The Marriott incident (Part 1)

The Marriott Hotel in Bristol is a fairly unremarkable edifice and unlikely to provoke strong reactions from anyone. It will never be a listed building or trouble anyone from English Heritage. Conversely, nobody will ever clamour for it to be torn down.

But when I walked past it a few weeks back I shuddered involuntarily because I had been there once before, many years ago.

The full story of that fateful visit involves two of my best friends from university, Dave and Eric. The popular cliché would be to describe them as a study in contrasts. Eric was regular and unadventurous – a thoroughly good egg about whom you could say almost nothing bad. He worked hard, got brilliant results, was a steadfast and loyal friend and if you had taken him home to meet your parents they would have enthused wholeheartedly in a way parents certainly never did about me.

His family was everything mine wasn’t – his parents were still together and he had a wonderful relationship with his two sisters to whom he was utterly devoted. He would go home to Norway every Christmas and they would all sit round the piano singing festive tunes, presumably sporting chunky patterned sweaters while the frosty windows steamed up with good cheer and wholesome loveliness. I on the other hand went home to find that Christmas Day was the one day every year I was nagged for not getting drunk, as opposed to the other 364 when I was told off for doing so.

From the thumbnail sketch I’ve just given it probably won’t surprise you to hear that Eric and I are no longer in touch. In fact, I stopped talking to him shortly after he got married which could be partly linked to the fact that I found his description of the wedding more than slightly chilling.

No two weddings are the same, and there’s endless scope to personalise them. Many, for instance, feature a reading which has been picked by the couple (or just the usual dreck from The Prophet by Khalil Gibran, if they’re feeling uninspired). Often there will be a piece of music picked for its sentimental value. For instance, I went to a wedding a few years back where the happy couple walked out of the venue as man and wife to the tune of Mr Blue Sky by ELO.

It was such a nice touch that I almost forgot that my friend was marrying a management consultant (though not quite. She's dead to me now).

If you are really lucky the wedding will feature some live music, maybe a nice acoustic performance by some friends of the bride or groom. One of my cousins, for instance, had a friend perform Forever Young by Bob Dylan at his wedding. How lovely! The performance might be deeply touching, it might be hilariously incompetent. Either way it’s a win-win, provided it’s not your wedding.

Eric’s wedding, however, went one step further even than that. Because he performed a song himself. During his own wedding ceremony. Not just any song, mind you. He performed saccharine blandfest Come What May from the crime against celluloid best known as Moulin Rouge.

Not alone though, oh no. He performed it as a duet. At this stage you might be thinking “a duet with his wife? how sweet/naff [delete as applicable]” but no, it was more unsettling than that.

He was duetting with his own sister.

I don’t know whether this virtuoso performance took place before or after they were declared man and wife but it’s a safe bet that it was well after the bit where people can stand up if they know of any reason why the couple shouldn’t be lawfully wed. Because if it had been before that surely there would have been someone, anyone, who would have had the decency to rise up and shout “Stop! This man has just sung a love song to - and with - his own sister. Am I the only one who can see that this is every shade of wrong?”

Perhaps this is why I wasn’t invited to the wedding.

Dave, on the other hand, has been immortalised in this blog post. He, like me, was at university to have fun and hopefully get a degree at the same time. In this respect we were very similar. Sadly (for me at least) Dave had a much better idea of what fun actually was than I did. It predominantly revolved around drinking Corona, going clubbing and copping off with ladies of widely varying quality. His conquests were legendary, as was his turn of phrase. I’ll never forget the time he drunkenly pulled another girl in our year. The next day, a group of us was quizzing him about how far he had got. It was a bit like Summer Loving without the cool cars or abuse of hair products. Dave's response was in his inimitable style.

“No, I didn’t shag her. But she moaned when the fingers came to town.”

Many years later both Eric and I tried to embrace laddishness but neither of us could carry it off. One time after university Dave and I were staying at Eric’s and Eric got lucky so we ended up going back to his room to take up our sleeping bags on the floor. He came back in at six in the morning and plonked himself smugly on the bed.

“How did it go?” we asked him.

“Let’s just say that that girl loves to eat cock.” was his indelicate response.

I learned a very important lesson that day. Well, two. The first was that Eric spoke with all the excitement of somebody probably receiving his first ever blow job. The second, and more important, lesson was that there may be no spectacle more toe-curlingly pathetic than a nerd boasting about his sexual conquests. Well, except a nerd complaining about his lack of sexual conquests. Funnily enough the latter was taking up an awful lot of my packed schedule back in those days. That and wanking.

So, that's Dave and Eric. And now that I’ve set the scene, come back next time when I’ll explain what this has to do with anything and why the innocent looking Marriott Hotel in Bristol holds such dread for me.

And yes, I know I'm a tease.