So I finally went to the Met Bar. Actually, I was almost trendy for a full 48 hours, because the very next night I was pacing around the "exclusive" bar in an uber-nightclub, home (no capital letter, which shows how cool it is), in Leicester Square. I think I can happily say that I won't be going to either of those places again.
The epidemic of private members' clubs in London kicked off about a year ago. What happens is that bars acquire a host of celebrity members and then broadcast reported sightings as if celebrities were some rare kind of diesel engine to lure in the starry-eyed punter. Then, to further prove how exclusive they are, these clubs hire a posse of thickset halfwits who, in another life, would have been selling second-hand videos out of a car boot or flogging tickets outside Stamford Bridge, but have discovered pseudo-style-wear instead. To get into one of these bars, you first have to get past the bloke with the truncated vocabulary, the sunglasses perched on his bald head at midnight, the shiny black jacket and, as my friend Sam points out, the facial hair shaved to resemble the female genitalia. Even if you're on the guest list, there's an interminable wait as he struggles through the alphabet to find your name.
Once you're in, you get to stand in a bar with an atmosphere somewhere between a seedy smalltown nightclub and a Friday night with a few beers at the church youth group, and pay double the going rate for everything you consume. Why do it? I've been trying to piece together the events of my Met Bar night in an attempt to recreate the mindset that led me to think that rounding off a nine-and-a-half-hour drinking session in this celebrity hangout might have been a good idea: 1) a freeze-frame memory of being hauled up the Met Bar steps by my boyfriend and shoved past the bouncers; 2) a receipt for drinks that reveals I spent £15.75 on two bottled beers, one glass of champagne and a glass of still water; 3) some carefully taken, virtually illegible notes on the back of my mobile telephone bill which reveal that I considered the Met Bar to be "grubby", have "red walls and big mirrors", be "tiny", and full of "sad people"; 4) even less legible notes scrawled on taxi receipts that seem to indicate I attempted to "interview" Matthew Wright, showbiz correspondent of the Mirror, and Dominic Mohan, ditto of the Sun.
According to said notes, when asked why people go to the Met Bar, Wright replied, from the Met Bar: "I wouldn't go. My wife and I stay at home. People come here to pull." Mohan replied: "My son's great, he dribbles all the time." But maybe I asked him another question that I forgot to write down.
Most telling of all, to my despair, is a digital-quality recollection of the slurring conversation I tried to have with my boss about why I had kept filling up his wineglass (first principle of insobriety: get everyone else as drunk as you are as fast as possible so that they might forget your indiscretions).
So it seems fairly clear. People go to these places because they can, and because the bars still sell drinks after 11 o'clock, and because, if you're still trying to get served at that time on a week night, there's a fair chance you've already mislaid your common sense and good taste and, if Wright is to be believed, may well be about to mislay your knickers. But I'm glad I went to the Met Bar, and that I snuck into the "VIP bar in home", because you haven't lived in London if you can't badmouth these places from first-hand experience. And anyway, when the government's white paper to de-restrict drinking hours finally goes through (I hear we can expect round-the-clock drinking around summer 2001), they'll probably go out of business.
