21 September—My Canadian significant other—only for the big bash, I must make clear—liked the idea of morning dress. Happily, it was easy to talk him out of it. But he had to borrow a lounge suit from another friend because mine couldn’t handle his girth. (I used to be streamlined.)

I wasn’t going to negotiate London traffic, Canuck didn’t have a car, and I had been warned about the parking hassle at and around Buckingham Palace. So on the big day Canuck and I hopped on the train to London and caught a taxi from Paddington to the party. The driver wasn’t impressed that we were going to the back-yard bash, but he was taken aback by our non-formal dress and intrigued that we weren’t afraid to go as a couple. We didn’t disabuse him.

Evidently our lack of morning dress and/or inferred (but in no way implied, I should have thought) homosexuality garnered quite a bit of attention once we were on the palace grounds and in the impressive back-yard, very little of it positive. One of the few other men not in morning dress introduced himself at one of the food marquees. He was a Labour MP (Member of Parliament), at the bash with some constituents and not too happy about it. Like my ad hoc significant other, the Labour MP was a republican but not an anti-monarchist.

After about an hour or two of being stared at, glaring back, engaging in jejune small-talk, getting propositioned (only once, by an older gentleman), and generally being bored and unimpressed by the food and drink, we heard that the royals were coming, the royals were coming! Naturally the crowd formed a flying wedge towards wherever the royals were supposed to be coming from.

Canuck and I didn’t join it, since we’d have nothing to do with that nonsense. We didn’t do receiving lines and weren’t impressed by celebrity of any sort, especially royalty. One excited wrinkly proletarian couple couldn’t believe we were passing up the opportunity to actually meet Her Majesty and His Royal Highness, not to mention the royal brats who were also allowed out that day, and made it clear we’d regret our lapse when we grew up.

But we did. Snub the Windsors, grow up, and not regret our lapse. A few days later I treated my significant other and his wife to dinner at Studley Priory.

A summer later, my fiancée-elect (before she was even that, now I think of it), whom I hadn’t known the previous summer, a thoroughly British belle, wanted to go to a Buckingham Palace Garden Party. In spite of what I told her. So my friend at the embassy came through again.

My beautiful fiancée-elect wasn’t happy that I refused to dress formally, but she was mollified by the fact that the suit I’d be wearing had recently been made from a polished worsted from one of her father’s mills in Cheshire by her father’s tailor in Manchester. (I still have it. Last time I wore it, as I recall was 1985. That’s probably the last time it fit.)

The Buck House back-yard bash was pretty much the same as the previous one, except that one of the royals or other didn’t show up (I think it was the Duke of Edinburgh) and my fiancée-elect insisted on working her way up the receiving line just to shake their hands and maybe even curtsy. I expect she did both, since that’s what the girls were taught at Roedean. But I didn’t really give a damn.

While she was getting her thrills, I was enjoying myself and schmoozing with the hired help, many of whom worked for the caterer, now-defunct J. Lyons and Company, a restaurant and hotel chain owned by a family of “Yids,” as one of the help called the Salmons. I don’t think that “Yids” was intended as a racist insult.

So that’s twice I snubbed the late Queen. In all events, a month after the big bash we were engaged and a couple of months after that we were disengaged. Life was good . . .