The Hell Of Nightclubs!

I went to a night club last Saturday. Not the sort of sentence I get to write very often, because I enjoy nightclubs less than I enjoy eating wool. But a cool, hip and trendy friend of mine said he had a spare VIP ticket to a special one off event there. So I went, partly because I was bored of watching on demand episodes of How Clean is Your Celebrity Builder From Hell and partly because I wanted to see what it meant to be VIP. Turns out being VIP largely entails sitting around drinking free champagne and generally just "being here".

Obviously, at 21, I was more than half a decade older than almost everyone else, and subsequently may as well have been smeared head to toe with pus. People regarded me with a combination of pity and disgust. To complete the circuit, I spent the night wearing the expression of a man waking up to Christmas in a prison cell.

"I'm too old to enjoy this," I thought. And then remembered I've always felt this way about clubs. And I mean all clubs - from the cheesiest downmarket sickbucket to the coolest cutting-edge hark-at-us poncehole. I hated them when I was 16 and I hate them today. I just don't have to pretend anymore.

I'm convinced no one actually likes clubs. It's a conspiracy. We've been told they're cool and fun; that only "saddoes" dislike them. And no one in out pathetic little pre-apocalyptic timebubble wants to be labelled "sad" - it's like being officially declared worthless by the state. So we muster a grin and go out on the town in our millions.

Clubs are despicable. Cramped, overpriced furnaces with sticky walls and the latest idiot theme tunes thumping through the humid air so loud you can't hold a conversation, just below inanities at megaphone-level. And since the smoking ban, the masking aroma of cigarette smoke has been replaced by the over-bearing stench of crotch sweat and hair wax.

Clubs are such insufferable dungeons of misery, the inmates have to take mood-altering substances to make their ordeal seem halfway tolerable. This leads them to believe they "enjoy" clubbing. The don't. No one does. They just enjoy drugs.

Drugs render location meaningless. Neck enough ketamine and you could have the best night of your life squatting in a shed rolling corks across the floor. And no one's going to search you on the way in. Why bother with clubs?

"Because you might get a shag," is the usual response. Really? If that's the only way you can find a partner - preening and jigging about like a desperate animal - you shouldn't be attempting to breed in the first place. What's your next trick? Inventing fire? People like you are going to spin civilisation into reverse. You're a moron, and so is that haircut you're trying to impress. Any offspring you eventually blast out should be drowned in a pan before they can do any harm. Or open any more nightclubs.

Even if you somehow avoid reproducing, isn't it a lot of hard work for very little reward? Seven hours hopping about in a hellish, reverberating bunker in exchange for sharing 64 febrile, panting pelvic thrusts with someone who'll snore and dribble into your pillow until 11 o'clock in the morning, before waking up beside you with their hair in a mess, blinking like a dizzy cat and smelling vaguely like a ham baguette? Really, why bother? Why not just stay at home punching yourself in the face? Invite a few friends round and make a night of it. It'll be more fun that a club.

Anyway, back to Saturday night, and apart from the age gap, two other things struck me. Firstly, everyone had clearly spent far too long perfecting their appearance. I used to feel intimidated by people like this; now I see them as walking insecurity beacons, slaves to the perceived judgement of others, trapped within a self-perpetuating circle of crushing status anxiety. I'd still secretly like to be them, of course, but at least these days I can temporarily erect a veneer of defensive, sneering superiority. I've progressed that far.

The second thing that struck me was frightening. They were all photographing themselves. In fact, that's all they seemed to be doing. Standing around in expensive clothes, snapping away with phones and cameras. One pose after another, as though they needed to prove their own existence, right there, in the moment. Crucially, this seemed to be the reason they were there in the first place. There was very little dancing. Just pouting and flashbulbs.

Surely this is a new development. Clubs have always been vapid and awful and boring and blah - but I can't remember clubbers documenting their every moment before. Not to this demented extent. It's not enough to pretend you're having fun in the club any more - you've got to pretend you're having fun in your Flickr gallery, and your friends' Flickr galleries. An unending exhibition in which a million terrified, try-too-hard imbeciles attempt to out-cool each other.

Mind you, since in about 20 years' time these same people will be standing waist-deep in skeletons, in an arid post-nuclear wasteland, clubbing each other to death in a fight for the last remaining glass of water, perhaps they're wise to enjoy these care-free moments while they last. Even if they're only pretending.

The Infested

I had a rat once. Not as a pet, you understand - I'm not that cool and alternative and lawless and hard - but as an invader. I was living in London with a friend temporarily in Greenwich near Blackheath, and one day my fellow live in chum heard a scratching from the kitchen drawer, pulled it open and got rat all in his face. It had been nesting there for some time; it was the drawer where he kept all of his overdue bills and said rat had gnawed all of these into tiny strips of bedding.

Anyway, we cornered the rat in the bathroom, shutting the door so it couldn't get out, and pondered our next move. We tried chasing it out with a broom - but that didn't work because every time we opened the door it leapt into a small hole in the wall behind the sink. Instead, a lengthy face-off began. I'd heard that poison is a bad idea, as you end up with a decomposing rat under your floor boards, and the subsequent reek can spoil the mood if you're trying to get off with someone, so instead we went to the local pound shop and bought some rat traps, slid them gingerly into the bathroom and waited. And waited. And finally, after 24 hours, we heard death arrive with a loud SNAP!

Except it wasn't death. The trap had simply torn one of the rat's ears off. A trail of ratty blood led from the trap to the hole. I felt sad and sick and mournful, but re-set the trap with a sense of duty - the next snap would surely finish the poor thing off. This was now a mercy killing. Another day passed, and then SNAP!

This time it had lost part of it's face. More blood, but still no body. Clearly, this wasn't a rat trap. It was a rat whittling machine. We were inadvertently subjecting the rat to the sort of torture you'd see in one of the Saw movies. That's what you get for using pound shops. Unable to bear the guilt, I went out and bought a deluxe top-of-the-range trap called something like RatFuck 2000. It looked like it could slaughter a bear.

Instead it ripped off it's tail. I quivered with shame; shouted apologies down the hole, like a concentration camp guard appalled by his own actions. There was no option now but to repeat the process of tearfully setting and re-setting the trap, until finally, on the third day, Mr Rat went to heaven. He was huge and probably deserved a decent burial, but we didn't know what to do with him so instead we wrapped him in a carrier bag and, in the dead of night, threw him in across the road, feeling like Charles Manson.

All of which is an overlong and indulgent introduction to what will now be a brief review of Help Me I'm Infested With Anthea Turner. A bizarre little show in which Turner teams up with a cheery/chubby exterminator and sets about ridding folk's houses of rats, fleas, ants, cockroaches, lice and probably wolves. Normally I'd watch this sort of thing with one side of my face sneering and the other chortling. But thanks to my harrowing rat experience, I found it uncharacteristically hypnotic. Despite her image as a kind of walking, talking doily, Anthea turns out to be a hard, judgemental piece of work who spends most of her time haranguing the human inhabitants for living in filth. The end result is a strange psychodrama in which the punters are caught between unfeeling vermin on one side, and an unfeeling former Blue Peter presenter on the other. And in the background, millions of insects being turned into corpses by the exterminator. There's shrieking and wailing and gnashing of teeth, and then finally, salvation. In the first show, a woman whose flat had been cleared of an ant infestation described it as a "life changing experience".

It's empowerment through genocide, essentially. Yes. Empowerment through genocide. Great name for a band. Odd concept for a series.