Leave at 8PM

You get out of the pub and just as you do it you get a Facebook Messenger message from someone you haven’t seen in ages – “Hey how are you!!!!” they are saying, and you think why is it everyone who is cooler than me communicates via the clunkiest and most lame messaging service on earth, “u out?????” and you say back “yeah” and “sorta” and they drop a pin and say “meet us here!!!!!!! Oli’s in town!!!!!!” because another universal truth of every person you know that is cooler than you is: they are constantly, constantly hanging out with someone called “Oli”.

Unfortunately you are now in a place that is simply Too Cool For You To Be There. You’re in a club where there’s a whole almost-empty room that has purple flashing lights and an old TV in the middle of it. You’re in a pub that doubles as an art gallery and Google Maps doesn’t know where the door is (it’s up two flights of stairs). You keep going to the bar and they have an obtuse system of payment – you have to buy drinks tokens, or something, or you can “pay with a dance”, or they only take euros, some utterly bizarre shit – and when you finally find you cool friend and their cool friends and Oli they are all stretched out over baroque sofas like beautiful cats, and you keep trying to do your same old tired smalltalk schtick – “So what’s your name then? Where do you work?” – but over the absolute poundpoundpound of the music the snippets you can hear are too bizarre to make any sense, your mind is clearly degrading, nobody’s name is “Sinopsis”, nobody’s job is “body painter”, and hold on you just realised it was four drinks tokens for £20 and this beer cost three tokens, you are drinking a fifteen pound can of b—