Our Tribe

I was very excited about my ebay purchase of two oak art deco bookends until they arrived today. they looked, well, err...rather more substantial and distinguished on the screen, but these two might have been knocked up last week in somebody's garden shed. I winced when I thought of the price I'd driven myself too, and the other rival twit who'd done the same.

However, I am not disheartened, this must be happening to thousands of people everyday as husbands, wives, girlfriends and boyfriends discretely and hopefully open mucho cardboard packaging to reveal....oh.....and promptly realize the great gift is not quite what it was in the minds eye.

Still, other things have a way of being much better than expected. the most unlikely of which was a friends fiftieth birthday party last might. Thankfully he'd had the gumption to hold the event in Blush, closed for the night, upstairs at the White Horse. But before you are imagining all the goings on just stop and imagine the opposite, quiet middle aged folks noodling along as best they can, commune with their favourite dancers, bar staff and host all fully dressed and quite prim and proper munching sandwiches and so on hardly raising a dicky bird of interest, but all very pleasant to be back with the tribe (remember, I'd been away near two months). It may not be much of a tribe, but at least for Julie and I, we realize that this is ours, honorary members if you like, me and Julie, take your seat at the bar Paul, and nobody will bother you at all. Delightful.

Of course, finding your tribe can take a long time, and there are many bogus versions. I've never enjoyed the tribe of architects, even architects bar's (there was on at Bristol when I was there) they are just hopelessly tedious in a way that Christie from Southend and her pals simply are not. This is not inverse snobbery either, it's directed at those who think that people who strip for a living are somehow weird, somehow impossible, when in my experience they appear the most natural folks in the world.