Wedding season in Malta is well and truly underway, with couples across the country tying the knot over the past few months.
And while most of those couples will have chosen a run-of-the-mill wedding cake as the centrepiece of their celebrations, David Camilleri and Christina Borg decided to ditch tradition when they got hitched last Saturday, and instead treated themselves and their guests to a mountain of cocaine.
“Ever since we got engaged five years ago, we knew we wanted to do something different. The problem was that neither of us have a personality, so we were struggling to come up with ideas,” said David.
“Then it hit us. I’m a lawyer, Christina is an estate agent, and all our friends are lawyers and estate agents. What better way to celebrate our marriage than with a massive pile of cocaine?”
The pair’s big day started at the parish church of Naxxar, where both David and Christina are from.
“We really wanted to get a move on because everyone was antsy and that coke mountain wasn’t going to snort itself. So before the ceremony we did a couple of pre-wedding lines with the priest. We said to him: “The holy host is white, and cocaine is white, so how different could they be?” Christina said.
“The whole thing lasted five minutes. As I power walked to the altar, Dun Pawl said, “Take man? Take woman?” We stared into each other’s dilated pupils and said, “Ejja ħa nsiru ċappa.”
David has fond memories of the moment:”My heart was racing when I saw Christina looking so gorgeous in her wedding dress, mainly because I’d also done a ton of coke on the way to the church.”
The couple also dispensed with the customary wedding car, and instead arrived at the beautiful Villa Biancaneve in Madliena after a brisk five-kilometre run.
“We spent almost €3,000 on catering but I think all the food got thrown away because obviously we went straight for the melħ. Come to think of it, even the tuxedo was a bit of a waste because I soon ended up shirtless,” David said.
The melħ in question was a 2-metre high mountain of Colombian nose candy that would have made Pablo Escobar envious.
Once all the guests had taken a share using their commemorative silver coke spoons, which they had received together with a bag of cocaine-coated perlini, David and Christina had their first dance.
“We’ve been to friends’ weddings where they danced to stuff like ‘I Don’t Wanna Miss A Thing’ by Aerosmith or ‘All Of Me’ by John Legend. But those songs aren’t ideal if you feel like you’re dying but in a good way, so we mental to some hard dance.”
So how did they manage to score enough cocaine for 300 guests, without alerting the authorities?
“My dad works at the Freeport, so when they found 90 kilos of the stuff hidden in a container ship a few months ago, he was able to make a few packets disappear,” Christina said.
“It also helps that my second cousin is a high-ranking police officer, and a government minister is a friend of the family. He really enjoyed the reception, actually.”
