Going clubbing
Alex James
‘Lunch at the Athenaeum!’ I told my mum. No idea what I was talking about. ‘The Athenaeum! It’s a gentleman’s club on Pall Mall. I’ve arrived, mother. Look at me now!’ I’ve been trying to break on to the gentleman’s club scene for a while. I’ve even joined one, a creaking Goliath down by the river. The dining room there is about the nicest in London, but I’ve only been once. The food is good: reasonably priced, old-fashioned splendour, whacking great Chateaubriand and whumping puddings that trump the décor for scale and invincibility. The ceilings are high and the conversation is low. The view is of the river and a room half full of people I’ve never seen before. I wonder why I don’t go there more often, really. I like the idea of it. Even as I write, it sounds perfect to me.
I suppose London used to be my playground and now it’s more of an office. I beetle up there, hustle and then beetle back to the parish to do my messing around in peace. When I’m not doing anything in town these days, in between wheeler-dealings, I really don’t want to do anything. I mean, I don’t want anything else to happen at all. I just want to sit there staring into space with my mouth slightly open, and the trouble with gentleman’s clubs is that everyone wants a chat. I mean that’s the point of them. They’re all cosy and matey. If you walk in on your own, it’s like you’re a single woman walking into a boozer in Chipping Norton. Pretty soon you’ve drawn a crowd. People are buying you drinks, telling you how wonderful it is here and about the funny thing that happened to them last week. There’s always someone to tell you that this club’s not as ‘stuffear’ as that club and then someone else has asked for another bowl of peanuts and, before I know it, I’m explaining the difference between a soft white cheese and a rind washed one, just like I was in my last meeting.
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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