Читать книгу Welcome to My World - Coleen McLoughlin - Страница 22

I arrive at an event like that and still wonder what it’s going to be like. I’ve never been one for wanting to meet celebrities. Lots of people have favourite actors and pop stars, but I’m not really like that, although at the Elle Style Awards I was really star-struck to see Charlize Theron and Mischa Barton. I suppose the only person I’d like to sit down and have a chat to if I ever had the chance to meet her would be Charlotte Church. Just because she seems quite similar to me, she’s the same age, and I think we’ve experienced a comparable amount of attention and scrutiny from the paparazzi and the press even though she has a totally different career to me.

I remember one of the few occasions where we were meant to go to a big do together, I was told I wasn’t allowed and ended up being really upset. We’d just started going out together when Wayne was named as BBC Young Sports Personality of the Year. He was invited down to London to pick up the award and asked me to be there with him. I was only seventeen and I was really excited. It was just before Christmas, so my mum and dad came shopping with me and I bought this little black dress. Then I saw these shoes in Dune, with an ankle strap and diamanté – they were really nice at the time – but they were £120 and I was still at school and my mum said, ‘No, you’re not getting them, we’ve just got you the dress.’ I’d resigned myself to settling for another pair of shoes, but just before the awards my mum and dad came back from town and they’d bought the ones I’d originally wanted. I couldn’t have been more made up. Then, that same night, Wayne came over and said I couldn’t go. His manager, David Moyes – Wayne was at Everton at the time – had said he didn’t think it was appropriate that I went with Wayne because we were too young. Maybe he didn’t want us staying in the hotel together. I was gutted.

I was excited to be going with Wayne to the Beckhams’ party. I expected it to be really good, but I imagined it would be quite a low-key affair with people eating and then a little bit of entertainment. That wasn’t the case at all. Everyone was really up for a great night, dancing away and enjoying themselves. It was brilliant. I suppose it’s not hard to enjoy yourself when there are 350 of you and you’ve just eaten a meal cooked by Gordon Ramsay and you’re being entertained by James Brown and Robbie Williams! Robbie used to be my favourite in Take That. By the way, I never did get the chance to have a few words with Mr Ramsay about how he was rearing a couple of pigs and had apparently named them after me and Wayne. Maybe it was a good job we didn’t get to meet!

Sometimes you go to these kinds of parties and everyone is on their best behaviour, but everyone was so relaxed, including Wayne. The next day the newspapers made a big fuss about Wayne dancing on his injured foot. Well, the truth is that I tried to stop him, but Wayne loves dancing and once he gets going there’s no holding him back!

Wayne’s quite proud of his fancy footwork on the dance floor. At every party we go to he makes a big thing of dancing, doing his thing, flips, the lot, you name it, until people form a circle and start cheering. He loves it! It’s his party piece. Actually, he’s not a bad dancer, but he’ll start doing this flipping and stuff, then the circle will form and all of a sudden he thinks he’s Michael Jackson! At Victoria and David’s he promised me he was going to behave himself. Then, later on in the night, he started dancing. I’m stood back and I can see this telltale little circle starting to form around him. As soon as I saw it I was over there, in the middle, dancing by his side and telling him, ‘C’mon, there’s a circle forming, you’ve got to come over here.’ Fortunately, I managed to get him out safely before the flips started.