ECHO Reporter Adrian Butler mixes it with the city's hottest crowd
* Scouserati n. group of fashionable actors, singers, models, footballers well-known in their home city of Liverpool - origin: blend of Scouser (from lobscouse, a stew formerly eaten by sailors) and literati.
STANDING at a bar waiting to be served shouldn't be a nerve-racking experience.
But this wasn't any bar and I wasn't any customer.
In the last 12 hours, I'd undergone a transformation as sudden and drastic Audrey Hepburn's in My Fair Lady - and now I was trying to pass myself off at the ball.
But I hadn't joined the titled ranks of Edwardian London society. The group I was muscling in on is far more elite than that.
The Scouserati are the men and women you've read about in the ECHO's Insider, the tabloids and the celeb mags.
They are the Liverpool elite, dressed head to toe in Missoni and Pucci Prince and sipping expensive cocktails in the city's VIP lounges.
And, outside Liverpool, they are fast becoming a national obsession.
"Our readers love Coleen and her friends," says one London showbiz hack. "They can't read enough about them and we want everything we can get on them."
I'd read about the life they lead - described as the nearest thing Britain gets to LA - and I wanted in.
The trouble is, there was no way I could pass myself off as one of them. With my scruffy, mousy-brown hair, non-designer clothes and pallid complexion, I just didn't fit in.
So the ECHO set me a challenge - to pass myself off as an A-list Scouser in just a day.
