High life
Not a bore we know
Taki
oh boy, what a weekend I've just had up in Leicestershire with Princess Di and Fergie!! Although I am known to be the epitome of discretion, I'm afraid there will be some questions asked in the House whenever the sybarites who run our lives decide to get back to work.
And it's even more embarrassing be- cause I now hear that this year it will be my rival who will be replacing his mother and opening Parliament. Oy veh, what is a poor Greek boy to do but get out of town come October. Mind you, I regret nothing because — as the great Barnaby Conrad once wrote — it was fun while it lasted.
But enough of holding back. Unlike Major Ron I will come clean, and to hell with the consequences. I went up to one of the most beautiful of counties for the wedding of Alex Dolbey to the delicious Susie Murray-Philipson, as did the Princess of Wales and the Duchess of York. Unfor- tunately, there were another 247-odd peo- ple doing the same thing, and although I didn't get to talk to or even see the two aforementioned ladies, I thought I'd drop their names as everyone else seems to be doing nowadays.
Perhaps our lack of contact was due to my having reverted to type and gotten blind drunk during the dinner that pre- ceded the dance. By the time the Zulu music started to rock I was in no state to make the banal conversation one is sup- posed to make with royals, so I gave them both a miss. Others were not so fortunate, namely Cornelia, the sister of the bride. Cornelia Faulkner is as nice a girl as one can hope to find during the Eighties, yet even she did a Brutus on me and rolled her eyes upwards when a bore came up and asked her to dance while yours truly was in the middle of a long soliloquy. What she meant was, what took the bore so long?
Then there was Birdie Fortescue, just as nice as Cornelia, but just as treacherous towards me that night. And many others whose names escape me. Needless to say, it wasn't all my fault. Having passed the last month in the Olive Republic, I wasn't used to the wonderful but strong claret served by my host and it went down a bit too fast. The result was that I crashed my rented car into that of a friend and then, in the company of the soybean king of Chica- go, went looking for Bruern — my ex- ancestral country seat in Oxfordshire — thinking it was adjacent to the marquee.
This is not to say that the weekend was one long disaster for me. The opposite, in fact. Although I remember little of the dance, I did notice that during the recep- tion Mr Tom King, the minister with the cushiest job in the Cabinet, raised his glass to his niece, the bride, and to her husband, and found it to be empty as the best man, nervously waiting to give the next speech, had downed it along with his own.
Towards the end of the evening I man- aged to sober up and that is when I met a man I've wanted to meet for a long time. He is the brother of the bride, and his name is Hylton. The reason I've wanted to meet him is because of the remark he once made to Frau Kluge, the ex-stripper who is now married to one of America's richest men. Mrs Kluge is a nice woman, as most strippers are, but she suffers from an extreme case of royalitis. In fact, when she sees a royal — even Ronnie Ferguson she tends to tremble, go weak at the knees, and all the rest of the things that afflict people who suffer from the disease. One day, in Virginia, where the Kluges keep a large house for expatriate Englishmen who have shaken hands with a royal, she announced that the King of Greece had just rung her from Europe and told her he and his party had shot 11 boars. 'Oh dear,' expostulated Hylton, 'I hope no one we know.'
Of course there were no Kluges around that night, and I guess this is why Prince Philip didn't make it. But not to worry. It was a hell of a party despite some people's protestations to Harry Worcester to keep his boring friends (Christopher Gilmour and Taki) to himself. But something tells me it was my last wedding party for quite a while.
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