Gentlemen’s clubs for all!

Is it a stage of life thing? Recently I’ve got a hankering to join a gentlemen’s club. It might be the creeping realisation that having put it off for so long – drifting in and out of London’s clubs over the years as a guest thinking ‘This is rather nice…’ – as I near 50, it’s a case of now or never.

So here’s a question – have you been to a club recently? Have you settled into the tightly stuffed, wing-backed armchair at the Athenaeum, White’s, Buck’s, Boodle’s or the Carlton? Have you dined at the Garrick surrounded by the some of the finest things to drip off the paintbrushes of Zoffany, Millais, Hogarth and numerous others? Have you taken a few lengths in the subterranean pool at the Royal Automobile Club, as Churchill did daily, to rinse away the pressures of war? If you haven’t then the sad truth of it is that a part of you simply hasn’t lived.