Blogfromthebarn

Holding back the years


A rare treat on Saturday night , a birthday celebration for G, brother-in-law, neighbour and occasional mountain biking chum), a box for the Simply Red concert at the Royal Albert Hall (fabulous venue) followed by dinner and dancing until the wee small hours at Tramp in Jermyn Street. I enjoyed the concert, they're not high on my list of favourite bands but the boy Hucknall can sing and it's a tight band and a good show.


The Albert hall is a great venue, and it was nice to be in a box with chums, share a glass or several and enjoy the middle-aged, middle-class, middle-of-the-roaders swaying gently in the aisles.

Onward to Tramp, my first visit to a club for some time, apparently jeans are now an acceptable form of dress, with the exception of the maitre'd I think I was the only person in a suit.
I've little doubt that some of the dozens of pretty, vacant, juvenile eye candy are still confused about the elderly waiter who seemed to be having a seizure on the dance floor.

There was a disproportionate amount of attractive young ladies to unattractive but opulent (no such thing as an ugly millionaire) older gents which made the evening very pleasant on the eye and the food was surprisingly excellent. Sadly for this old rocker the music (and I can't quite believe I'm being such a cliche) was repetitive, rapping, unintelligible and much too loud. I don't think I'm quite in the 'cocoa and an early night' territory yet but I can certainly see the direction signs.

Sadly for the connoisseurs of boogie the handkerchief sized dance floor didn't lend itself to a full exposition of the terpsichorean treat that is the "shaky hand dance". Sophie was there with some of her lovely chums and since there's only one thing worse than seeing a parent dance it's your friends seeing both of them dancing so Mrs Stuffy and I did our very best to make her day.
Other lessons learned :-

• Stunning Russian ladies are really not impressed by greetings in Polish now matter how hard you've worked on the accent.
• Young people smoke, all of them, all the time, I think I could probably negate my 20 years of abstinence simply by sniffing my jacket.
• Not having a hangover when Mrs Stuffy does is good for about 2 hours of Sunday morning smugness before she turns nasty.
• Stopping the 'music' and playing 'eye of the tiger' is apparently de riguer when the expansive party of ex-KGB in the corner orders a £2,000 bottle of fizz, so shouting "Oy put the thumpy thumpy thumpy song back on !" is frowned upon, tovarich.

Labels: concert, nightclub, russians, simply red, Tramp

posted by Stuffy @ 9:00 am