Ye London party season kicked off in style last night - and the Guy with the Eye was there. Is there no sacrifice I won’t make on your behalf, dear reader? Well, yes there is. I was unavoidably detained at the Dog & Duck until ye party’s opening sermon was over. John Donne may deserve his reputation as Preacher to the Stars - and the Star-gazers - but frankly, if you’ve heard it once you’ve heard it a thousand times. So the Guy’s carriage pulled up just as Paris Hilton (is there no bash this girl doesn’t attend?) stepped from hers. The doors were blown open before us by the gasp of relief as Donne put down his notes and the assembled crowd dashed for the bar.

 

Johnny the D stayed on for a glass (or six!), but rumours that Paris appeared a little under-done must be discounted. Our one-time love-machine’s a reformed character nowadays - Peter Stringfellow take note!! - and those horses of the night can’t run fast enough for his new holy style.

 

In the corner Willy ‘the Fish’ Lilly was laying down some riffs on his bass viol, but his whacked-out re-bop rectification of ‘Round Midnight’ was inaudible above the babble, till long-time campadre and technik whizz Eli Ashmole began rubbing his ebony wand to push some e-l-e-c-t-r-i-c-i-t-y through the big boy’s amp. The Guy asks, ‘Why the shades, Eli?’ I hear he was up all the night before, getting ratted again.

 

Little Nicky Culpeper emerged from ye offices, rubbing his nose as usual and asking someone to pass him an album cover. Why is this boy so popular with the younger set? Is it the pale and wan look? Or is it those ever-busy fingers?? Don’t bother asking John Partridge: the Guy saw him lying behind the sofa so still he might have been dead. Too much of Nicky’s wild lettuce - or had he indeed met a Swift end??

 

Meanwhile swarthy Meditteranean love-icon Guido Bonatti was on the prowl. He confided in the Guy that he was here only because the heating in his new residence was jammed on too hot for comfort. But while we spoke his eyes were always pointed elsewhere. Looking for a rich widow, Guido? Not if Willy the Fish spots her first!

 

Forget the image of born-again gloom-merchant you may have garnered from his recent CD of Irish funeral laments, ‘Milton Keens’! Blind Boy M was hopped up and ready to rock, joining Willy Lilly as he pumped out some righteous grooves on his Hammond. A thumping version of ‘What’d I Say’ got the party popping. But as his exhibition on the dance-floor showed, memories of Charles still make John Gadbury forget all his art. John, the Guy needs to know: were those gyrations a gonged-out version of the Twist? Or merely the desperate flailing of a man falling into the Tiber??

 

A late arrival was Joe Kepler, fresh from the Priory, where he’s been getting treatment for ‘exhaustion’. Joe, we all know that’s the favoured celeb euphemism for dabbling with semi-sextiles. Much good his spell in rehab has done him: tonight he was rapping to anyone who’d listen about something he called biquintiles. Who says the Germans have no sense of humour??

 

The Guy with the Eye is sad to report that the festivities broke up in acrimony, after John Dee complained that his scrying mirror had disappeared. Willy the Fish cast a quick horary, which directed the search towards ye offices. There Nicky C was discovered hunched over the missing mirror with an oyster shell and a page torn from Christian Astrology. Two planetary hours that were with him, over-animated and under-dressed, were hastily covered up with a blanket. One was a Venus hour, notorious for such behaviour, but the other was a Saturn hour, which surprised us all.

 

On this, carriages were called. As the Guy boarded his, few revellers remained, except the forlorn figure of Simon Forman wandering the hall, swinging an empty bottle and crying ‘Halek! Halek! Someone must want some halek!’