How to be the bride’s mother

AS ever I’m trying to channel my inner Carole Middleton. I’m still bowled over by her consummate elegance and composure at Kate and Wills’s wedding. She didn’t sob loudly all over Prince Charles and make her nose red and blotchy. She didn’t have a rogue inch of petticoat or errant bra strap ruining her understated yet gorgeous ensemble.

Even more impressively, she appeared to be thoroughly enjoying every second of an epic extravaganza most menopausal women, hot flushes at the ready, would have considered an ordeal.

Now she’s marrying off her younger daughter Pippa and I’m doing the same with my daughter Saskia and I’m determined to emulate her poise. Or am I? I’ve already broken the Middleton mould with a crinoline gown in bejewelled lipstick pink.

Unlike Carole I’ll be making an exuberant speech liberally scattered with pauses for a good old-fashioned weep or saucy guffaw. In non-Middleton style I’ll be joining the band on stage for a right old dance-up to Mud’s Tiger Feet.

Okay, cancel the above. I’d rather be me than a Middleton any day. Who needs a size-four figure and impeccable taste when you can let your hair down and unleash lashings of distinctly vulgar fun? HOW heartening to hear Stewart Parvin, one of Her Majesty’s favourite designers, reveal that at 90 the Queen takes colossal pleasure in beautiful clothes, adores colour, refuses to be budged by the whims of fashion and has evolved a style so personal that no other woman would be foolish enough even to come close to cloning it.