Track four - three of us in this marriage

TRACK FOUR of my semi-autobiog-WORK-IN-PROGRESS

Where were you when you heard the news that Diana, Princess of Wales had been killed in a car crash in Paris?

In the early hours of August 31st 1997, I was in bed with Norm, a long-haired IT geek from *Solihull. He was sweet and funny, but definitely not a long-term prospect. That makes it sound like buying a house, which is really the equivalent of what we do, at least subconsciously, when we’re choosing a mate. New to the market: not in a chain, open-plan sense of humour, en suite kindness, and multiple orgasms.

I’d been at a party with a group of people I was doing improv with, and it turned into a heavy night of drinking, dancing and flirting. I’d graduated from the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School a year before, and I was dabbling in various pursuits; most of which involved enjoying male company. Over the years, I have come to realise that although I have good female friends, I adore the company of men. Not just for sex you understand, but for the lightning-quick, unedited verbal jousting. I grew up in a verbally dexterous household brimming with the back-and-forth that is best done with men.

*I think it was Solihull.

Candle in the Wind (this is the version Elton John sang at Diana’s funeral, wearing possibly the worst syrup in history.)

Side-bar: for most of my adult life I’ve favoured more of a nomadic life-style. I’ve never seen the attraction of domesticity; or settling into a home. I’ll revisit that another time.

1998 rolled around, and I started doing NewsRevue, a long-running topical show, with a cast of four, at the legendary Canal Cafe Theatre in London. To do the show you had to be a quick learner, an improviser, a singer, with good comedic chops. Sometimes we’d get changes to scripts on the day of the show. My bits included a Monica Lewinsky monologue (the White House intern who it turned out had had Bill Clinton in various oval orifices), a tap-dancing Harriet Harman and Tina Turner singing ‘I Can’t Man the Trains’ (a spoof of I Can’t Stand The Rain). The costume changes were ridiculously fast; I often went on stage with a wig half on, or not on at all. As you can imagine, the corpsing was off the charts.

That year, our cast was awarded several five stars at the Edinburgh Fringe.

I was also in a second show up at the fringe. Up the Arts was a piss-take of The Review Show, an incredibly earnest show hosted by Mark Lawson. Amongst my many roles, I played Allison Person (Allison Pearson).

The cast included the man who would become my first husband.

He homed in on me like an Exocet missile. One minute we were chatting in a club, and the next he was kissing me so hard that my groin twitched with electricity. I wasn’t really attracted to him at first, but like a missile he persisted in finding his target. And the sex was probably the most exciting sex I’d had at that point.

Still, something didn’t feel quite right about the house where great sex lived.

Fat Boy Slim’s Praise you is a track that takes me back to that heady time.

I was 28 years old, and I was in love. Whatever in love means.

In January 2000 we got married on St Lucia, where he’d got down on one knee in the sand a year or so earlier. On the morning of our wedding, I woke up early and realised I could only open one eye. I stumbled to the bathroom, and, squinting in the mirror, saw that a mosquito had bitten me on the eyelid. It had swelled up so badly that my left eye had closed. One of the hotel staff managed to get me some antihistamine pills from a local pharmacy. I struggled into the column dress that I’d bought hastily in the January sales and necked several pills – that you’re advised not to take with alcohol – with copious glugs of strong Bounty Rum.

For a curvy woman with tits and arse (who had piled on weight because she was on the pill), a column dress is a fucking disaster. As part of the wedding package at the hotel, they had provided a videographer and as I came down the aisle, that was carved out of sand, I looked like a burrito. I’m also swaying a lot because I’m off my tits on prime rum and a handful of pills. At one point, the celebrant Josephine said: “Abigail, would you please stop laughing.” The one-eyed swaying burrito nearly pissed herself.

After the ceremony, I could barely stand up straight, so the videographer suggested that my husband carry me along the surf that was softly licking the unbearably romantic, sunset-streaked beach. My husband lifted me up, and carried me a few steps, then his arms got tired and he dropped me.

This was all accompanied by Shania Twain’s You’re Still The One because that's the only music they had to hand.

We had a predictably messy divorce just over a year later. There was no videographer filming that, although I often thought that divorce videos are an untapped market.

Darling reader, I was right to have doubts; but I still wasn’t quite prepared for what was to come.

TO BE CONTINUED…