THEY say it ain't over until the fat lady sings, but we all knew it was pretty much over when the fat bloke in the shiny satin karate pyjamas belted out the chords of Abba's Waterloo.

The wedding party had started about 36 hours earlier with bucketfuls of booze at a village pub and now it was drawing to an equally sophisticated close as about 100 inebriated guests leapt about enthusiastically on the dance floor to the 1974 Eurovision winner.

After 18 months of planning and several thousand pounds of spending, my best friend was now officially Mrs Grose (no comment) and she was loving every minute of it. And who can blame her when everything had gone so smoothly?

Well, smooth-ish. First there was the case of the missing hat. Purchased several months earlier at a swanky Edinburgh store, the hat had been carefully packaged up and put on top of the fridge until the mother-of-the-bride required it on the big day.

Unfortunately when the bride went to retrieve it the day before the big day, she found it had disappeared without trace. And this wasn't a tiny little titfer either; this was a large lilac affair with feathers and everything. But it had gone: vanishing into the Bermuda triangle that is my friend's flat as completely as the T-shirts, lipsticks and - most bizarrely - the pair of knee-high black leather boots that had gone before it.

I've often thought there must be a ghost on the prowl in her lovely old Edinburgh tenement flat, but I've had the good sense never to mention it. Which brings us to hiccup number two.

Generally, my mate is a pretty level-headed kinda gal, but mention ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night and she goes a bit wobbly at the knees. So when we all arrived at the glamorously gothic Scottish castle she was to marry in, it probably wasn't the best idea for her soon-to-be sister-in-law to mention the fact that it was Hallowe'en.

The bride valiantly tried to quell her fears with unfeasibly large amounts of white wine, which she bravely worked her way through until around three in the morning before announcing that she was going to bed - but was not going alone.

Because I had slept with her many times before - in purely platonic terms, of course - I immediately stepped in and volunteered the aforementioned sister-in-law. I'm sorry, but she laughs in her sleep and can never remember the joke in the morning.

Then there was the best man's speech, but quite frankly the less said about that the better. Suffice it to say that pins being dropped in the top turret of the castle could be heard quite clearly during his jokes.

And then came Abba Mania - or McAbba as we snide Sassenachs insisted on calling them - a tribute band so good that even Auntie Alma got out of her wheelchair for a quick shimmy round the dancefloor.

They played all the hits to perfection, they had all the moves down and, perhaps most importantly of all, if all the gibbering, drooling men were anything to go by, they had a couple of frontwomen (a blonde and a brunette with breasts pert enough to double up as shoulder pads) who made the original pairing look like Hinge and Brackett.

But if I am allowed one tiny complaint - and it is only a teeny, tiny one - it would have to be that the quality of eye candy for the ladies was of a pretty poor standard. Okay so the original Benny and Bjorn were not exactly the Brad Pitt and George Clooney of their day, but they were a lot closer to Adonis-like perfection than the pair we were presented with.

While Bjorn looked like a rather tense bank clerk with a bad case of constipation (too much deep fried haggis will do that to you apparently), Benny looked like the sort of lad who still lives with his mum - and likes it that way. His ill-fitting karate pyjamas looked freshly ironed and his bowl-cut hair had a centre parting so straight it could only have been achieved with a ruler.

In fact now that I come to think of it the guitarist looked less like Benny from Abba and more like Benny from Crossroads. But this is a small and ultimately meaningless quibble about a day which will be remembered by all those involved with great affection and an enormous grin for years to come.

Especially when the photographic evidence is finally developed and the groom learns the terrible truth about how his bride and her two bridesmaids really managed to break the honeymoon bed.

But that, as they say, is a different story.

Updated: 10:41 Tuesday, November 05, 2002