Cooper Brown: He's Out There

'Why am I getting married? Why just eat one candy bar slowly when you can have the whole store?'

Tomorrow, I get married. Aaarrrgghh..... married ...... the Cooperman married!!!! This has got to be a bad dream. Pretty soon I'll wake up in the arms of some blonde lovely who will totter back off to the slums and everything will be all right. If it could happen to Bobby in Dallas, then why not me?

I seriously considered skipping the country yesterday. I packed a bag, got the passport and was in the Quattroporte just driving around the Westway like a nut, trying to make up my mind. I presume everyone feels a little like this? It's driving me crazy. Am I making the worst mistake of my life? Am I doing it just because I've got a kid with her?

If I'm honest, I was way more into a couple of other chicks when I was younger, but you don't think about getting hitched when you're a player – why would you? Why just eat one candy bar really slowly when you can have the whole store? Then you get to a certain age and all your buddies are married and then you meet someone and you automatically start to think about marriage, rather than just dating.

Actually, the whole marriage thing is just something you seem to do at a certain age with whoever you happen to be with at the time. If I was dating the same chick now as I was back then, I'd be marrying one of them. It's like a big life casino and the chips are seriously down... "les jeux sont fait". HA! Bet you didn't know that the Coop spoke a bit of French? OK, I admit it, I learnt it off a Bond movie and I don't think that I've spelt it right, but who cares? The sub-editor guys sort all that shit out – I don't have time for details. I'M GETTING MARRIED AAAARRRRGGGGHHHHHHHH!! Have I mentioned it?

Hugh Grant rings me – he's still single and is really rubbing it in. He's laughing and teasing me about how this is the end of my life and how he's going to ring me up once the deed is done and tell me about all the things he's up to. I hate Hugh Grant. Actually I don't – he's a really cool guy – but he was getting on my nerves quite a lot, because I know he's going to be cruising MY wedding for chick action.

With all this going on in my head, I get to look after H-F for the day, as Victoria is starting the marathon preparation schedule. I take him to the zoo. I love the zoo – it calms me down. Weirdly, seeing magnificent wild animals in cages makes me relaxed, although I don't ignore the symbolism. We go straight to the monkeys. H-F loves the monkeys. We spend a good hour pulling faces at the big, fat gorilla and then watch the ones who swing around on their tails before one of them ruins the whole thing by pulling some shit out of his ass and throwing it at us. Quite a lot goes into H-F's stroller, and it stinks. I wheel him off to the cafeteria (seriously the worst food in all of London) where I try to get some napkins to wipe the stuff off. I do my best, but he still stinks and is crying his ass off.

We go up to the giraffe house. They make me laugh as they are so totally useless. They spend a million years evolving this long neck so that they can eat leaves off tall trees and then... they get captured and put in a zoo where they can eat at any height they want to. How depressing is that? They look really depressed, just lolloping around like big ugly tall chicks at a disco.

We stand next to this couple who are arguing – I love listening to other people's arguments. They're going on about how she has put her life on hold for eight years to look after their kids, and he still does what the fuck he wants and she gets no support whatsoever. He knows that this is probably true and hits back about having to earn money and that he is sorry that he actually enjoys his job, maybe he should get a job that is really shit, then she would be happy?

I actually follow them as they wander off as I don't want to miss the end, but they stop and start to make unsubtle sniffing gestures and I know they can smell the monkey shit on H-F, but think it's me. I leave and head off under the tunnel to go and see the snakes. A gang of 14-year-olds start to laugh at the smell from my stroller, and when I tell them to fuck off, they start to abuse me and do this bald slap thing on their heads.

Has it come to this? I'm in a zoo the day before my wedding, pushing round a kid who smells of monkey shit while pre-pubescents abuse my lack of hair? I guess I'm finally having a sort of mid-life crisis, but having to cram it all into one day so that I can get on with my blissfully happy future married life? My BlackBerry jingles – it's Victoria – where am I? What's that noise? Why is H-F crying? So many questions... Cooper Out.

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