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Saturday 22 November 2008

Slow Life

Going clubbing

I guess even with the opulence of the buildings it’s hard to create a sensation of glamour without girls or famous people and young persons getting drunk, and I’m still a glamour junkie at heart.

Well, the Athenaeum was lovely. It’s an academics’ club really. I finished off my gooseberry pie and invited my host, an English professor, to have one with me at Groucho’s. Well, we were just getting started. I can never resist an expert. Experts can never resist the Groucho, either. It always still feels like coming home, arriving at Groucho’s. Maybe I’m just not ready to join the ranks of the city’s gentlemen. My wife was there. There was a fit movie star in the corner. Everyone has tired of my cheese stories and leaves me alone. My professor and I sat in another corner talking about the time he saw The Doors at the Isle of Wight.

Then we went to the Colony. I haven’t been for ages, but it suddenly seemed appropriate, as we were ‘clubbing’.

There is something absolutely wonderful about the Colony room. It’s hard to describe it or its clientèle without it sounding horrible, but it’s not. It achieves something that no other club that I’ve ever been to manages. Even though it’s slap in the middle of the carnage of Dean Street, when you go in there in the afternoon, there was never anywhere more peaceful. The sunshine pours in and when it’s quiet, as it usually is at that time, there’s a sense of absolute stillness with a feeling that something fantastic might happen. I suppose that’s what glamour is, that feeling that something good is about to occur right here, right now. How the Colony manages to achieve this wonderful sense of poise with green emulsion and flat Coca-Cola and a bunch of gnarly wrong-uns, where Corinthian pillars in St James’s fail to do anything like it, is completely beyond me. I used to go there for weeks at a time. I kissed the barman and he showed me a photograph of the old days that made me laugh. It’s a shame, but it looks as if it’s the end of the road for the Colony. The lease on the building is up and it’s not really the kind of party that would make sense anywhere else. I wonder if I will ever go there again, to the timeless, careless, peerless mother of all modern members’ clubs.

It’s only for a certain kind of person, though, the Colony. My professor necked his beer in no time, said cheerio and was out the door before I’d said cheese. Ah, well.

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