From the late 18th century to the early 20th century, Gentlemen's Clubs were a big deal in London. Apparently they are on the rise again, but I think in general they are way down from where they were. Imagine lots of ritzy dudes puffing pipes and reading the paper while sitting around in red leather chairs planning their next circumnavigation or whatever. This is totally classic London stuff. Of course Oxford, jointly with Cambridge, have one of these clubs, but it's not just men anymore. You can only join if you went to Oxford or Cambridge, but if you did you're basically in as long as you can pay the hefty membership fee. I haven't joined yet. Juergen however, is a member and took me, Brandon, and some dudes from their work (Macquarie) for an evening.
the club
The evening was a trip. When we got there Juergen told us we had to keep our jackets on (jacket and tie required at all times) and our cell phones off. Ok, whatever, it's England and it's Oxfordy so somebody is telling you what to wear again, no big surprise. Then, we went in to have some pre dinner drinks at the bar. The bar is a huge room about 5 times the size of my apartment which was totally empty except for the bartender and two old guys reading books (at separate tables) and nursing drinks. We ordered beers and sat down, adding about infinity % more conversation to the room.
After we finished our drinks, we went into the dining room for our 7:00 dinner reservation. This room is pretty fancy, with lots of giant gilt portraits of severe looking guys staring down, tables of varying size, nice place settings, long white candles burning, and whatever else to make a pretty classy environment. Coming in was a bit strange though, because the only other people in this room four times the size of the bar were just three people in their 80s, each eating alone at a single table. One lady looked up, squinted and stared at us as we walked past. I actually wanted to stop and talk to her, but it seemed like the wrong thing to do. WEIRDSVILLE. We sat down and started going over the menus. The food was very typical Brit, but the kind you find in nicer places. The waiters wouldn't take our orders though... we had to write them down on a form. MORE WEIRDSVILLE. After the waiter took the form away, they came back and asked us what we were having, so they could change out to the right cutlery! WECLOME TO DOWNTOWN WEIRDSVILLE, CORNER OF WEIRD AND S'VILLE. We just complied, as any good Oxonian would do: strange dining rituals are hammered into you at Oxford. The dinner itself and the wine were all good, if unadventurous. By the end of dinner, the room was filling up a bit more, maybe there were 40 people in there with us. Ok, not soooo totally weird. Splitting from the dining room, Juergen gave us the tour. The main lobby has a total "gone with the wind" staircase, this thing is wider than my living room. At the top, there is the library.
cool!
can you see the "silence" sign?
Honestly, this is the coolest part of the whole club: this place is stuffed with something like 30,000 books, lots of which are very old. I love love love old books. There are floor to ceiling bookshelves crammed into every corner of this part of the club, and they even have those rolling ladders you see in movies with scenes in places like this. The red leather chairs, newspapers, woodwork, etc. are all there, this place is totally London Clubby. Of course, there was no one actually in the place other than us... not exactly WEIRDSVILLE, but still a bit odd. We hung around in here for a while, going through the various rooms and flipping through old books, I think I could really enjoy some quiet afternoons doing that.
Next, we went downstairs into the basement to play snooker. More on this in a moment, but first a bit about the route to the basement. Underneath the big stairs, there are little stairs, which seem to go down into a warren of little passages and rooms. Along the way is a hallway of locked red doors, one of which has a red light next to it. I have no idea what any of these are for, but would like to imagine something very sketchy. They're probably storage closets though. Off of one hallway, there was a small little room with another old guy watching TV by himself. RETURN TO WEIRDSVILLE? Having made it to the snooker room (which is also full of books), we settled down to figure out how to play. If Brandon hadn't been so devoted to figuring it out from the rules on the wall, we would have all lost interest pretty quickly. In short, this game is like pool, with a bigger table, smaller balls, longer sticks, different amounts of points for different balls, and a whole bunch of balls you have to hit first before hitting the points balls. Also, those little balls totally don't behave like regular pool balls, so as you can imagine, the game took for freaking ever. At one point, we all got quadruple Jamesons, which are basically the same as nice liberal Hattie's Hat single pours, and sipped away at those for hours. By the time we finished our 2?, 3? hour game, it was midnight and the club was closing.
Leaving, I was trying to figure out if I would shell out the membership fee to join... it would be pretty cool to be in a club, but it seemed pretty darn quiet, but then again I'd like that in some ways, and I would get a kick out of chilling with all those books. Plus, it would be a cool place to take out of town guests, etc. It would be tons better if more people I know from the MBA actually went there, but most of the MBAs I talk to aren't too impressed. Plus there's the issue of having to wear a frigging tie and jacket to anther part of my life, as if work wasn't bad enough in that respect.
Hmmm. I'm going to have to think about this.
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