to be at the finish when she crossed the line. As it happens, she was twenty minutes ahead of him. But he got there.

Sara, you have made my best friend the most organised version of himself any of us has ever seen. You make him braver, and kinder, and a great deal better dressed. And you laugh at his jokes, which is more than I have managed since 2004.

Tom, mate, I am so proud of you. You have finally found the one thing worth turning up for properly.

So would you all please stand and raise your glasses. To Tom and Sara: right person, right result. To Tom and Sara.

Invented example, written to show the style

Hi, everyone. I’m Claire, Emma’s older sister and, for the record, her maid of honor by birthright. Thank you all for being here, and thank you to Daniel’s parents, Mark and Lisa, for welcoming our whole loud family into yours.

Emma and I shared a bedroom for fourteen years, which means I know two things about her. She talks in her sleep, and she is always, always right about people.

The sleep talking I will save for another night. Mostly she argued with a substitute teacher called Mr. Pruitt. Once, at two in the morning, she told him very firmly that he could not grade a book report on vibes.

But the second thing matters. When we were kids, Emma could tell in about thirty seconds whether someone was kind. She told me in tenth grade that my prom date was “fine, but not great,” and she was right about that too. At work she is the person everyone asks before they hire anyone, because Emma just knows.

So when she came home after a second date and said, very calmly, “I am going to marry him,” I did not laugh. I asked what his name was. It was Daniel. Daniel, I have been waiting four years to tell you that she called it.

And she was right again. Daniel is the man who drove three hours through a snowstorm when Emma’s car broke down outside Albany, and spent the drive back asking about her day so she would not feel bad. He learned every word of our family’s terrible Thanksgiving song, and he sings it louder than any of us. He looks at my sister like she is the only person in the room, even when the room is our parents’ kitchen with eleven people in it.

Emma, you have always seen people clearly. Thank you for seeing me too, even in the years I was stealing your sweaters.

Please raise your glasses. To Emma, who always knows, and to Daniel, who proved her right. To Emma and Daniel!

Invented example, written to show the style

Good afternoon, everyone. For those I haven’t met, I’m Peter, Anna’s dad. On behalf of my wife, Susan, and myself, welcome, and thank you for coming, some of you from a very long way. A special welcome to James’s parents, Moira and Iain, who have come down from Aberdeen, and to Anna’s grandmother, Joan, who at ninety-one is the reason none of us were allowed to be late this morning.

Susan and I have been looking forward to today for a long time. I have been dreading this part of it for almost as long, so do bear with me.

When Anna was seven, she ran a lemonade stand at the end of our drive. She charged ten pence a cup, and twenty pence if you wanted it without the bits of lemon she had dropped in. She made four pounds and gave half of it to the neighbour who had lent her the table.

That is still Anna. She works hard, she drives a fair bargain, and she always remembers who helped.

She was a determined child. At nine she decided to swim a full length of the town pool before her cousin could, so she went every Saturday morning that winter, and I sat on the bench in the steam reading the same newspaper for four months. She did it in March. Her cousin, I am told, has still not forgiven her.

At sixteen she announced she would be a vet, then a lawyer, then, for one memorable summer, a drummer. We supported all three, one of them through a closed door. In the end she became a teacher, and the best kind: the kind who still gets cards from children she taught years ago. I like to think the drumming helped with the noise.

Being Anna’s dad has been the great privilege of my life. She has made me laugh more than anyone except her mother, she has made me worry more than anyone at all, and she rings me every Sunday without fail to tell me what I am doing wrong in the garden.

Then, five years ago, she brought James home for Sunday lunch. I will admit I was ready not to like him. That is the job. But he offered to wash up before pudding, he asked me three questions about my tomatoes and listened to all three answers, and when Joan told her story about the lamp for the fourth time, he laughed as if it were the first. By the time he left, Susan had told him to call her Sue, which took me a year.

James, I have watched you with Anna for five years now. You are steady when she is in a hurry, and you make her laugh when she is taking things too seriously, which, as you know, is often. You never try to make her smaller. You make room for her to be exactly who she is, and as her dad I could not ask for more.

James, you have married a generous woman. I suspect you already know that. And Moira and Iain, thank you for raising a son we are so proud to welcome into our family.

Anna, you have been my girl for thirty-one years. Today you are James’s wife, and I find, to my surprise, that I am not losing anything at all. I am just gaining someone else to do the washing up.

Ladies and gentlemen, please stand and raise your glasses. To Anna and James.

Invented example, written to show the style

Good evening, everyone, and thank you all for coming. I’m Rachel, the eldest, which means I have known Dad longer than anyone here except Mum and Uncle Steve.

Dad turned sixty this week, and the family group chat has been busy. Mostly with photos of the 1987 moustache. I will not be showing it tonight. Mum has asked me nicely.

What I want to tell you about instead is a Saturday in 1999, when I was nine and convinced I could not learn to ride a bike. Dad took a whole day off, which he never did, and ran beside me up and down Elm Street until it was dark. He never let go of the seat until I asked him to.

He has been doing that for me, in one way or another, ever since.

He did it when I moved to Glasgow for university, and he drove the van six hours and spent two days building a bookshelf that still leans to the left. He did it when I failed my first driving test, and took me out every evening for a month in the car park behind the hardware shop. And he did it the year Mum was sick, when he learned to cook, badly at first and then very well, and never once let us see that he was worried.

That is who Dad is. He is the person running next to you, holding on until you are ready, and letting go the moment you ask.

Dad, I know you are not big on speeches, and I can see you checking your watch, so I will stop soon. Sixty suits you. You are also, for the record, still the only person in this family who can fold a fitted sheet. You are still the first person we call with good news, and the first we call when something breaks, which is usually a car. Thank you for every Saturday. We are so glad we get to spend this one with you.

Everyone, please raise your glasses. To Dad. Happy sixtieth.

Invented example, written to show the style

Good afternoon, everyone. If I could ask you to put the cake down for just a moment. Thank you. I promise this is shorter than our hold music.

When I started here in 2009, Linda gave me two pieces of advice. “Never trust the printer on the third floor,” and “If a customer is shouting, they are scared.” The printer has since been replaced. The second one I have used every week for fifteen years.

That is Linda in two sentences. Practical, kind, and usually right.

Linda answered the phone on the first ring for thirty-one years. She remembered the names of customers’ dogs. And when the system went down on Black Friday 2016, it was Linda who walked the whole team through taking orders on paper, with a smile and a supply of good pens. We took more orders that day than the year before. Nobody has ever been able to explain it.

Half the people in this room were trained by Linda, and you can tell, because you still write the customer’s name at the top of the page before you pick up the phone. That is her. So is the spreadsheet of everyone’s birthdays that nobody asked for and everybody relies on, and the jar of mints on her desk that has somehow never once been empty.

People stay where they are looked after, and Linda looked after all of us. When my son was born, there was a lasagna in my freezer before we got home from the hospital. I still do not know how she got in.

Linda, you made this a better place to work, and we will miss you. You have told us the plan is the garden, the grandchildren and finally driving the coast road you have talked about since 2012. We hope it is everything you want. And when we ring to ask where you kept the spare toner, we know you will answer on the first ring.

Everyone, please raise your glasses, or your coffee cups. To Linda, and thirty-one years.

Invented example, written to show the style

Okay, everyone, two minutes, and then the pizza is yours.

Six months ago I stood in this room and told you we would move every customer to the new booking system by the end of September. A few of you laughed. Priya wrote “September of which year?” on the whiteboard, and I left it there, because it was a fair question.

Last Friday at 4:52 in the afternoon, the last account went across. Forty-one thousand customers, and not a single lost booking.

I want to say thank you properly, because “great teamwork, everyone” does not cover it. Thank you, Marcus, for the night in July when the import failed at eleven o’clock and you stayed until it ran clean, then came in at nine the next morning and told nobody. Thank you, Priya, for the checklist, all ninety-three steps of it, which we followed, and which worked. Thank you, Jo and the support team, for taking twice the usual calls in the week of the switch and keeping every one of them calm. And thank you to everyone who quietly covered someone else’s work so they could focus on this.

Most of this was careful, unglamorous work done well, again and again, by people who cared about getting it right. That is the best thing I can say about any team.

Priya, you can rub September off the whiteboard now. Thank you, all of you.