SATURDAY 4th OCTOBER: SOHO HOUSE NYC

/ SOHO LOUSE

Maybe I should have given up when I took the taxi. Maybe I should have realised that I shouldn't have left the house when I got out of the taxi.

It was a bad omen: I had spent 5 minutes in one of New York's finest yellow cabs and traveled only 15 yards and my throat already ached from the shouting. We had to go to an engagement party in Brooklyn Heights first but pick up a couple of people in West Village first. The driver told us that he didn't like to wait. Even tho' I was sober I questioned him about the description of his job then followed this with a few 'vamos'. Being called Abjulla, he questioned what I meant and then we started screaming at each other 'asshole' in competitive ranges of decibels. The Lady had stepped out of the cabby now and was racing across the street to another cab which wouldn't know the way. The small taxi driver glared at me but I had the last laugh. I got out of the rear left door and walked. He honked his horn but the door was left open. Yeah, sounds like a puerile and not very effective punishment - but hey, you make a taxi driver get out of his comfy seat and into the chilly street air and he's, what they call, pissed. Childish, the Lady knows...

The Lady didn't speak to me until we got to the Heights with her friends. I noted the party was only supposed to be 'open' from 6 to 8 and then noted the large volume of red wine at the bar. Surely, they're not going to get through all that. Oh yes they did.

The rest of the evening was a blur. I left the party at 10. Stopped in Bar & Books and pretended to listen to someone talk to me whilst I breathed hard to sober up. Then I glided into Soho House NY. I had always wanted a peak after the one time I ventured to the roof pool to play boggle with a film exec (don't ask). So there I was concentrating to hold my head up and trying to expand my tunnel vision to see my the Lady and her friends. Howard Stern sat close by with a blonde. The place was crowded with the sort of brash Americanos that I tend to avoid. What happened Soho House NYC? It's a great space but obviously got too popular for its own good. The stiff door policy hasn't worked and 18 year old girls stalked men in blue shirts and chinos. Hopefully these types with grow bored and go on to the next big thing and leave the place to the gentrified. As if I care - what did Groucho Marx once say about clubs?

Then somehow I got livelier and I spent the rest of the evening talking about how red wine makes me a little moody and yes- I'd love to read your script and really? you're in music sweetheart. At 4 we got chucked out. My clothes smelt of the cigarettes I had smoked in the dire games room (you can tell everthing about the crowd in the way some Bridge'n'Tunnel folks knocked drinks over the pool table and just abandoned them). I wanted to go home and The Lady wanted to party.

I left but phoned her and found myself back in shouting mode ala taxi driver. She got home at 8 and announced it was the best party she had seen in NYC and then promptly ignored me for 36 hours.

As the Persians say - if you sneeze on going out of your house - something bad may happen - stop and sit down for a minute - and let it pass. As the New Yorkers say - if you have an argument with a yellow cab driver - ask him to pull over and get out and get another one - life's too short.
The future?