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This book is dedicated to each and every incredible girl and guy included in this book who has changed and shaped my life and made me the person I am today.
Also to the city of London, my ultimate inspiration and the setting that housed so many of these relationships.
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
My Greatest Thanks To …
Foreword
1. And So it Begins …
2. Cigarettes and Alcohol
3. Candle in the Wind
4. No Pubes and a Soggy Biscuit
5. Valentine’s Day Disasters
6. Coner Boner and the Photo of Doom
7. Not-so-sweet Sixteen
8. Bad Influence
9. The Sex Door into Cambridge
10. ‘You’re Just Too Nice’
11. Inbetween a Heartbreak and the Cotswolds
12. London Calling
13. Rachel Stevens and Mopping Up Vomit (Not Hers)
14. A Fur Coat and a Colonic
15. Mamma Mia!
16. A Love Potion to New York
17. The Email that Changed Everything
18. Laid in Chelsea
19. The Secret
20. Hair Today
21. Hattie, TOWIE and a Triathlon
22. The Long Johns and Dutch Courage
23. Can’t Buy Me Love
24. Epilogue
Picture Section
Copyright
About the Publisher
My wonderful and beautiful family: Mum, Dad, Amelia and James, and the memory of a beautiful grandmother who, thank God, will never read this book. You are all my rock through everything, always.
Sarah Dillistone, and everyone involved in Made in Chelsea, for making everything possible and for changing my life.
My Cheska, Binky and Richard, and the rest of the cast, for sharing an unbelievable experience together.
My beautiful agents at Curtis Brown, Richard Gibb and Felicity Blunt, who save my life wherever I am in the world. Also, Jacquie, Jon, Gordon, Hannah, Becky and Fran for all being superstars.
My fabulous and beautiful editor Anna Valentine, who has the job of taking out all the REALLY naughty, unpublishable stories, and to everyone at HarperCollins who has made this book possible.
My best friends and one day best men at my wedding, Louis, Alex, Oscar and Richard, who have each made the last 26 years very amusing.
My wonderful Pink Palace urban family, Emily, Sam and George, for the wine, the parties, the shoulder. You are the three people I know will always be there.
Jordan, for everything, and for being my truly fabulous Bridget Jones.
Jason Holman, for driving me around the world and giving me all the relationship advice I need. You know everything before anyone else!
Jon and Matt at Insanity for all your help and support.
Luke, Ryan, Jamieson, Rollo and all my closest Chelsea friends who have shared the last seven years of truly wonderful memories after midnight.
It’s early October 2011. I’m sitting in my room surrounded by boxes of cigarettes and empty bottles of wine. It looks like a slum. My three flatmates are all out, and I have never felt so low in my entire life. I’m booked to do an appearance at a nightclub in Bristol tonight but I text saying I have been asked to film for Made in Chelsea so I can’t make it. I have quite honestly cried for 72 hours. Looking in the mirror I think I look like I have lost everything. In some ways I feel that I have. My mum is calling every half an hour and I have hardly eaten in four days. My phone rings from an unknown number and I ignore it.
Two minutes later it rings again … and again. On the fourth time I pick up silently and listen.
‘Your taxi is outside.’
I know I’m due on the T4 sofa in 45 minutes to give an interview about the next series of Made in Chelsea. I have no choice – I have to go.
I put on any clothes I find that seem clean and I get into a large Mercedes with tinted windows. I sit in the back of the car, expressionless, while we make our way across London to a shopping centre in Bayswater.
When I walk into the TV studios I’m shown to a dressing room, where I cry into a bowl of Haribos. But I don’t have time to dwell on my misery, as I’m quickly taken into another room, where I am covered in make-up to hide what I actually look like.
I then find myself standing on the edge of the set, waiting for my interview. I force myself to smile, knowing that I have to be on Ollie form for the next 20 minutes. I have to laugh and chat about how excited I am that filming for the next series is about to start. I have to be the Ollie from Made in Chelsea that everyone knows. But at that precise moment, I couldn’t have felt any further from that. Inside I was dying and so far away from being Laid in Chelsea.
I had just gone through one of the hardest break-ups of my life. Whether she thought that way about it I don’t know, but I felt as if I had lost everything.
Looking back at that moment now, I realise that no matter how bad it seems, no matter how bad the break-up, you can always bounce back. I’m now in a happy place – yes, I’m single and fairly sexless, but I believe in love, and I’d like to believe that the person I’m going to spend the rest of my life with is out there somewhere. It’s only time that is holding back that moment when we will meet – probably when we’re both least expecting it.
Of course, I’ve asked myself if there’s such a thing as ‘happily ever after’. We’re supposed to believe it when we watch the great romantic Disney films, but who’s to say what happens after the camera stops rolling? Maybe after Beauty and the Beast Belle realised she was terribly shallow and ran off in search of a better-looking man? Perhaps once Ariel from The Little Mermaid was on dry land she decided that it wasn’t love she wanted, but a Ferrari and a credit card?
We all want to believe in love, but can we trust that we will end up with the right person, have three children and a Range Rover? Have we forgotten what love is all about? A house in the country and a wardrobe full of Sloane Street clothes is wonderful, but neither of these things will send you flowers for no reason, hug you when you’ve had a truly shit day, or handle morning-breath sex.
I want to bring back some of that belief in love, simply because I love the idea of being in love. In this book you will hear all about my life and my great loves – those that have helped make me into the person I am today, and those whose memory should definitely be taken and buried in the graveyard of failed romances and never spoken of again. But for now I’m happily digging them up to show that no matter how bad things get in the romance stakes, you should never give up hope that things will get better again. And, of course, I’ll reveal all about those relationships that you may already be familiar with from a little show called Made in Chelsea.
During the 10 years I’ve been dating, I’ve had some amazing experiences and I have gathered a lot of stories along the way. Some are good; others are bad. Some loves have lasted hours, days, weeks or months, and some have stood firm for several years. I feel like the girls (and guys) I’ve dated have given me the equivalent of a doctorate in relationships, and I want to share what I’ve learned with you. So, light the candles, pour the champagne and prepare to get Laid in Chelsea …
Let’s start way, way back, when I was a child. I grew up in Southampton and for the majority of my childhood I was the only boy in a household of females. My sister, Amelia, was two years older than me, which basically meant I was buying Tampax for toilet-stranded women from an early age. By the time I was 10 I’m fairly sure I could differentiate between ‘medium’ and ‘super plus’ using the box’s colour codes.
I loved my sister, but to be honest I did always want an older brother. Amelia wasn’t interested in digging up woodland creatures or playing conkers. She and my mum would always be in Marks & Spencer, with a chart to show which colours went best with her complexion while I played cars with the trolley. When I was about six, Mum was struggling to get the lid off a jar and I rolled my eyes and said, ‘It was obviously designed by a man.’ It was something I’d heard my mum say many times about various objects and I was probably trying to bond with her in the same way my sister did.
Because of my colouring, I often get asked about my heritage. So, to get the record straight, I have absolutely no idea why I’m so brown. My granddad on my mum’s side was a chauffeur to the royals and was also Oscar Wilde’s personal driver. He and my granny lived in a cottage in the Kensington Palace estate. My granddad on my dad’s side made it possible for people to take long-haul flights. He invented a fireproof tank for planes that prevented them blowing up if there was a fire mid-flight. Mum’s side of the family were never rich, whereas my dad’s always drove Bentleys and were very wealthy.
Sadly, both of my grandfathers died before I was born, but I was very close to my grannies and they were wonderful women – one of them lived until she was 103 years old.
I definitely think spending so much time with my mum, sister and grannies gave me a better understanding of females. By 12 I knew what Touche Éclat was (it’s make-up, lads) – at the time they only had one shade – and I’d also watch all of the girly movies of the day, tucked up on the sofa with my mum and Amelia. My upbringing also taught me from an early age how to show respect to women. I knew to stand nearest the cars when walking down the pavement with a woman, so if a car drove through a puddle I would get wet but they would be protected (at least I think that’s what we do it for!). It’s so hard these days because if you want to give up your seat for a woman on the train they assume that you think they’re pregnant, old or morbidly obese, but I’m determined that if I can find a way to be a gentleman that doesn’t put me in danger of being beaten up by a large boyfriend and his dog, I will do it.
When I was around four years old I had my first crush. I can still remember it; I was at a wedding on the Caribbean island of St Lucia when I met a girl called Emma. She was beautiful, with blue eyes and long dark hair. She was the daughter of family friends who were getting married on the island that week. I thought she was perfect. I remember seeing her for the first time when we were both with our parents and I couldn’t stop smiling at her. I probably looked like a right knob.
I must have been desperately trying to impress Emma, because I made the terrifically bad decision to make friends with the local kids and go and hang out on the beach with them in a bid to find a prize of a metaphorical slaughtered lamb for her.
After some Del-Boy-style negotiation (that may have looked like a very young drug deal), I ended up trading a pineapple I had pilfered from the wedding spread for a half-dead black and white sea snake. It was all they had to offer and it seemed like a great deal at the time.
When the speeches began I decided it was the perfect time to present my princess with her gift. I boldly marched into the reception dressed in my smartest clothes, smelling a little bit of dead snake and feeling very excited indeed. The best man was whipping out his comedy routine about the groom when I went straight to the top table and threw the snake onto the bride’s plate. She recoiled in horror and the whole room went silent. Even worse, this whole scenario was played out in full view of Emma. Why I didn’t attempt to hand it straight to Emma I’ll never know, but I suspect it was because I wanted to cause the biggest commotion I could to get noticed by the object of my apparent desire. Needless to say, the entire party was soon in uproar.
The bride looked like she was going to have a seizure, and the only person who seemed even vaguely amused was my father, because he knew how much I would have enjoyed that moment.
I got into so much trouble afterwards that I temporarily forgot about my love for Emma. I was sent straight to bed by my mother, who was less than happy with my behaviour, and was robbed of the opportunity to roll about the dancefloor to cheesy songs as all kids love to do at weddings.
It was only when I woke up the next morning that I turned to my mum and said, ‘Mummy, was she real?’ because I thought I’d dreamed up both Emma and the snake. Mum had calmed down by then so she gave me a hug and told me that I would meet the right girl for me one day, and that I might need more time and a different approach to find her.
Needless to say I was ridiculed mercilessly by Amelia and I didn’t get the girl either. My parents still laugh about that story now and it’s one that usually gets rolled out over the Christmas dinner table.
That was my first ever taste of heartbreak. Even at that tender age my heart was still rather bruised and my mum said I was upset for days about the fact that Emma would probably never want to marry me now.
I still know Emma to this day; she’s a dancer in Southampton. Our paths cross every now and again but thankfully I don’t think she remembers a thing about the snake episode. She’s still lovely but there’s never been any romance between us. Maybe the snake killed our love before it had even begun? Sadly I feel like that incident kind of set the tone for the next 20 years or so when it came to my love life.
It took a little time to recover from, but I wasn’t put off by that incident and so I went in search of the next young lady who would be sure to fall for my undeniable charms. Weirdly, this story also involves an animal (not in a bestiality way, dirty bastards!). The girl in question was Patricia Harris. We were both aged five when we first exchanged glances on our first day of prep school. I walked into class, probably wearing dungarees because I used to rock them, and there she was.
She had pigtails and freckles and she was American, so she seemed quite exotic. It took a while for sparks to fly, but eventually we bonded over our teacher’s missing hamster. Now, I wouldn’t normally advise using rodents as a way into a girl’s heart, but it worked in this case.
Mrs Bonham-Smith’s pet had been on the missing list for nearly a month and after a long grieving process for Bamster, everyone had given up hope of ever seeing her whiskery face again. It was widely assumed that the hamster had decided that being terrorised by children week in week out wasn’t what she wanted to do with her life, so she had escaped to try and find a better one.
We never expected to see Bamster again and I imagined her trying to make her long journey to the sewers of London with some sawdust tied up in a spotted handkerchief, dreaming of the big time.
One day Patricia and I were so bored we decided to have one last search around the classroom just in case she was hiding out, and amazingly we found her snuggled up to another fugitive hamster underneath a disused sink with what looked like about a thousand baby hamsters (dirty bitch).
Patricia and I were so excited, and it seemed like such a profound shared experience at the time that I honestly thought Patricia and I were meant to be together forever (of course the Green Card would also be a massive bonus). But unfortunately, as much as she appreciated our shared interests, she was still at the stage where she found boys annoying.
I recently tried to look Patricia up on Facebook to see what she’s up to these days, but I failed to find her. It may be 21 years later, she could be living anywhere in the world and look like Shrek’s arse by now, but one thing I’ve learned about romance is that you can find it in the most unexpected places with the most unexpected people.
I have never been one to live in the moment when it comes to relationships, even though I’m spontaneous in lots of other ways. Even when I was a child I was always fast-forwarding and thinking about marriage and kids and living happily ever after within days of meeting someone. I just loved the idea of marriage, which might have had something to do with my sister’s childhood fixation with Home and Away.
OK, so my love obsession didn’t make me the coolest kid in school, because the cool ones were often rebellious and rude, but I was a sensitive dreamer. I was pretty much the anti-poon. The other kids in my school used to take the piss out of me because I was always desperate to look after both people and animals, and I could often be found in the playing fields gazing at squirrels. Once I even took home a dead squirrel I’d found so I could put it on the nature table at school the next day. Nothing says nature like a rigamortis squirrel. My parents were horrified, but I just wanted to help. The poor little thing deserved a proper grave. I also once tried to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a moth. I really wish I was making that up because it sounds utterly ridiculous now I think about it, but I remember it so clearly. It happened on the same momentous day that Britney Spears released ‘Baby One More Time’ and whenever I hear that song it always reminds me of my attempt at giving CPR to, let’s face it, a fucking ugly butterfly.
OK, so I have always been, and probably always will be, a hopeless romantic, which has been my downfall time and time again. When I was about eight I was living in a place called Abbott’s Way in Southampton with my parents and Amelia. To all intents and purposes we were very happy in this fabulous house that had an amazing garden and tennis courts. My dad worked in property and my mum was a housewife. It was very much a cosy family home. Aside from my animal obsession, I was kind of like any other normal 8-year-old. I watched Pete’s Dragon on repeat and had unsuccessful tennis lessons. I thought myself incredibly lucky to be living in this amazing family and I didn’t really have a care in the world – my life was stable and wonderful. Or so I thought.
My parents were never that affectionate with each other when I was a child, to the point where I often used to try to sneak up on them after bedtime to see if I could catch them kissing just so I would know for sure that they loved each other.
So it shouldn’t have been a surprise when, on one grey, drizzly autumn day, everything changed. Amelia and I were sat watching Pete’s Dragon on TV when Mum and Dad walked into the sitting room. They sat down on our two pink pouffes – the height of early 90s chic – and Amelia and I knew straight away that they had something very serious to discuss with us.
I think it was Mum who took the stand first and announced in the kindest way possible that they were going to get divorced. At that age, we didn’t really understand what they meant at first and it was all very confusing, until they explained that although they were still going to be friends, they would no longer be married to each other.
They had seemed so content that it made no sense to me at all. I remember sitting very still and taking it all in. I just stared at them with a blank expression while my sister cried beside me. I think I was too young to really get my head around the enormity of what they were telling us, whereas Amelia was that bit older so she knew what it meant in the long term.
They tried to help us get to grips with the fact that they were going to be living apart, but I couldn’t understand why they didn’t love each other anymore. It took a long time for it to properly sink in, but once it did a small part of the fairytale had died.
I was worried that they wouldn’t be happy any more, and I wondered how they could bear being apart from each other when they had shared a house, a bedroom … everything. It seemed like a very odd thing to do, and in my eight-year-old mind I thought that maybe they would just start loving each other again and it would all be fine.
My sister and I used to watch the film The Parent Trap and discuss how we would use the same tactics to get our mum and dad back together. We thought if we could set up some cunning situations where they had to spend time with each other, they would fall back in love and live happily ever after. But of course that’s not how things work. It’s funny how a child’s mind thinks.
After the initial shock and sadness wore off I was secretly slightly happy when I realised that I would now have two lots of presents every Christmas and birthday. In fact, despite the divorce initially being a huge blow, I realised that the whole thing was actually going to work in my favour in the long term.
A new, weirdly exciting phase of my life was about to begin, and with more presents and two houses, I would surely look cool enough to pull any girl now … But while I was already mentally writing out extravagant gift lists, my sister was still distraught. In my child’s brain, I saw it as the start of a new chapter, whereas she saw it as the end of one. I guess everyone deals with divorce differently, and I think the best thing parents can do is to keep the kids out of it as much as possible.
My parents said they would make sure that both of my new houses had a pond, which was another massive bonus. For some strange reason I was, and still am, obsessed with fish. I’m a Pisces, so that may have something to do with it. You may (or may not) be interested to hear that I’m a keen deep-sea fisherman and have a fishing boat moored in Hayling Island, just off Portsmouth, which I take on regular excursions around the world. See, I’m not so camp after all!
Anyway, I’m getting distracted. Let’s get back to the story.
From what I remember my parents’ divorce was really quite amicable. Amelia and I were kept out of all of the proceedings, and not once did we see any kind of arguments between them. I don’t think there was any big drama when it came to their break-up: they had simply fallen out of love with each other.
The only thing that did upset me was the idea of my dad cross-dressing. As a child, Mrs Doubtfire was one of my favourite films. It must have made quite an impression on me, as I once got very upset believing that the only way Dad would be able to see Amelia and I was if he dressed up as an elderly woman like Robin Williams did in the film. I think a whole generation of divorcee Doubtfire kids genuinely believed our fathers now had to become transvestites.
As I started to get older, I refused to let my parents’ divorce give me a skewed attitude to relationships. I have friends from broken families and as a result they’ve become really cynical about love, but I believe that just because one relationship doesn’t work out it doesn’t mean that they’re all doomed to fail. Anyway, there was no way I was going to let my parents’ divorce put me off my quest for the perfect partner.