Yesterday we went to celebrate the wedding of Wills and Kate at the home of our long-standing friends David and Lyn Griffin. Good company, fine champagne, excellent TV snacks which would have made quite a decent lunch by themselves followed by an actual lunch laid out in a huge marquee in the grounds of their manor house which, I gather, was first mentioned in the Domesday Book.

All in all an excellent day out, and one which - inevitably - evoked memories of the wedding day of Prince William’s parents, almost thirty years ago.

Yet I have to say that, for me, the really memorable thing about the 29th of July 1981 was not the sight of Prince Charles marrying Lady Diana Spencer (or ‘Ladee Dee’, as the French called her) but that incredible first taste of slightly vinegrated rice balls adorned with seaweed and raw fish.

How it came about was as follows. As you can see from the photograph above, on my return from Algeria in 1978 I had - to my absolute amazement - been given the job of running a language school: Davies’s School of English in the rather swish north London suburb of Highgate.  And we, as a Highgate-based business, were approached to see if we would like to  set up a stall on Pond Square as part of the Royal Wedding celebrations.

The idea was to have some sort of product to sell, with a generous percentage of any profit going to one of the Prince of Wales’ charities. And I didn’t have to think very long before I came up with an idea of what might go down well with an English crowd out celebrating: food.

Not just any food, however. None of your run of the mill burgers, bangers or kebabs.  ‘International Food cooked by our students’ was what I had in mind.

By then I’d been running the school for coming up three years and had introduced a number of innovations. One of the most popular was something which (literally) spiced up our end of term parties. Three or four weeks in advance I would put up a notice asking students interested in cooking food from their own countries to attend a meeting. French would be put with French, Turks with Turks and so on, while I explained that they would have to think of food which could either be cooked on the spot in the school kitchens, or be prepared - with permission - at the house of one of the host families.

Budgets were fixed, and trade-offs were made, to ensure that there was a balance between cold and hot foods, meat-based and vegetarian, mains and desserts. I even relaxed the absolute rule which stated ‘Only English to be spoken at school’ since, as one of the Italians told me ‘is impossible to cook in English!’.

Came the great day and everything was ready. There were to be 7 or 8 different dishes on offer ranging from salade niçoise to lamb tajine, from Canadian Maple Syrup Pudding Cake (or as they call it in Quebec, Pouding Chômeur) to the afore-mentioned sushi.  Teams of cooks were at the ready to add last-minute touches, and volunteers would be transporting the food the few hundred metres from North Grove to Pond Square.  

My secretary Sally, whose lettering was exquisite, had prepared a series of cards with each dish named in English and the language of origin and we had brought down an ancient blackboard on an easel to which the cards were attached and on which the prices were to be written in chalk.

And there was the problem. I didn’t have the slightest clue what to charge for the dishes, especially the more exotic ones.  None of us non-Japanese had ever tasted sushi and I wondered how it would go down. Nowadays you can get box lunches of sushi in Boots or Sainsbury’s, for goodness sake, but in 1981 it would prove as popular, I feared, as deep-fried cuddly kitten paws.

Was I wrong!  Maybe the populace of Highgate had a much higher degree of gustatory adventurism than the rest of the UK; maybe the combination of a lovely 19-year-old allegedly virgin princess, a day off work and beautiful summer weather had put everybody into a good mood, up for any new experience. Whatever the reason, they were waving money at us, eager for anything we had on offer.  I soon found myself rubbing the original modest prices off the blackboard, raising them to quite ludicrous amounts, while simultaneously urging Sally and Jenny, my deputy, to should cut down the sizes of the portions.

Back at the school the teams of cooks did their best to keep up with demand but, eventually, we ran out of supplies. And, by the time the photographer came round to take the photo below, Steve and I were forced to mime being fed by our subservient but gallantly smiling female colleagues.

So those are my memories of the last great Royal Wedding. There’s just one thing I ask myself: why didn’t I foresee the great British craze for Japanese food and invest, say, in Nobu or Yo! Sushi?  Maybe now I could actually afford to go and try the authentic stuff in Japan.