And still the band plays on, though the chairs are beginning to tilt imperceptibly down the deck. Perhaps there’s only so much wretchedness people can take. Aside from the fact that the jewellery dealers of Hatton Garden now feature boxes of tissues on their counters, like divorce lawyers (turns out diamonds were a girl’s best friend after all), London seems frenetically intent on squeezing out a few last drops of debauchery.
Hatchard’s Christmas signing last night was packed with readers swigging wine and lugging green bags of hardbacks, while the usual quota of deranged Gissing characters clustered with their autograph books. Signatures are apparently still sound and one could hardly grab a seat in the Ritz. Sebastian Horsley’s “evening of moral turpitude” at Marylebone speakeasy Underbar was packed, whilst rumours of extremely louche goings on at a certain ambassadorial residence in Portland Place suggest that swinging is the new going out.
Quentin Crisp wrote of the Blitz that the streets of blacked-out London became a paved double bed; “Voices whispered suggestively to you as you walked along, hands reached out if you stood still and in dimly lit trains people carried on as they had once behaved only in taxis.” All shamefully irresponsible, but cheering to think that this the winter of our discontent might be set to be a new summer of love.
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