Cooper Brown: He's Out There

'The priest had really bad halitosis and he kept leaning in towards me. I nearly threw up all over him'

Thursday 10 July 2008 00:00 BST
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I couldn't go through with the wedding. We got to the moment when the priest asked me whether I would take her hand in marriage and I kicked off. I said no, I wasn't prepared to do anything of the sort, and then punched him in the face before telling the assembled great and good what I thought of them all...

OK, I'm lying. But I thought about it. The priest had really bad halitosis and I very nearly threw up all over him. He kept leaning right in towards me and I was recoiling in discomfort. Victoria looked a knockout. If she hadn't, there would have been hell to pay as I'd splashed out more money on her "pruning" than anything else. Guess what the total cost of the celebrations came to? Forty-six-thousand pounds... Unbelievable – and that doesn't even include the honeymoon. I'm writing this from the achingly hot island of Mauritius. We're in the honeymoon suite of the wonderful five-star Le Touessrok, and it doesn't come cheap. Hopefully that little mention might just knock something off the bill. It's a wonderful place to stay...

Back to the wedding. I woke up on the actual morning feeling like shit because Ben had insisted on me celebrating my last night of bachelorhood in style. This involved a Scarface mound of Pablo and a visit to a "posh" lap-dancing joint in Hammersmith. We had a great time, but it left me with very unsuitable images flashing through my brain all during the ceremony. Ben had rented a lime-green Lamborghini Countach to take me to the ceremony. We drove out of London on zero sleep and made the two-hour drive in under 90 minutes.

I got changed in a room at the village pub, as Victoria really believes the whole "don't see your fiancé before the wedding" shit. When I was ready and in my Richard James suit, I looked seriously sharp. I'd had some special shoes made for me but they were a little tight and made me walk a little like a lady. This wasn't really the image I had in mind of my wedding, so I ditched them and went barefoot. My mom would have been proud. I looked a proper hippie, but I didn't give a shit – I knew it would really piss the in-laws off.

We got back into the Lamborghini and shot off towards the church. It was seriously packed. The church is not too big so there was a whole separate group of people sitting outside and they had a little PA system rigged up so they could hear it all. It was very LA... in Wiltshire. I went into the church and had a peek at the guests through the curtain. Hugh Grant was there, as was Minnie Driver, and the other guests were trying their best not to stare, but I could see that everyone was seriously impressed.

Hugo has a new girlfriend, called M'Kosi. She is an exile from Zimbabwe and he met her in some hospital. This has really knocked Mr Himmler for six, as he's not exactly up on his race relations. He was trying to do some small talk with her and kept referring to "your country" and "back home". There was just the hint of a boner in his too-tight morning-suit trousers. How confusing all these thoughts must have been for him – me about to legally own his daughter while he gets unconsciously aroused by his mad son's black girlfriend. When he saw that I wasn't wearing any shoes, it nearly finished him off.

It's this curious thing about Brits that they can handle racism and rape and pillage but not "bad form". Barefoot at a wedding was clearly "bad form", and he took his own shoes off and proffered them to me pleadingly. I pretended not to see him and padded up to the altar to wait. I knew that at some stage we had to kneel down, so Ben had come up with this superb joke where he'd drawn the words "Help Me" on the soles of my feet so that everybody would read them when I went down.

Then the music starts and I take a peek back and Victoria is coming down the aisle and she looks a million dollars – well, £46,000, to be precise. She had her hair swept up in some complicated arrangement and a proper big white meringue of a dress. She did look stunning – and she was mine. Poor H-F was following her in this dumb pageboy outfit that Trinny had insisted on. Pleasingly, you could see that Trinny was really put out that she wasn't the main draw in the congregation. She was sitting on the other side of the aisle from Minnie Driver and was pretending to ignore her. I was taking all this stuff in and taking great pleasure in the situation as my future wife walked towards me. I really should have been concentrating on events, but I was drifting off elsewhere – still a little wired on Pablo.

The ceremony started and I started to try to time my head movements so they went back as the priest's breath advanced. Then we knelt and I heard a gasp from the congregation – the foot joke had worked. It was only afterwards that Hugo told me Ben had actually written "I fuck pigs" on my feet – SO Ben... The real problem is that I can't get the stuff off so everyone keeps spotting it on my feet here in Mauritius whenever I go swimming in the gorgeous water of the Indian Ocean that laps gently on to the silky beaches of Le Touessrok, one of the finest hotels in the world. I'm married, God help us all... Cooper Out.

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