It is going to be a tiresomely late night.
It is also, I hope, going to be a busy one.
With this in mind I should have started writing this some time ago, but I didn’t, and so it might finish up being a bit disjointed in between customers, or, alternatively, short as I get fed up of trying to write in five minute bursts.
The reason for such optimism is that our local nightclub is closing. Not that such a closure usually leads to an increase in revenue. In fact it has been closed for weeks and weeks, and has announced that it is going to have one final, last-gasp event.
It is opening tonight for the very last time.
Part of me is a bit sad about this. The nightclub has been an important, if wearisome and disreputable, part of my life for many years, from the occasional times when I went in it, years and years ago, when you had to be a member and be over twenty one, to the hundreds and hundreds of nights when I have sat outside it.
I need not tell you that the latter outnumbers the former by a longetty long way.
One of the taxi drivers got fed up of sitting outside it and opened a burger van there once, which led to a great deal of taxi driver socialising and probably also taxi driver obesity and heart disease, although it was very splendid. There is no nicer feeling than a cup of tea, a good chat and a hot beefburger in the bitter chill of a winter night at three in the morning, even one of slightly dubious provenance cooked by a taxi driver.
We all did a victory loop around its one way system after a brilliantly profitable New Year’s Eve once, and Mark plucked up the courage to come and talk to me for the very first time in the taxi queue outside it, when I was unable to get out of my taxi because of a broken ankle that I was attempting to keep secret.
I have fallen asleep there, waking up just before dawn to wonder where everybody had gone. I have made friends there, been a spectator of some thrilling fights and arrests, one of which involved a police officer dragging a customer bodily out of the back of my taxi. Somebody smashed the window of my taxi there once, and I once picked up some very unhappy customers who had popped across the road for an amorous encounter on the field opposite before getting completely lost, losing their underwear in the mud and becoming convinced, by the absence of streetlights, that they were lost in the eternal wilderness, eventually stumbling upon my taxi with sobs of gratitude.
Probably, on balance, I won’t miss it very much.
Probably I won’t miss it at all really. There will probably be more or less the same number of customers, they will just go home an hour earlier. There was a time when the nightclub, being halfway around a long one-way system, was a wonderful late-night cash generator, but those days are gone. Today’s youngsters socialise online, take drugs rather than drink, and generally do not feel any great need for a grubby, overpriced, late night venue, even if it is right on the edge of the lake.
You can’t see the stunning view at night anyway.
It seems that half of Windermere is planning to attend tonight. Even Elspeth briefly considered it, by way of a nostalgic moment, until she remembered what the nightclub was actually like, and then wisely thought better of it, some things about our twenties are best left behind us.
It is going to be a late night.
It will be the last late night.
I can’t say I am sorry about that.
