I still haven't got both feet back down on the ground after England's fabulous triumph in the World Cup.

Last Saturday morning I had to go straight from the pub's big screen to conduct a wedding at St Michael's here in the City.

I must say, it was the most joyful wedding I've ever officiated at. Even the bridesmaids under the torrential downpour chattered endlessly about the wiles of Jonny Wilkinson.

This is three great sporting occasions in my life now, so I suppose I can look forward only to living out my days under anticlimax before I have to hang up my surplice, stow away my cassock or wind my dog collar in - or whatever parsons are supposed to do when they retire.

The other two moments of unbridled ecstasy were, back in 1966, England's victory in the soccer World Cup and, when I was only a lad, our wresting the Ashes from the Aussies at the Oval in 1953.

I can still hear the clatter of willow on leather as "Brylcreem boy" Denis Compton struck the winning boundary.

It's funny - so to speak - how you'll laugh at anything when you're in the celebratory mood. After that wedding, off we all went to the Counting House - a place that used to be a City bank but which is now one of the best pubs in London - and stood round the bar regaling one another with silly newspaper headlines. Somebody remembered the report from the Second World War - "Eighth Army Push Bottles Up Germans" - and we were all falling about like Aussie defenders in the mud.

Then someone mentioned the news of the disgrace of the former African leader Canaan Banana on account of his sexual misadventures: "Banana Jailed For Sodomy." And that set everybody off: "MacArthur Flies Back To Front." "Biggles Flies Undone," and so on.

The bar room conversation soon got round to unlikely stories - you know, how the most unbelievable daftnesses was spoken on momentous occasions with all due solemnity.

For instance, Professor Erasmus Wilson of Oxford University declared in 1848, "When the Paris Exhibition closes, electric light will close with it and no more will ever be heard about it." Even the great inventor Thomas Edison was not above the occasional booboo: "It is apparent to me," he said in 1895 "that the possibilities of the aeroplane have been exhausted."

But such gaffes are mere tittle tattle compared with the blunders of the greatest men. Back in 1939, Churchill - six years before he and the US president decided to drop the atom bomb on Hiroshima - declared: "Atomic energy might be as good as our present day explosives, but it unlikely to produce anything more dangerous."

If you are ever tempted to despair over your conspicuous lack of talent, think again and cheer up, for it was said of Fred Astaire: "Can't act. Can't sing. Slightly bald. Dances a little." And to Marilyn Monroe: "You'll never make it in movies." But, getting back to last Saturday's wedding reception and tales at the bar about sport and sex, one purple-faced geezer said: "All the girls at that school were either hockey players or whores."

"I'll have you know my wife went to that school!"

"Really? What position did she play?"

* Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.