The wedding market is Big worldwide, it creates jobs and keeps businesses across many areas including hotels, specialist venues, entertainment, decoration, organisation alive and thriving. It is also a happy business to be in. The wedding couples want to create the most beautiful day in their lives and it is wonderful to be part of their stories. It does however require a high level of organisation and I have learnt, more importantly, a sense of reassuring calm, which ensures that everything flows, even when things go wrong which they sometimes do. A few years’ ago, relatively early in my hotel career, we had a big wedding at Le Manoir. The couple was young and successful, everything had to be perfect, and there seemed to be an unlimited budget. There was to a live band the night before the wedding, a a glamorous wedding with dinner and a crazy pool brunch party the day after. Everything had been meticulously planned and the weather was gorgeous, phew we were not worried about any rain. The guests arrived and the party began, everyone was happy, especially the hosts. Late in the evening the kitchen staff came to see me to say there was no more water in the kitchen. I checked the guest loos, no water. I checked the hotel rooms, none there either. With limited experience my initial thought was that we had been cut off our water supply. I called the neighbours, they had water. We decided to go searching in the dark to find the where our water supply came from. As we approached the entrance of the hotel we saw water flooding down the street. There it was! The main pipe had burst and there was a like a “Jet d’eau” in our garden. Had to find a plumber, but it was midnight and I had 100+ guests around my pool who would soon go to bed to their rooms, where there would be no water to flush, no water to bath and what I was to find out no water to get rid of the sick from all the drinking which had been going on. I found a plumber, via the Web, who did show up (at a hefty price of course), but not surprisingly he did not have the equipment required to fix the problem in his truck. We had to wait until the following morning, luckily Balitrand opens at 7.30am, before the plumber to fix the pipe, by which time some of the guests were taking water from the pool to flush their loos. By 10.30 the problem was solved and the party could carry on.