by Members’ clubs, borrowed sofas, and the calendar London refuses to let me control
Woke up at half eleven on the sofa of a flat that is absolutely not mine, still in last night’s dress, with absolutely no memory of how the playlist ended up stuck on the same three songs on repeat, and a text from my editor asking, gently but pointedly, where this week’s copy has gotten to. Honestly, fair question. I have been slightly distracted.
Last night, briefly
A friend of a friend was launching some sort of members’ club near Fitzrovia, the kind of event where everyone is dressed considerably better than the actual venue deserves, and I spent most of the evening trading gossip with a woman I had met exactly once before, who turned out to know absolutely everyone worth knowing in this city, which is precisely the kind of connection I collect the way other people collect stamps.
Left around one, shared a cab with three people I am fairly sure I will never see again and one I very much hope I will, and ended up here, on this sofa, considerably later than planned and considerably more entertained than I expected a Tuesday night to be.
The actual work bit
Managing to write this from the kitchen table of aforementioned not my flat, coffee in hand, while my host gets ready for what sounds like an equally chaotic day of her own. There is something I genuinely love about this city’s capacity to produce an entire social ecosystem out of absolutely nothing, a launch party for a club nobody had heard of a month ago, already generating the kind of gossip that will circulate through half of London by Friday.
Caught up on the feed properly over breakfast, and there was a piece running through this week’s opening list that had me genuinely reconsidering my Thursday plans entirely, which is either a compliment to the writing or a genuine problem for my actual productivity, possibly both simultaneously.
What London does to a person’s calendar
Nobody warns you, moving here, how thoroughly the city will colonise every evening you own if you let it, three invitations for tonight alone, none of which I have any genuine reason to attend beyond curiosity and the fact that saying yes to absolutely everything has, so far, produced considerably more interesting material than staying in ever has.
Turning down two of them regardless, purely on the grounds that I do actually need to file this piece before another editor message arrives, considerably less gently worded than the last one.
Tonight, provisionally
One event, properly chosen this time, a smaller gathering that a genuinely reliable source tells me will be worth the trip. Will report back, assuming I remember the details clearly enough by tomorrow morning, which is, admittedly, not always guaranteed on nights that start this promisingly.
More London social diary at Vivienne Pratfall, The London Prat.
The woman who knows everyone
Properly interrogated her, in the nicest possible way, about how exactly one ends up knowing quite this many people across quite this many different corners of London, and the answer, disappointingly for anyone hoping for a shortcut, turned out to be simply years of saying yes to things and genuinely remembering the details of people’s lives the second time you meet them, rather than any specific networking strategy worth stealing.
She did, however, give me the name of a considerably smaller, considerably less publicised event happening later this month that she promises is worth the trip, which I have written down properly rather than trusting to memory this time, given how reliably my memory has been failing me lately on precisely this kind of useful detail.
The host’s morning, for context
My extremely patient host, whose sofa I am still occupying as I write this, has been getting ready for what she describes, with visible dread, as a genuinely unavoidable family lunch across town, the kind of obligation that apparently cannot be rescheduled regardless of how the previous evening went. I offered considerable sympathy and slightly less practical help, mostly in the form of making her a coffee that she assures me was at least drinkable.
Promising to actually leave before she needs the flat back properly, though we both know that promise carries roughly the same reliability as most promises made before noon on a day like this one.
Also worth noting, purely for the record, that I did eventually file the actual piece my editor was chasing, roughly two hours after this diary entry itself was drafted, which feels like precisely the correct order of priorities for a Tuesday that started on someone else’s sofa.
What tonight is actually going to involve
The smaller gathering I mentioned earlier turns out, on closer inspection of the actual invitation, to be considerably more of a proper dinner than the casual drinks I had assumed, which means an outfit rethink is now required with rather less notice than I would ordinarily like, and possibly another borrowed item from whichever friend I can reach in the next hour who owns something appropriately smart that also is not already promised to someone else this week.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
