Real life | 1 October 2015

At least two insurances are going to have to go, as I grapple with fear of penury, I have decided.

My health insurance is looking increasingly pointless, because I never use it. I just keep it going because I daren’t stop it. And I think the same can be said of my ‘Being A Cool Person’ insurance. If you have never heard of the latter, it is also sometimes referred to as ‘membership of Soho House’.

I have had it for donkey’s years but I never avail myself of it. I used to use it a lot in my heyday, when I could party with the best of them.

Back then, I could drape myself against a bar with a mojito without looking absurd. Or else lounge in a corner booth, champagne bottle on the table, surrounded by disparate budding stars of media and politics, who all seemed perfectly happy to include me in their nights of mild misbehaviour — nothing even remotely involving a pig’s head, I hasten to assure you — on the basis that I looked like I might be someone interesting, although quite who I was exactly was very far from clear to them, which is pretty much how I felt about them, strangely enough.