8. A designer bag – my personal favourite. They might be expensive but a designer bag is your access-all-areas pass to fashion. Are they looking at me or my bag? Who cares!
as the next day I usually have big black eyes! I like eye make-up by either Nars or MAC. Other than that, I’ll always take my chewing gum, green Wrigley’s Extra, my credit cards, and a bit of money just in case I need to get a taxi home.
When the time arrived to leave the hotel a car took us to the Beckhams’ house. I’ve been to quite a few big events but I still feel a bit apprehensive about these kinds of things, wondering if anyone I know will have arrived yet, who’ll be sat at our table, the usual things. At the entrance the paparazzi were lined up and there was an ITV camera crew filming people entering. As we walked in they asked me who my dress was by and how Wayne’s foot was getting on – in case you’ve forgotten, he’d broken his fourth metatarsal a couple of months before the World Cup and everyone was worried about whether he was going to be fit in time to play.
I’ll never get used to the red carpet. The first time I experienced it was at the Pride of Britain awards when there was a wall of paparazzi shouting at me, ‘Coleen! Over here! Coleen! Over here! Over here!’ In the end I just stood there twisting my head around from side to side and going, ‘Wait! Give me a chance!’ That whole walk makes me feel really self-conscious. I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to it. At the National Television Awards, when I was making my documentary for Channel 5, I started thinking, ‘What if I stand there and they don’t even want to take my picture?’
We’d been to David and Victoria’s house for dinner a few years previously, but this time the party was being hosted in a marquee in the grounds. Once inside, it took your breath away. Everything was gorgeous. They are great hosts. At around 7 p.m., just as we arrived, four jets with St George’s crosses on their wings flew overhead. There was a soft moss-green carpet leading up to the reception area, decorated with beautiful cream-coloured flowers and scented candles. In the dining area, over 300 guests sat at round tables, and each table had a silver birch tree at its centre, surrounded by an arrangement of lilies, tulips and roses. And they had my and Wayne’s favourite wine on the tables – New Zealand Cloudy Bay sauvignon blanc – so we were made up.
It’s rare that you’ll ever see me and Wayne attending a public event together. We just don’t go for that celebrity-couple thing. The Beckhams’ World Cup party is one of the few times it’s happened.
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.
I expected Victoria’s party 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.
For a lot of events I’ll take my best friend, Claire, with me. Over time, I’ve become a bit wiser to the way things work.
I can go out and enjoy myself, but I have forever got to be on my guard because there are always journalists hanging around trying to catch well-known people out, either doing something they’re not supposed to or even if they’re talking to someone that might make a story. It sounds paranoid, but I’m always aware that journalists might be ear-wigging my conversations, or they’ll try to take advantage of Claire if she’s standing on her own and start asking her questions. I’ve come to understand that it’s possible to be at a different party from the one that’s reported in the newspapers the next day.
I found that out very early on. I had my eighteenth birthday party at the Devonshire Hotel in Liverpool. It was quite hard arranging it because of the football fixtures and fitting dates around Wayne’s schedule. In the end, we sorted out a date and it was fantastic. I’d just left school and everyone was there, family and friends, the place was jam-packed. Everyone was up dancing from the beginning. I was given a three-tier cake, decorated with shopping bags from all my favourite stores made out of icing. However, in the end it was a fight that made the headlines the next day. They said there’d been a scrap between my family and Wayne’s. That wasn’t the truth at all. At the end of the night the bouncers were clearing the room and asked one of Wayne’s family to move to a different area. It wasn’t a big fight, it was a small argument which turned into a scuffle. Within minutes the police appeared and the whole thing was blown out of all proportion. It was like someone had been ready to call the police and the press, because no sooner had it started than everyone appeared and the story was in the newspapers the next day. I still can’t understand how the press and the police were so quick to arrive on the scene. It makes you wonder.
In case of emergencies
Whether you’re at a party