Even Wiggy

There’s something wonderful about Friday nights in London.  I think the hours between 5pm and midnight are almost certainly the favourite of the week because there is the possibility of not quite knowing the course the evening may take, where exactly one may end up and with whom.

Saturdays don’t cut it in the same manner, there’s too much preparation involved and with that can only come anti-climax- usually, in my case anyway, tinged with Queens Park Rangers doing something unfeasibly idiotic to concede a last-minute equaliser.

People have too long to get comfy and settle in on a Saturday, but to charge out of an office into the open arms of a cocktail list and rummage through the litter of the week with good company ticks all my boxes.

For those of us who work in the media and don’t have a wife with a rolling pin waiting for us at the door, Friday is a chance to let loose and live the cliche. Village East on Bermondsey Street is a good place to end any week that has been coloured by auditioning models in bikinis singing ‘Like a Virgin’;  a personal trainer gone AWOL following a desertion by his fiancee (on several occasions I’ve bolted out of the gym halfway through one of his sessions so I know where she’s coming from), and builders not returning phone calls about where I can plug a phone in Wisley House.

Yet, come Saturday morning why is there some council tithead with a high-power headge strimmer outside to at 8.15am? In October. Last week, if I thought at least I’d escaped the suburban gardeners and Neighbourhood Watch, I was woken at 9am by my friend, Wiggy who’d driven unannounced from Clapham to personally deliver the invite to his engagement party and drop in for coffee.

It’s not only a shock to be woken at 9a.m by a camp postman driving a BMW convertible with a TV in the dashboard (‘I bought if off Rod Stewart’s tailor!’) but the idea that this dilettante is settling down.

He used to prance around Clapham with verve and nerve going up to pretty girls, declaring that he simply had to tell them they were ‘the most beautiful girl he had ever seen’, hand over his business card and then scuttle off to a darkened corner having laid the bait for a phone call in the week. It was like watching a crustacean at work in an Attenborough documentary.

Remarkably this method kept him in a line of very attractive girls for over a decade (it was, of course, a numbers game and on many a time I felt a warm glow of satisfaction as a woman with her instincts properly switched on told him to ‘Fuck off!’). Though he either got bored in a couple of weeks or they easily sussed him out having been molested by a man who couldn’t remember who they were, I can’t recall him ever referring to his latest squeeze by their actual name – more often a ‘tag’ that usually revealed his lack of imagination so among others there was Polish bird, Selfridges (she worked on the cosmetics department at Selfridges) and Harrods (correct, the cosmetics department of Harrods).

I recall attending a party with him at a bar on the Kings Road in the company of his latest squeeze, Harpers. She was a fashion writer for Harpers and Queen. Come to think of it, that could best describe my tag for them as a couple. The evening was a disaster on all fronts.

Arriving at Harper’s Kennington house where I’d been invited for supper, I immediately sussed why I was there. As was invariably the case I realised I’d been drafted in only because the latest girlfriend had some lonely, frumpy friend with a crooked smile that needed an debonair, single man to escort them and the best he could muster was myself. The number of times he did that to me. The one on that night was the daughter of Lord and Lady so and so and was built like a stateley home.

As she played footsie with me under the table, I flashed one of those ‘You fucker!’ glances at him because, yet again, I’d been sold down the river and pimped out so he could get in someone else’s good books. And so off we went to the party for these friends of Harpers.

Wiggy and I knew absolutely no one there and it transpired we were the only males in the room who were not officers in the guards. As a pair of  men who were always more likely to end up in a sandpit rather than Sandhurst,  our lack of social standing was all too readily exposed and we did not improve matters by dropping a pair of Mitsis and heading off to the bar.

Harpers had been cheerily waltzing about, telling people about the dashing, romantic young broker who’d stolen her heart by appearing out of nowhere and telling   her she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever etc etc and pointing over to the grinning idiot swaying next to me.

In retrospect, mingling was a mistake. Many men, when placed in certain environments and under the influence, are creatures of habit and a farce of nature. As far as Wiggy now knew he was in a bar (check), full of women (check) and one could only watch in awe as he went into autopilot and approached the nearest pretty girl and told her she was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen and handed over his card.

Not only was she Harpers best friend, who’d heard about this patter just minutes before, but Harpers was stood next to her. Both too shocked to slap him, they were still stood there with mouths agape as Wiggy returned to the bar content with another good job done. Suffice to say it was only a matter of seconds before his evening unraveled spectacularly.

The email he forwarded from Harpers informing him his services were no longer required is still fresh in the memory. It opened with the line ‘Do you practice at being useless or was it something they taught you at school?’ and then followed a tirade questioning every facet of his poor character and psychological flaws that was brutal, damning, beautifully written and completely accurate.

Everyone who read it agreed entirely with her assessment and one or two speculated whether she had gone far enough. Afterall, she only had a glimpse of the brushwork, God knows what  she’d have written if she could’ve seen whole canvas.

So the reality of his engagement sunk in with last Saturday morning’s hangover as he handed me a greetings card sized invite. It’s all drinks at the Baglioni, dinner at The market Tavern and a party at Whisky Mist, with a ‘Hello!’ style portrait shot of a glamourous looking French girl, full of the flush, and him stood there grinning manically in a suit in a garden setting. Look very carefully and I swear you can just spot a bead of sweat on his brow.

This all has her imprint all over it. If left to him there wouldn’t be an engagement, let alone a party. She has him well drilled and he knows his place, though anyone looking for a portent will see the party celebrating their engagement is on Halloween.

The women of Clapham should, if they had any sense of civic decency, give her a medal. Last month she was the other side of the world on business for a week and he was too scared to go out. When I spoke to him, he was spending his third consecutive night indoors watching Sex and the City. And he was happy.

So this is a grave development as it just gives my parents more ammunition. Even Wiggy. It hasn’t gone unnoticed by my mother that of my peer group I am now the only one not to have ‘settled down’ (a phrase that is peculiar to women and parents). Most of them did it years ago and have started producing offspring left, right and centre. Even worse, they are making a good hash of it so I can’t point my parents in the direction of a traumatic divorce or three.

It’s not exactly like I’m running at harem here either. The only thing I’ve woken next to in bed in Wisley House was an empty champagne bottle. That was very nearly three weeks ago and it still hasn’t returned my calls.