Poor cows

Sophie’s lives in an old pornographic cinema at the south end of Great Windmill Street, Soho. It is opposite McDonald’s and the Windmill International (‘Probably the most exciting mens club in the world [if you don’t mind paying women to expose their breasts when they might do it for nothing if you were charming]’). Is it so exciting that the patrons do not care that they have been given a semi-consensual sexual experience but denied an apostrophe? It is also pleasingly close to the venue of the Second Congress of the Communist League, which took place in 1847, and prompted the commission of the Communist Manifesto, and all on the first floor of the Red Lion pub which is now a cocktail bar called Be At One. Quite so.

Sophie’s is a steak house because it is now the fashion to eat cow by mass. I don’t know why and assume it is a kind of machismo; cows are bigger than ducks. It is the third Sophie’s — the first is in Chelsea — and the second, in Covent Garden, closed recently, possibly due to cow terrorists who I, alongside Jeremy Corbyn, wholeheartedly support. I have cow ennui, and cow fatigue. I am, essentially, cowed.

Even so, I am excited because Sophie’s used to be the Moulin Cinema, which showed soft pornography and, for some reason, Carry On films. Is that what fans of soft pornography liked to watch when they were sated? Bernard Bresslaw looking sad? Was that their cinema verité, their recognition? I am not sorry that the Moulin Cinema has closed but sometimes anything feels more palatable than what Soho has become, which is blocks of flats for men seeking danger, even as they make Soho undangerous.