Shove It Up Your Private Members Club

As we all know, since I've moved my social life has been second to none (erm... perhaps that should be next to none) and on Saturday, I found myself the lucky recipient of invites to not one, but two birthday parties.

Having spent Friday night and all day Saturday babysitting my nephews, I downed a couple of cans of red bull and headed off dahn west end. It was about 8.30 when we got to the vicinity of the first party, which was in a private members club, which we wandered around for about half an hour before spotting.

We were met by a slightly rude lady demanding our coats from us, not taking "oh it's ok, we're not going to be here that long" as an answer, we were forced to pay to put our coats in when faced with "We're a private members' club. It's policy". Said in a none-too-friendly tone of voice.

The next trip is to the bar. Inspection of the menu resulted in a slight loss of breath, a speeding up of the heart and general boggling of eyes. The prices ranged from £4.95 to £209 - more at the higher end of the price range than the smaller end - the next cheapest thing after £4.95 was £18.50. So we went for the £4.95ers which came to £10.89... once they'd added the non-discretionary service charge. So that's a 10% serivce charge for all drinks, a non optional cloakroom fee and general extortion on the menu.

I suspect it's needless to say, but we stayed only for one drink (me in outrage) - and made our way to the next birthday party - fearing that the pub-sounding name might simply be a rouse and it turn out to be another house of extortion.

Rather conveniently, the pub was walking distance, so we trotted off towards it, once again, circling it for about half an hour (me tottering in my heels) before we realised we'd be walking past it.

The good is that the round of three drinks I bought came to under a tenner (not bad, eh?), but the bad news was that because we got lost on the way to both places, we only arrived in time for last orders - and I can tell you, after having being to the world's most expensive bar and having tottered around, apparently lost, in my high heels most of the night, I was right miffed only to be getting one drink as a reward.