I went to my first party in a teepee this morning. According to the tabloids and society pages, the likes of Ben Fogle and Pippa Middleton were here yesterday! Clearly on some level I have arrived. Quite where I have arrived I'm not sure. And, as usual, I'm late. Ben and Pippa have gone and they left no trail.As Sunday lunchtime drinks go it was all agreeably Tatler and Harper's Bazaar.
What to wear was an intsy-wintsy bit tricky.
What does one wear to a teepee? La Pippa wore beige.
The invite warned about uneven ground, mud and a long walk from the main road if the weather was bad. The dress code stressed flats or wedges.
But that was to do with the location: in the centre of the vast and enchanted forest that is Wherwell Estate – drifts of bluebells and, on the way in, clumps of grinning, happy locals, pointing you in the right direction.
In any case the weather has been fine today and, for once, there was zero mud on the road....if you don't count me and Shedley and my beloved Jalopy.
As with the Allium mentioned in my Chelsea Flower Show post, I have no idea what the plural of one teepee is but there were three at least and I'm going for teepees.
They are enormous great things, rigid and, happily, not reeking of leather, let alone rawhide-of-camel or buffalo as I'd been stitched up to believe. The interiors were so cavernous they'd have made a Sioux squaw swoon.
Inside there were hot braziers burning and copious amounts of champagne and extremely delicious nibbles being freighted about.
These were the sort of nibbles you just don't magically conjure from a packet of filo pastry and a tub of cream cheese. These nibbles will make all future nibbles seem prosaic and yawny: oysters and lobster and pâté de foie gras balancing delicately atop a shot glass of Sauternes. For example.
On the edge of the drinks-party-teepee, a glamourous younger set, no less beautiful for being wearied by the night before, lounged on hay bales in white jeans and silk blouses and stacked stilettos very probably by Mr Blahnik.
The fire eaters and the troupe of tumbling dwarves and the arrangements of scantily clad damsels with live pythons wrapped about their persons, they had all moved on...
But the atmosphere in the teepee, at noon, on a May day in the middle of the enchanting forest, bluebells etc., was heightened by the knowledge that Le Cirque had been there mere hours earlier, swallowing firebrands and tumbling and doing whatever it is that ladies with live pythons at a wedding reception do.
19.05.2013
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| A curious swing |
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| But, I Am Not A Mote |
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| I Love the M3 |
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| Motherly Red Mist |
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| High Vizzers |
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