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It was surprising how many people have said the most difficult part of the wedding wasn’t choosing the dress or deciding on the venue, or even getting the three year old bridesmaid to stand still while she was getting her dress made, it was doing the table plan.

Deciding who sits next to whom at the reception is an exercise in tact and diplomacy. In many families there is someone who doesn’t talk to someone else and if one of the parents have remarried, then there can be extra hurdles to cross.

I’d heard that families can spend hours on their table plans, scribbling names on bits of paper and then crossing them off again and moving them to another table. I was talking to my mum about this and in true ‘Blue Peter’ style she came up with a solution.

We put all the names of our wedding guests on small pieces of cardboard and stuck a bit of sticky-backed Velcro to the back of each one. As we had 76 guests to the wedding breakfast, excluding the top table, we took 8 stiff paper plates to represent each table and stuck 10 pieces of the opposite side of the sticky backed Velcro around the edge of each plate (representing the maximum number of guests who would be seated at each table).

We were then able to arrange our guests around each table, pulling them on and off with ease, moving them to different positions until we were quite happy with the seating plan.

The top table is relatively straight-forward. It usually comprises of the bride’s father next to the bride and the bride’s mother next to the groom. The groom’s father sits next to the Bride’s mother and the groom’s mother sits next to the Bride’s father. The Best man and chief bridesmaid also sit on the top table.

If parents have divorced, separated or remarried, and you want to stick to protocol, then it is usually just the birth parents who sit at the top table and partners and step-parents are treated as honoured guests and should be seated closest to the top table.