City Boys

On our wedding anniversary we always go out, and since we were married in Las Vegas with four schools of architecture as witnesses, it's the cue for lots of memories, even though it was a while ago. You can feel pretty melancholic about it, I've felt melancholic about it all day. We chose a steakhouse, Vegas evenings are built on steakhouses, the age of the beef is cherished; two months aging and a rib eye virtually qualifies as heritage. Sometimes they make interior design out of the stuff, exhibiting it in huge glass cases, sometimes the steakhouse is on top of a building, sometimes revolving on top of a building. Even the idea of a Las Vegas steakhouse makes me melancholic, but in London, steakhouses suffered a bit of a bad reputation, simply because the English don't really do steak like either the Americans (fat) or the French (thin), we just do it badly, we put it in pies.
So we went to Hawksmoor, a sort of new breed, and only just down the road in Spitalfields. Hawksmoor feels like a Las Vegas steakhouse, looks like a Las Vegas steakhouse and serves what turned out to be totally Las Vegas steak or, if you are a vegetarian, lobster.
Being melancholic and thinking about your ear lobes getting bigger and hairs growing in your nose, what wasn't good was that we were in the city of London, so as we sat down we realized we were surrounded by city boys. It doesn't matter the actual age, city boys are stranded in perpetual adolescence.
The city institution is a simple marriage of the british public school system, a sort of moral trampoline, with the pick pocket; without the public school system they'd all be in jail. And don't you notice THAT when they're within a hairs breath. You only need one example, in comes one troop bearing an absurd magnum of showy wine. They brought-in their own wine! They brought it in for £5 corkage! How crap is that! How cheap do you want to look? I suppose it was a school prize.
And there was a sense that all these people were simply impersonating each other, and they would go on impersonating each other forever, and I am supposed (thank you Ms Thatcher) to accept that this is how the world works; it's absurd!! It's embarrassing!!
You feel hugely original, even youthful, in a room full of British bankers.
The image advertises some no doubt extremely nice people called Wine Folly.