The famous Flyfishers’ Club, Britain’s oldest fly-fishing club, is the latest male bastion to have the fair sex banging at the door. Women feel they have been unjustly excluded throughout its 193-year history, and now they want in. Seeing as the Garrick has at last buckled to the demand to admit women, they say the Flyfishers should too.
I quit the venerable Society of Authors too, after discovering it isn’t primarily for authors anymore
But I, for one, will be making no such demand. And not just because I have zero interest in fishing with flies. The truth is, I am probably the least clubbable person you are likely to meet. Although it’s taken me most of my life to finally recognise this fact. Over the decades I have eagerly joined quite a few clubs and societies, only to just as eagerly jump ship.
It all started in the 1970s when, at the tender age of 18, I joined the Sherlock Holmes Society. I’d read all the stories as a kid in America and could think of nothing better than meeting fellow Holmes-lovers now that I myself lived a short bus ride away from 221b Baker Street. So off I trotted to the society’s annual dinner at the Charing Cross Hotel. Dining with crusty retired colonels from the shires and others of that ilk, I was somewhat alarmed to discover that they seemed to believe the great detective was not only a real person but that he might actually still be alive. Apparently his astonishing longevity was due to the honey from the bees he kept on his Sussex farm. Unable to compete with such extreme Holmesiana, I soon let my membership lapse.
Then came the Dickens Fellowship. When the organisation announced an essay-writing competition on the theme of ‘what Dickens means to me’, I grabbed a pen and put my Sydney Carton-loving heart and soul into it. When I failed to win and didn’t even receive an acknowledgement of my efforts, I lost interest in the snooty old Fellowship.
Next up was the Oscar Wilde Society. By now older, I’d developed a taste for the wit and humour of the inimitable epigramist. But the society’s obsession with the most microscopic of Wildean minutiae – e.g. debating whose hairstyle Oscar was emulating when he got his locks cut short on one particular occasion – began to do my head in. I left after two years.
Three decades ago, when I was a feature writer at the Daily Mail, I joined the Pen Club hoping for some scintillating conversations along literary lines. But the poets and novelists I met at its functions, mostly a threadbare lot, preferred to talk about money. I was always being questioned about the Mail’s rate of pay for freelance contributions. No wonder I quietly slipped away from them for good.
I belonged to Women in Journalism for a while, many years ago. But after attending a few of their events I got the impression the organisation consisted mainly of various impenetrable cliques, hackettes of one type or another clustering closely together. I didn’t fit in anywhere, natch, so off I flounced.
Recently I quit the venerable Society of Authors too, after discovering it isn’t primarily for authors anymore. The membership that once included Tennyson and H.G. Wells now accepts bloggers and vloggers, the self-published, people who invent video games and anyone who self-identifies as a scribbler. No thanks.
However, the one place where I did fit in very nicely, during the 1990s, was the obscure Asylum Club, the brainchild of a quirky, congenial art collector. This unusual assemblage of bohemians and oddballs met regularly in a little basement dive in Fitzrovia. The drinks and the gossip flowed, there were dramatic scenes and ribaldry. I felt right at home there, amongst the other ‘sore thumbs’. And I’d happily still belong, except that, sadly, it folded a long time ago. I guess it just couldn’t survive the onslaught of the 21st century.
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