Am I Getting Too Old For This Shit

Last night Louise, Catherine, and I had dinner at Brinkleys in Chelsea. The food is not inexpensive, but consistently good, and the wine is well priced, making it a refreshing difference from places like The Collection, whose cheapest bottles start at around the 18 pound mark.

Brinkleys is a local hangout filled with very thin, very beautiful, bejeweled people. I looked around at the women with their expensive clothes and perfectly styled manes of hair, and wondered what they did to look that good. I imagined hours of shopping, beauty treatments, and in some cases regular Botox installments.

There was one strikingly attractive American woman, sitting with her friend in a corner, who appeared to eat nothing and simply consumed vast amounts of what looked like gin and tonics, and smoked one long slim cigarette after another. I do wonder how women who smoke and drink that much past a certain age have such good skin. Again, regular beauty treatments and a bit of collagen or Botox injected here and there is probably the answer. Either that or freakishly good genes.

Ronnie joined us after dessert (hot sticky toffee pudding with ice-cream, hmmmm), and we headed off to a noisy bar down the road. This was an unpleasant experience from the start; The music was so loud we had to shout to each other, which kind of defeats the object of having a drink and a catch-up with friends. Also, a group of terribly attractive and scantily clad young Australian girls were shaking their stuff on a make-shift dance floor, being hotly pursued by some young Chelsea men who resembled hyenas waiting on the periphery. The girls drunkenly whooped, gyrated, and swayed unsteadily on a dangerously wet floor, and as I found a chair safely away from the rowdy mob, I thought it was a kind of fortunate irony that we were right across the road from the Chelsea and Westminster hospital.

I was also clearly sitting by their belongings, because both the girls and young men kept leaning over from their drunken revelry to ask if their coat or handbag was still there. There was a time in my life when they might have been leaning over to ask me to dance, or if I wanted a drink. And more so, a time when I would have been inclined to say yes. Clearly, I thought, I am getting too old for this shit.

At the stroke of midnight (or thereabouts), we were joined by Alexia and headed off to the 151 club. As dark, dingy, and smoky as ever, we found a table and spent most of the evening talking amongst ourselves. The best thing about the 151 in my opinion, is that you can actually sit and have a conversation and hear the other person, or you can go onto the dance floor, or simply hang around the bar - there is something for everyone. It is not the swankiest of places, though you'd be forgiven for thinking so by what they charge for their drinks.

Still we had a fairly good time, despite an annoying young thing sitting to my right, who insisted on keeping her ashtray on our table, and made my eyes water each time she ashed her cigarette. It occured to me that once upon a time I myself smoked up a storm and would have been that annoying young woman, and again my age occured to me.

Back at ours Robert and Will were just finishing a game of World of WarCraft when we arrived home, and Cath managed to drag Will back to theirs. I was so happy to be home, and have a dawning realisation that I love having dinner with my girlfriends and even a catch-up over a drink, but I'm just not into the noisy bar and club thing anymore. I'm not even coming at it from any particular standpoint; it's just that I don't particularly enjoy that scene, and a lot of the time I feel a bit old. I think the latter is something I need to explore a bit more closely, because let's face it, 30 is hardly old.

Perhaps, and I hesitantly approach this possibility, I am subconsciously preparing to nest? Or alternatively, I am just at a point in my life where I value actually being able to have a conversation with someone, as opposed to getting shit-faced, shouting unintelligably across the bar, and being pawed by drunken strangers on the dance floor. Ah, the trappings of youth we must leave behind....

Credit: art-of-kisses.blogspot.com