I’m trying not to be excited about the wedding. I know that I’m flunking my civic duty in this. It’s as though the country is on hand to be a giant congregation, cheering on a happy couple, drinking a toast to them, and supporting them through the ensuing years. Go, Will and Kate, go!

The thing is, I was excited enough about Will’s mother’s wedding. I was nearly ten at the time. Everyone wanted to feel as close as possible to St Paul’s Cathedral. My mother spent the day in a darkened room upstairs, so that she could photograph the television. I’m pretty sure I was in charge of a tape recorder, so that we didn’t miss a syllable of Charles’s name. How narrowly those nuptials missed the time when every home had video.

Can any marriage sustain that hype? It’s only recently that we’ve come to doubt it. So awestruck were we by the train that Elizabeth Emmanuel had follow Diana up the aisle, that it’s taken us an age to think, wasn’t that a bit much? The problems began, not just for the couple, but for the rest of us: this was a wedding that ushered in The Eighties; the Hello Wedding; the years during which celebrities used this is a pattern by which they could work their own media magic.

Then came Anthea Turner and the confectionary; and Catherine Zeta-Jones and the crasher-snapper; the Goodies, the Rooneys, and the Goodies again.

I’ve been brought up to be wary of so big a bash. My parents considered themselves married when they went into an empty church in the shadow of a gibbet. “Will you look after me?” my father asked. “I’ll do my best,” my mother replied. (She ended up doing more than that.)

And in those two impulses – the one, to savour a royal couple’s ceremony, and the other, to celebrate one’s marriage as discreetly as possible – there are things to guide us through the week or so ahead. William is a celebrity of a peculiar kind: one who, in time, will be distinguished from the rest of us by having a priest put some oil on his head; one who follows on from monarchs who believed that God put them there. If celebrities have something of the divine about them, then he has it in the most formal sense. Now he’s taking someone with him for the journey.

But, since the years when the divine right of kings was a big idea, there have been civil wars, revolutions and Royal It’s A Knockout. The monarchs of the future can get away with being pretty much Dutch. By all means let William and Kate have a splendid simkhas; and let what a spokesperson said on behalf of the bride’s mother be true, that the wedding be exquisite in every detail. Still, I can’t help wishing for them something more private. And for the rest of us? Rather than imitate the anointed, let’s hope that they take our simpler unions as a pattern for theirs.

Tom Payne is the author of Fame: from the Bronze Age to Britney