We scrimped on our wedding to go on a round-the-world honeymoon – here’s how we did it

We also spent time on Lanai. Both are beautiful, but Hawaii wasn’t for us. Each humongous American chain hotel we stayed in seemed designed to rinse every last cent from you and the food was uniformly dreadful, including the poke bowl that somehow removed my inlay while I was eating it. I picked out my filling and rinsed it in the sink. “Be careful, don’t let it …” shouted my husband just as the tap blasted £800 of dentistry down the drain. The whole point of a tropical island to me is the beach. But on arrival at each resort, we were given a map to show you in which direction you’d be drowned if you dared go anywhere near the water.

Kauai was endlessly fascinating for the feral chickens that populate it and, when we took a helicopter over parts of the island that you can’t reach by car, and along the wild coast, we were bewitched by the giant white horses of the sea below. If we left some of our heart over that water, we left a piece of our brain on an excruciating movie-themed tour of the island, guided by a man with a sonorous voice as big as his waistline and absolutely nothing to say, but doing it ad nauseam.

Our final stop was Los Angeles, partly because we hadn’t been for a few years, mostly because the connections back to London made more sense than any other. We saw old friends, and had a rip-roaring night out with the wondrous baldheaded drag queen Constance Cooper, famous for being one of one Robert Mapplethorpe’s subjects.
Constance was still hosting her night at the Chateau Marmont when we visited, and we all ended up at the gay dive the Gold Coast Bar until the early hours, hearing gossip about Joe Dallesandro and assorted Warhol acolytes. It all felt insanely glamorous.