BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN
Last Friday night, deep in a den of iniquity on Soho’s Frith Street, it occurred to me that the boom-boom and boom-booms of nightclubs no longer appeal to me.
The days of waking up at midnight in my bachelor flat on Great Titchfield Street and thinking it a fair scheme to pop by Bar Madrid for tequila and tango were already distant.
Now, sat beneath the Arts Theatre Club’s ‘iconic’ neon sign, all I could think about were how my ears were stinging excruciatingly like a pair of post-op trannies, whether my dogs back home had been exited for their nightly penny, and how I might adjoin a letter ‘f’ to the club sign.
The music seemed still the same; the bare skin on show still ubiquitous; the alcohol still ample.
The bar looked like any trendy drinking den from that neck of the woods in the noughties – the bar staff just as foreign, appealing and devoted; the cocktails just as lush and exorbitant. That Soho edge of being next to strip joints and the mackintosh brigade with their brown paper magazine sheaths had dipped somewhat, like most things on the helter-skelter of moral relativism, juxtaposed by the globalism of Starbucks.
What had changed physically?
The complement of a wife of sixteen years, those many inches of titanium binding my shattered pins, and the company of some who back then would have been studying – like my daughter is now – for their GCSEs.
Mentally?
Perhaps oddly, the cerebral changes seemed far weightier – a yearning to chat with one’s fellow human beings about things rather than people; to converse in a milieu where one could hear and be heard; to have fun in an atmosphere created by coterie rather than environment. And to belly-laugh as one can only really do in the chilled company of chums.
The reason for this departure from the backveld to the shade of the metropolis was the Deputy Editor’s birthday. (Again, many happy returns, Dear Bembers – still twenty-five years old and holding).
Chiswick’s newfound rake looking jolly dapper in his Crispesque clobber; sporting well the hidden locks of Richard O’Brien and grinning like Jack Torrence in The Shining for Twitter snaps (for which of course I ducked).
It was marvellous to see so many of the magazine’s writers present too, in particular Lord McGhee of Old Compton, adorned by skull rings and draped (alas sans ermine) in the kinkiest leathers Soho has attested.
For next year, Dear Bembers, a country inn.
Hire the barn.
Stodge and sponge.
Claret and cigars.
Dominic Wightman is Editor of Country Squire Magazine.