Let men have their boys’ clubs

Taken to the Garrick Club one evening, I was surprised when a mouse ran across the carpet. I squeaked and pulled my legs up. Not a murmur from the other armchairs. My host leaned over. ‘No one minds the mice,’ he explained. ‘It’s the women they don’t want.’ It made me laugh then and it makes me laugh now.

I thought fondly of this story when I read in the paper that Emily Bendell, founder of the lingerie brand Bluebella, had instructed lawyers to seek an injunction preventing the Garrick from ‘continuing to operate its discriminatory policy’ of excluding women would-be members. As it happens, I don’t mind being there on sufferance between the allotted hours and in the permitted rooms. Boys will be boys, gentlemen will be gentlemen. Don’t let the buffers get you down.

It has been a summer of postponed weddings and that means cancelled stag-dos too. Some grooms are planning ‘small stags’ (muntjacs, perhaps?) when social distancing allows. I feel for my husband. Formerly, I packed him off for weekends in Hamburg of beer halls, night clubs and Miniatur Wunderland, the largest model railway in the world, in the knowledge that he would come home happy and restored. In the strange spring months of isolation it became all too apparent that my cricket chat was lacking and my football banter poor. On Sunday afternoons, he would disappear into the study for epic pub quiz sessions, beer on desk, mates on Zoom, and emerge hours later as new.

The word ‘bastion’, usually coupled with ‘male’, is invariably framed as a Bad Thing. But the bastion serves its purpose.