Tab Tries: The Royal Wedding Drinking Game

READ: How Important are the Royal Family?

ADMIRE: Jon Bailey’s cartoon

Well, well, well, trying to stop us drinking by keeping lectures going on the Royal wedding day are you University? It’ll take more than that to stop me getting thematically drunk.

Thanks to combined genius of the Royal Wedding Drinking Game and iPlayer, we decided to host our own slightly late Royal wedding party. And we decided to do it properly.

One of us was wearing floor-length florals. Another had a red blazer. Someone had even broken out a novelty wedding hat to rival Eugenie’s (not really: Eugenie looked like a berk, and this one looked fly).

We arrived at ‘The Palace’ (Oscar’s room) and proceeded to decorate the venue, draping some polyester bunting across a flag of Brazil, and spreading our free picnic rug across the floor. Having avoided any comical facial injuries during my debut champagne-pop, we proceeded to concoct a ‘King’s Pimms’ (champagne instead of lemonade; strong in all senses of the word). Next, we distributed some tiaras, and the really relevant and logical Halloween cups that I’d discovered in our picnic basket. Alcohol and costumes sorted, we were ready to start.

King Pimms, it’s how the royals get drunk (probably)

The rules of the game are quite extensive, but it turns out that the general gist, like most good drinking games, is drink a lot and often. A sample rule is if you see a flag and call it first, you can make other people do 4 fingers. Pretty much everyone had a flag. After eight or so minutes we had abandoned all attempts to honour the rule and just let it go, like so many of Prince Harry’s morals.

To make things worse/better, the coverage was really, really long. We skipped out the rubbish beginning, but even still we had at least 2 hours worth of drink time. By the half hour mark, most of the rules had gone out the window and we were just drinking every time we saw someone royal.

But there was one rule we stuck to. When the priest said, ‘I now proclaim you man and wife’ the last person to shout ‘God save our future king!’ had to down ‘The King’s Cup’, a dirty pint made up of everybody’s fines.

By some miracle (everyone lying), it seemed as if we all said it at the same time. Bit of a hitch (pun very much intended). Being a deeply democratic bunch, we passed a referendum on whether or not Oscar should be the man to take one for the monarchy. The result was unanimous.

Ten or so seconds later, and Oscar had taken to the throne to rebalance his fluid levels. Whether or not he was having a cheeky sick remains a mystery.

Thereafter, things started to deteriorate. At some point (notes are unclear; ‘Oscar elected to have the King’s Cup’ is followed by an illegible scribble in a different  pen, soaring arrogantly across three lines of the page) we abandoned the ceremony in favour of a good old wedding disco. The disco featured classics such as ‘Isn’t She Lovely?’ (in honour of Pippa) and ‘Reach For The Stars’ (in honour of Elton and Becks and the other famous folk in attendance). Dad dancing happened.

At some point, after realising one of the guests had been asleep on a desk chair for at least an hour, we decided it was time that the celebrations were wrapped up and carriages were called. Carriages, bicycles- you say tomato, etc.

So, the game had been a relative success. Thing is, no one really wins with a game like that, and it just left everyone slightly bloated, tired and smelling like basil. People did lose, (poor, puzzled Oscar) – but, having packed up the picnic basket, one was left with a sad sense of emptiness. The Big Day had been coming for so long, and it had come to pass, all too quickly, in a haze of plastic memorabilia and unpalatable punch.  On the other hand, it yielded important cathartic benefits (being bound by actual Law to drop a c-bomb every time you see David Cameron’s face? Very healthy).

A largely meaningless exercise in baseless indulgence and the joys of a good hat? There’s definitely a metaphor in there somewhere.

The full Royal wedding coverage is available on iPlayer until Friday if you want to host your own Royal Wedding Drinking Game.