Margo, Jerry, Madge & A Magical...Marriage?

In a full and varied life it has been my pleasure to attend some pretty spectacular parties. Boy George’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream/Summer Solstice’ themed birthday in 1995; I went as Titania Fairy Queen and danced with the kaftan-clad birthday boy. The 1997 opening of the Calvin Klein Collection boutique in Paris where the man himself took quite a shine to me and sent me home with free, autographed smalls. The backstage bash at a Finsbury Park music festival in ’99 where a kids TV presenter and I made creative use of the luxury portaloos (and I earned my second Blue Peter badge). The night at Dirty Dishes where the mirrorball came down (for which I may have been partially responsible…) The soap awards after-party where I challenged Lionel Blair to a dance-off - and won. And yes, my very own ‘Studio 54 Meets Disco Bloodbath’ Hallowe’en 2006 extravaganza where TWBD transformed my bachelor pad into a blood red Eighties New York discotheque and Patrick Batemans and Morticia Addamses thronged the Clapham Road. None of these however come close to matching the sheer style, glamour, excitement, emotion and beauty of one of the happiest days of my life – Margo and Jerry’s wedding.

Even writing those words has brought a lump to my throat as I think back to the day just three weeks ago. Let’s get one thing out of the way before I begin the recollections though. Although the invitations said ‘Civil Partnership’, I and most of the other guests quickly came to refer to the occasion as the ‘wedding’ and I’m sticking with that. While one or two people I’ve spoken to baulk at calling a gay union (any gay union that is, not just Margo and Jerry’s) a ‘wedding’, for my money a ‘wedding’ as opposed to a ‘marriage’ is the whole shebang of ceremony, reception, evening do, speeches, confetti, drunk uncles, tearful aunties and fat bridesmaids getting fingered behind the marquee. Admittedly M & J’s wedding was far too classy to have the last of these (there was no marquee for a start) but a wedding it most certainly was and anyone who wants to say otherwise frankly wouldn’t have been invited. To my mind the terms ‘marriage’ or ‘civil partnership’ (or indeed, ‘civil marriage’) apply only to the mechanism via which the relationship becomes official in law; everything else is semantics.

So, down off my soapbox and on to the big day. Actually let’s start a few nights before when we - the grooms, the overseas visitors (Brick, Adam and Matty aka The Americans and Claire Mac, The Sicilian Widow), OLoC and myself – kicked off the festivities at where else but VauxhallVille. There we found the gang were in celebratory mood too, it being their first birthday. They’d gone for a Wild West theme, always one of my favourite dress-up choices, and entertainment was provided by the sublime Tina C who dedicated many a song to the happy couple. Timberlina, who I’m still just a little bit stalker-ish about, made sure our party was the centre of attention and although I think we may have pissed off the gorgeous Nathaniel De Ville by storming the stage for his line dancing finale it was the perfect way to start off the wedding weekend. Margo – under the influence of three bottles of Cava not to mention the caipirinhas we’d necked at Anne Frank’s House before leaving – fell on top of Sam the Wedding Planner, nearly knocking her out and resulting in not only a golf ball-sized lump on his left temple but also a black bruise to the tongue which he was lucky not to bite clean through. Which would certainly have made saying his vows somewhat tricky…

After a Friday spent recovering, Saturday saw me running a few errands for the boys and making the finishing touches to my outfit, before joining M & J, the Hollogays, The Americans, The Sicilian Widow and a huge contingent of their recently-arrived families for a long, boozy dinner at the local Italian. What was beautiful about that part of the celebrations was the realisation that this wasn’t just a wedding of two people who love each other deeply, but of their loved ones too; their friends and families, siblings and ex-lovers, colleagues, employers, employees, all brought together by the common bond of their love for one, the other or both of this gorgeous couple.

Sunday morning dawned and with it, The Big Day. The ceremony was due to start at 3.00 so I could afford a lie in even though – having been given the honour of being Master of Ceremonies – I had to be at the Prince of Wales Theatre, their chosen venue, at 2.00. I was up in good time but on looking in the mirror saw that a few late nights (and long days) had taken their toll on my usually flawless complexion and I looked pasty, puffy and – aaargh! – spotty. So, I put out a Facialist 911 call and within half an hour had a fully-trained expert on my doorstep armed with the finest products and strict orders to make me a supermodel. The results were nothing short of miraculous and I was dressed, groomed and out the door within the hour and got me to the ‘church’ just about on time.

What followed was nothing short of dreamlike.

After a walk through of the venue and timings with Sam the Wedding Planner (who’d made a good recovery from Thursday night’s near-fatal Margo-tumbling accident) the ushers (among them, The Agony Uncles) and I took our places to receive the guests as they arrived, and what a glamorous bunch they were. The hats, gowns, suits, corsages, fascinators, cravats, ties, jewellery and general sparkle with which everyone had adorned themselves made for a picture–perfect colourful congregation, led by an immaculately attired groom and groom; Margo in a beautiful checked two-piece, Jerry in a more sober, sharply tailored navy number. Their make-up artiste had worked miracles on Margo’s golf ball, rendering it all but invisible, and the swelling to his tongue had subsided enough for him to get his ‘I will’ out when the moment came.

That moment was at the near-climax of a truly beautiful ceremony which combined the very considered – thoughtful, literary readings expressing what love means to them – and the high camp – a choral rendition of a classically re-arranged ‘Crazy For You’ in honour of the boys’ own goddess, Mrs Ritchie. Taking place on the stage of the theatre, decorated with nothing more elaborate than huge hyacinths in monolithic glass vases, the ceremony was touching, honest, sincere and devotional. Only two things distracted from the emotion of it all. One was the registrar’s inability to pronounce the word ‘ask’, instead saying ‘arks’, bringing to mind Catherine Tate’s ‘Am I bovvered?’ schoolgirl Lauren. The other was, well, you’ve probably guessed – me, sobbing uncontrollably having been completely overwhelmed with emotion before I’d even arrived. I’d managed to hold it together long enough to announce the guests as they’d arrived and usher them into the auditorium but then totally lost it as the vows were read.

Still, I was able to get something of a grip and moved on to the champagne reception in the theatre’s main room, a fabulous art deco space overlooking Leicester Square, complete with sweeping staircase designed – and of course used – for grand entrances. Glenda and ActiveWill, the buffest boys anyone knows, had been talked into taking the role of Champagne Charlies and had spent many extra hours in the gym and many fewer hours eating to ensure that they were at the peak of their musculature for the occasion. Stripped to the waist of their skin-tight white jeans and sprinkled in gold body glitter, the boys toured the room filling guests’ flutes from Methuselahs of Perrier-Jouet and Laurent-Perrier, ensuring that by the time the cake – a glorious, just-shy-of-over-the-top pink iced confection – was ready to be cut, the majority of those in attendance were half cut themselves.

After a few group photos it was time for food, and a delicious, Cornucopian fork buffet had been set up in an adjoining, equally splendid room. Rosé – the boys’ favourite wine – flowed freely, rather too freely in my case considering my duties were not yet over, guests mingled, conversation flourished and love was all around.

Moving downstairs to a function room, transformed for the evening by who else but TWBD into a fantasy disco, the evening part of the bash got into full swing and more guests poured in. The drinks went down, the volume up, and revellers of every age, size and persuasion took to the dancefloor to throw their best shapes to the DJ’s sounds. The floor was cleared for the grooms to have their first dance, to the wonderfully personal choice of ‘Nothing Fails’ (more Madonna) and choreographed to a sufficient extent to impress without a trace of showing off (though God knows if you can’t show off at your own wedding, when can you?) Entertainment was provided by scene legend Dave Lynn, who had most people in stitches with the notable (and vocal) exception of a rather intoxicated distant relative of Jerry’s who was swiftly evicted by his mother.

Finally came the speeches and although five may sound excessive it was anything but, as each of the two best men, Margo’s brother and father and the boys themselves delivered very different but equally moving orations which between them managed to thank, involve, welcome and embrace everyone in the room, and beyond that those who weren’t there: the ‘absent friends’. Touchingly, the boys handed out gifts – beautiful, thoughtful, individually chosen gifts – to those of us who had had duties; I will cherish mine, a paperweight bearing the words ‘A Crown Of Life’ always. And as far as the formalities went, that was pretty much that and it was time to party.

By about 11 o’clock, I had been on the go for nine hours or so and been drinking for much of that. Coupled with my greatly heightened emotional state – partly due to the occasion and my love for Margo who I love like the brother I never had, and partly due to self-pity for my own recent break up from a relationship I’d invested so much hope in – and having rather upset Jerry with an ill-placed ‘joke’ that strayed the wrong side of politically incorrect, I realised that I was in no fit state to stay a second longer and left without saying goodbyes. I think if I had attempted to I would only have started crying again and no-one wanted to see that, frankly. I disappeared into the night and thankfully made it safely home; I woke the next morning still holding my button-hole where I’d gone to sleep clutching it like a precious keepsake (which it is).

I really couldn’t pick a favourite moment of the day. It was so perfect, so personal, so inclusive, so stylish, so sincere, so real, so fantastical, so fucking special from even before the start until well after the finish, that to try to pick one moment would be folly. I’ll remember it for many years to come, how much fun it was, how honoured I was to have been involved, and how when I saw two such devoted and loving people, who I love so very much, commit themselves to each other for life I actually thought my heart would burst out of my chest. So here’s to you Margo and Jerry. You pulled it off – the best party of my life. Thank you for giving me the honour of being your MC and sorry if I let you down by being a drunk. Thank you for the lovely gift which as I type I can see out of the corner of my eye in the spot where I now keep it, proudly on display. But thank you most of all being there for each other and for making the promises you did in front of us all on that wonderful day. I’ll never forget it.

Drinking, dating and defaults

A couple of posts ago, I promised that I would provide you, dear fans of TS&F, with an update on how the drinking was going. Out with a delightfully broad cross-section of the Gang yesterday afternoon, one of them (Little Agony Uncle since you’re asking) enquired as to why that update had not appeared, and I answered that as yet I didn’t feel that I’d quite worked out what my feelings were. I should have expected nothing less from an experienced agony uncle but was nonetheless still stunned by the simple brilliance of his advice: “Tell it to the blog.” So, here goes…

Since I took the big decision to try quitting for a while, and, following the success of that experiment, the arguably bigger decision to then try drinking again, I have certainly regained - or possibly, just gained – a sense of control about my drinking that was missing. It feels wonderful to be able to say that because, well aware as I was of the physical damage I was doing myself, and the wastefulness of spending entire weekends sleeping off the effects of one night’s drinking, it was the lack of control that had really scared me and finally prompted me to find the stop button. I still don’t feel that I’ve quite got the degree of control that I would like to have however, and as result my relationship with alcohol is still at best ambivalent.

It’s really hard to define what it is that I’m unsure about, but as I’m ‘telling it to the blog’ I’ll let you be the judge of whether what I’m saying makes sense. Since stopping, albeit for just a few weeks, there’s been a paradigm shift in my default drinking mode from drinking almost every day to drinking hardly any days, and from drinking more and faster than pretty much anyone to drinking no more and often much less than everyone. I’ve had a couple or three hangovers but nothing on the scale of ‘the old days’ and I’m satisfied that these have not been because of particularly excessive drinking – my biggest bender having been New Year’s Eve and even that was nothing compared to, say, my Bloodbath party - but because my body’s tolerance of and ability to process alcohol has retuned itself from that of a heavy drinker to that of a moderate one. Most satisfyingly, there have been no blackouts, no memory loss, no stripping naked and leaping into hot tubs (other than stone-cold sober in Chariots but that’s not for here), no turning up at afternoon parties already hammered and terrorising the children…you get the picture.

Yesterday I spent a pretty-much-perfect few hours with the boys in Le Shaz Bar and had just one shandy; last week at dinner with Big Sis I had one beer; on neither occasion did I want any more. So, complete abstinence I can do, and ‘just the one’, I can do; the grey area comes when I allow myself – and it really does feel like allowing myself – to drink, those nights (or days) when I consciously decide that drinking is on the agenda. Friday night and Saturday just gone were both such times, the former Glenda’s birthday drinks, the latter an enjoyable but ultimately unsuccessful date with the sexy Saffa from just after Christmas. On both occasions I followed the ‘old’ (and for most, ‘normal’) pattern of one drink after another and both times reached a point where I didn’t want to have any more; I’d chosen to press the ‘stop’ button.

The difficulty is that to be able to push the button, I have to be able to reach it, and it’s never in the bar or club or party that I’m at. If I stay, I’ll stay drinking – it’s as simple as that. I don’t think this is the ‘alcohol allergy’ that Bubble described; I can and do stop at or very near to the moment of my choosing; I just can’t quite get my head around doing that in whatever my present surroundings might be. Instead I have to do a Cinderella-like flit home, to the security – and sobriety – of home; to the sofa, a cup of tea, some chocolate…sources of comfort other than the bottle. Socially it can make things awkward. On the date, for example, about four hours and five or so pints in, I tried to engineer our going back to mine. Of course that was in part with the ulterior motive of getting a bit closer to the gorgeous hunk o’ spunk (that sadly was not on his agenda, unbelievable as that may be) but primarily because I knew that if we stayed out I would end up plastered and I just didn’t want to be. I guess through giving it so much thought – any thought even – I’ve created for myself a new guilt about drinking whereby anything more than ‘just the one’ triggers a thought process that can become quite self-accusatory.

All this leaves me not quite knowing what to do. I could quit drinking altogether, as not doing something is the only sure-fire way to not feel guilty about doing it, but for a reason I can’t yet grasp I don’t ‘want’ to be teetotal. I enjoy good wines, good whisky, a cocktail, a glass of champagne, and I don’t want to give those up. What I need to get to grips with is how to drink socially, if such a thing even exists. Maybe I’m sweating it all a bit too much; maybe I should just go a bit easier on myself and not beat myself up if I get a bit pissed at the weekend – everyone does, right? Or maybe a bit of self-tough-loving is the key to getting this drinking thing licked. For now, I’m happy, things are good, the future’s bright and I must say, that Agony Uncle gives damn good advice because ‘telling it to the blog’ - and may I thank you for indulging me - has made things a whole lot clearer than they were just 24 hours ago!

Testing My Sobriety

After three full weeks of not drinking – not one single drop, sip or taste – I gave myself permission last weekend to start again, with a view to putting to the test whether, having proved to my satisfaction that I could go totally without, I could drink and keep it under control. During the week I’d had a long and enlightening conversation with Bubble, my Stateside friend who is in AA and has been sober now for 13 months. He – like all of the Inner Circle – has been incredibly supportive of my efforts and gave me some surprising but common sense advice: that the only way to be sure if I had a problem was not to abstain, but to drink.

The rationale behind this is that alcoholism, like all addictions, comes in many guises. Some people are alcohol-dependent; that is, they physically cannot get through a day, an hour or a minute without being drunk. For others, the drinking is the symptom, not the problem; they drink to mask or anaesthetise immediate or deeply-rooted emotional or psychological pain, so while they may not drink all the time, when they do, they do it to excess. Others still – and this is the category Bubble falls into – are alcohol-allergic; one drink, just one, triggers a reaction in the brain which removes the ability to stop, leading them to drink to oblivion for no other reason than that they cannot do otherwise.

Of these three types of alcoholism – and the list is by no means exhaustive – I felt by day 21 that I’d successfully discounted the first (cravings, whilst they occurred, were very few and far between and swiftly passed with a bit of self-coaching and a family-size mint Aero.) I took, several times, a good hard impassive look at my life to see if the second applied and decided that it did not; for all that I have, and have had, trouble in my life, I genuinely could not equate my drinking with being symptomatic of it. That left the third option, the alcohol allergy, and there was only one way to put that to the test. So it was that on Saturday last I tentatively took my first drink in three weeks.

The results were far from dramatic. It didn’t go ‘straight to my head’ as I’d thought it might, nor did it make me feel at all ill, as I’d feared it might. I felt neither relief nor pleasure; my overwhelming feeling was, if anything, of confusion. Confusion, because after so long abstaining, I’d unconsciously come to dissociate drinking alcohol from being a part of my routine, and so almost like a computer detecting rogue software, my brain struggled to comprehend what exactly a glass of wine was doing in my hands. I finished the glass very slowly, and shortly after went on to a 40th birthday party and from there, on to that classy Sarf London venue Los Dos Brewos, and not a drop further passed my lips. Experiment or no experiment, I just didn’t want to drink! Sure I was getting bored senseless of juice, Red Bull and water, but I wasn’t even tempted to vary it with something hard. (Although I was certainly gagging for something ‘hard’ but failed to find it – two weeks into not drinking, I mentioned to Glenda that on a stone-cold sober visit to Barcode, I’d been amazed at how few guys I’d found attractive without my trusty beer goggles of old. He chuckled and replied with his typical brevity and perceptiveness, “Sobriety is a harsh judge,” and how bloody right he was!)

Thinking it over the next day, I cautiously allowed myself to take the previous night’s abstinence as a good sign. But then I got to wondering, maybe I didn’t want more of the wine because it just wasn’t very nice wine? What would happen if I were to crack open a really good bottle; would I finish the lot? I needed to test this theory so later, invited to Margo and Jerry’s for lunch along with The Agony Uncles and Our Lady of Chappelle, I took with me a corker of a Cab Sauv and when the beef was served let Margo pour me a small glass. I sipped as I ate – interspersing each delicious mouthful with one of Pellegrino – and found that the one glass lasted me through the meal and indeed dessert. Cometh the cheese board, cometh the port, and I partook of a thimbleful; again, I savoured it, enjoyed it, finished it – but felt no urge at all to refill it. I still felt somehow guilty that after three weeks (sounds like nothing, doesn’t it?) I was ‘back on the bottle’ again, but I reassured myself that it was for research purposes and felt a lot better for that.

So where am I with it now? Well, I think it’s too early to say that I’ve got it fully under control. Sure, I managed to stop at one glass of wine; but I have yet to try that test on one beer, one cocktail or – my real Nemesis – one vodka. And try it I will; I need to know that I can control my drinking, as opposed to my non-drinking, for myself, and if I can’t, I need to think again about what I’m going to do about it.

So far, so damn good – I feel great, everyone says I look great, for the best part of a month I’ve not done or said a single thing I’m ashamed of, and as a very pleasant side-effect my money’s going a hell of a lot further. The support I’ve had from the Inner Circle has been, if not surprising, amazing and affirming. From regular words of encouragement and expressions of their pride, to the more subtle gestures such as inviting me for ‘a juice’ after work, the gang have accepted and respected my need to not drink and made sticking to it so much easier. Drinking responsibly though is, I think, likely to be a greater challenge yet than not drinking has been. Watch, as ever, this space!