The endless summer started here

As the weather heats up and the first sangrias of the season are supped, I warmed up and slipped from underneath my stone. Now in my experience one really needs a full on Marbella style blow out to get the summer going, so imagine my lizard like squeals of delight when an invitation slipped underneath the door at Grim Towers, my place in the campo bearing the immortal words

“James Hewitt requests the pleasure of your company for the grand opening of Polo House Marbella”

Now, as a professional lunch guest in Marbella for 20 years now, I’ve bumped into James on a number of occasions and have never understood why he tends to crop up on the hate list of the Great British Public every time. He may have bumped uglies with Saint Diana of Kensington, but to be honest, he wasn’t the only high profile figure to do so, as I seem to remember a certain bumfaced English rugby captain also being linked to the Queen of Hearts. But I digress

Heralded in the press release as costing €2 million fit out, the Polo House Marbella is a polo themed restaurant and club with a colonial atmosphere. A brilliant concept if you ask me, for what is Marbella if not a de facto British colony? Did I not hear recently that Spain will give up its claim to Gibraltar if it can have Marbella back from the British?

Of course, all the polo action takes place at Sotogrande, but that’s not were the Eurotrash hang out, so locating the club on the main road between Marbella and Puerto Banus was another masterstroke.

And lets face it, to myself an all the other lounge lizards based on the coast, it doesn’t matter what the theme of the venue is. As long as the booze and nibbles are both free and freely available, we’ll be there. And with Vueve Clicquot supplying the fizz, we were there in force. Slitherer employed his usual tactics at these events, get there early, say hello to the host (who was more than a little nervous, but that may have been at the sight of me) and then get to the bar. From which vantage spot I was able to spy a fantastic selection of Eurotrash, including heavyweight contenders such as Baroness von Thyssen, one of the richest women in Spain, who popped in from cosying with Antonio Banderas in Malaga. The fact that she was known as plain Carmen Cervera from Seville before she married the millionaire art aristocrat doesn’t matter. In Marbella she’s treated as royalty, as were the smattering of German princesses from now defunct principalities and James reputation as one of Marbella’s own nobility was underlined when the Marbella mayor, Angeles Munoz, officially opened the restaurant in a ribbon cutting ceremony. Truth is stranger than fiction I mused as I staggered out into the evening….