The wedding of the year was to be spectacularly held in one of the finer castles in the English Countryside. It was splashed across all of the newspapers, with lists of the famous guests or ‘rent a crowd’ that would be attending for at least two weeks before the actual event. Adequate time for any would be gatecrasher or demon paparazzi to plan their route to hedonistic heaven. They would all be there the write ups screamed with such excitement never seen before for a society wedding, not since the Royal Wedding in 1981 was there such pandemonium over the security and guest list. Those society kings and queens who had sent acceptance letters to the grooms mother included: Palm Beach Pamela, the society sunshine queen that would travel around the world in her private jet following the polo jet set and bedding them, one by one.
P.B.P. so named as her skin was as tough as an old rhino’s from too much sun, alcohol and partying. Pamela would spend the year, following the sun around the world, snaring each young stud that walked into her path. There had been recent rumours that she was about to marry one such stud, a gorgeous Argentine polo player by the name of Canto Perineum, with a legendary cock as long and as strong as his most muscular stallions. Canto owned the most beautiful ranch in the country and surprise, surprise, funnily enough was also one of the richest men in the Southern Hemisphere. Apparently he had promised Pamela that if she married him this year, he would pay for her face, breast and tummy lift to try to make her look like a pert nineteen year old all over again. Hopefully Pamela would have recovered suitably enough to attend the amazing wedding so that the whole media crew could gawp at her ‘work’ as they called the surgically enhanced that they reported on.
Contessa Valiuma de la Andepressanta would also be attending with her newest ski bum beau. The Countessa lived most of the year in Gstaad, was a demon skier and had an impeccable background including an education at Rosey and two billionaire husbands that had somehow died on her within a year of marrying and had left her a vast fortune on which she most certainly enjoyed herself to the full on. Valiuma bored with her billions had spent increasing time enjoying the old white powder rather than the powder of her beloved slopes. The last article I remember reading about her described how she had almost died last Christmas of septicemia, from too much party snow up her surgically enhanced nostrils.
Echinacea Kleinwort Jenson, the German banking heiress, who was now on her third marriage at the age of twenty seven. Echinacea and Valiuma were best friends and played the international party circuit together beautifully. They were a doubly successful poker team and played for huge sums of money against the boys at their weekly London
The most annoying of the whole Euro-trash group however, was Hermione von St John’s Wort-Winklehoffen. I had already met Hermione a number of times since the fated wedding that I crashed and first ‘met’ her properly on the dancefloor of Tramp. She had thankfully not recognised me at one of Billy’s extravagant drinks parties that he had thrown just before his death. Wort-Winklehoffen made it plainly obvious that she was desperate to get into my husband’s pants and whenever Billy was in the room, she made a point of purposely standing with her back to me. She behaved as though I had practically fallen off the ‘scene’ and I was subversively blanked whenever I had the misfortune to see her.
Oh, I almost forgot that Parisian jewellery designer cow, Catalie Hydro, who was definitely not my cup of tea. She was also at the wedding of the year, parading her bag of tat for everyone to buy from her and thinking that she was the best dressed woman in London
So we made our way to the wedding of the year, or possibly the decade. Myself and two gay male friends, who are two of my favourite people in the world. The three of us had been talking about the possibility of ‘accepting an invitation’ to the wedding for a few weeks beforehand and thought it might be a hoot. What better way to spend a Saturday night than to be handcuffed and arrested by the local old bill. With security rife, how the hell would we do it? Why did we want to do it? How would we feel if we found gatecrashers at our own weddings? I drove up from London
James and Edmund had always said that I was a gay man trapped in a woman’s body. I found myself getting very upset at this crazy suggestion and told them that there was absolutely nothing ‘trapped’ about my personality whatsoever, even if it did mean that I could not quite explain why I adored dancing to Hazel Dean’s greatest hits. We giggled as I drove to the venue and did not analyse the way that we would make our entrance into the castle grounds, which we hoped, was not accompanied by a whopping great moat. Besides, we were far more concerned about finding the bloody place, without an aide memoir of so much as a map of the area or a previous dry-run recce.
A great friend of ours, Araminta Dunkley, who apparently had multiple experience in the art of graceful gate crashing, had come up with the ingenuous idea of trotting up to the castle door with a wine glass in each of our hands, as though we had momentarily left the wedding throng to take in a little air before dining. Araminta had been successful hundreds of times with this clever wheeze at various book launches, rock group after show parties and even society weddings. The only time that Araminta had come unstuck was when she had taken a large balloon size wine glass, fill with Chablis to a party filled with non-drinkers clutching their alcohol-free fruit cocktails. It was the best piece of advice of the whole evening that we could have got. Those wine glasses, looking back, even if they were cheap cut glass from the local ESSO garage, were our absolute saving grace.
Graceful gate crashing it was not! The half a mile drive to the castle was as dark as hell and at low beam, with palpitating heart, I nearly managed to screw up the start to the evening by driving into the entrance’s steepest ditch. The main entrance was swarming with paparazzi and ruddy faced locals shouting the names of the well-known faces inside the stunning looking marquee. It certainly did not look like this gate crashing lark was going to be the biggest breeze of our lives. Our wine glasses were held with the grip of an SAS soldier in Sierra Leone
So in gay shoes and my Jimmy Choos, we trampled across an ‘alternative route’ around the castle walls and the adjacent, surprisingly for this time of year, rather muddy cow field. I have to say that when we realised that we might have to scale the castle’s fortressed walls at one point, we paled in terror and nearly let fly the whole idea to retreat back to the safety of my VW and the local nightclub. Especially as the ropes and ladders that we had forgotten to bring with us AND high heels (worn by all three of us!) was not quite the ideal situation to find oneself in when faced by a bit of impromptu wall scaling and Oxfordshire cow merde. We were unquestionably not having it all at nine o’clock that fateful Saturday night.
However, the ghost of party spirit was on our side that night and fifty metres hence, we fell upon a five foot wooden fence which we decided was worth getting a leg over for. We swiftly got a leg over, only to be encountered on the other side by a young girl with a playful Jack Russell. The dog apparently belonged to Lady B, the bride groom’s mother, who would be along any minute to check on her beloved hound. A great deal of fuss was made by us towards the stunned looking terrier and our new found friend, namely Lady B’s nanny and our orientation became a little more louche and relaxed as we happily walked inside the walled gardens. Hurrahs all round, hugs for each of us, we had got in. That is until we were ‘found’ by a burly security guard manning the premises.
With wine glasses still firmly in our hands even after the fence climb, we decided that the best thing to do in this situation was to sit down in the conveniently placed herb garden terrazzo and feign me not feeling on best form to say the least. Mr. Security asked (just a little suspicion rising in his voice), if we were lost. I replied in a confident but relaxed voice that I had not been feeling terribly well and had wanted to come for a bit of a walk around the castle grounds and breathe a little fresh air to make me feel better before embarking on dinner. Mr. S scared the living daylights out of us when he explained that the dobermans and rottweilers were out patrolling the castle tonight and that it was not a safe idea to be walking around on our own.
Thanking him for his concern and that I was feeling a touch better, the security guard kindly showed us the correct and safest way to the marquee. Had we not been carrying our now extensively finger stained wine glasses we would not have got away with it. Don’t even need to go to Brixton these days to live life on the edge. Just walk through Hyde Park in a thunder & lightning storm and you’ve pretty much had it, or indeed here at Superbenders Castle
Shit, bugger, fuck. The five hundred starry night arseholes were still on the main course of their dinner and the three of us looked like complete loonies again, standing outside of the marquee huddled under a tree. Security and dogs patrolled past us at too regular intervals for comfort. Anyone videoing our trepidation would find it was like watching a farce, akin to television’s Big Brother but hopefully a touch more glamorous and without the mingers. Not only that, but James had decided to bring Space cake with him as our own wedding night celebratory dinner! What the hell, we chomped it down and giggled for what seemed an eternity under the ancient oak until ………………in like Flynn………………Well I’m not going to tell you quite how we did it now am I, but it was bloody good. Not a breeze, no James Bond heroics to get in, but it tuned into a truly memorably five in the morning sort of a night.
The house was packed, every gold backed chair was taken and the gallery stood cheek by jowl. Everyone behaved impeccably wooden, no running, no diving, no petting for these guys. They were all here, to see and be seen, with their rented designer clothes and Harry Winston loaned spectacular diamonds. Ah, there by the waterfall was the bride and groom, the stunning Dozy Malteser and her new husband Queenie Burghley, who looked like they’d been on Senokat all week. I observed that Dozy and Queenie had spent ages chatting inanely to Stefan Bling-Bling the cosmetics queen, perhaps he was their dealer. Edmund, James and I were not especially assiduous at this gate crashing business; however, one could not fault the wow factor of the party, dominated by the ruthless doyenne of Supershyster PR. At last we were having it all.
We danced, we stared and we marveled at the spectacle before our eyes. There were rose bowls filled full of Columbian’s finest on each table complete with silver straws engraved with the initials of each guest, there was a five foot tower of the most delicious smelling flowers artistically entwined with fruits hardly imaginable, gracing each table’s centerpiece. But the most interesting spectacle of all was the flirting; smooching and bickering amongst the sea of Pilates toned bodies, moving on from the partner that they had come to the party with and moving swiftly on to the new pick up, in one deftly maneuver. Including a guest appearance by the three musketeers on the wedding evening video (yes we thought that a bit naff too for a celebration of this calibre) and Edmund’s drunken ‘Darling you look fabulous, congratulations’, speech to the startled bride! We all thought that this was terribly brave on Edmund’s part, what wouldn’t have made a great party, without a bit of kitsch?!
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