What a surreal night. To celebrate the Oscars Soho House has a party for its members. A friend of mine has membership and asked me along, as everyone else has day-jobs and can’t stay out drinking till 6am on a Monday morning. So we met in Bar Italia at midnight (I felt incredibly conspicuous on the train, in my evening coat and black patent heels, until I got to Soho that is, which was like 10pm on a Friday) for double espressos (£3.80?! Yeah, that perked me up pretty quick. I know it’s an institution and all, but bloody hell. I can’t even calculate the mark up on that). Bagging a good table in Soho House, we were brought bellinis. And then more bellinis. When the free champagne ran out we were bought a bottle by a man who seemed to know everyone, and asked the waiters to take care of us. He took turns flirting with me and Anna, and his conversation ran a very fine line between being obnoxious, offensive and laughably charming. He left at about 2am, after showing us a photo of his hot son, who is studying in Paris, and was replaced by another guy, one of the founders of Soho House. The conversation with him was even more surreal – at one point he asked me if I’d ever been to the New York branch of Soho House and if I went to Cannes and I wanted to have a quiet word and tell him that he had me confused with someone else. We’d both be pretty embarrassed when he realised I was a freelance editor, lived in an unhip part of south-east London and wasn’t a member of any exclusive clubs. At 4am giant trays of food were brought out – scrambled eggs, bacon, sausages, beans, hash browns, mushrooms, fried bread, tomatoes, smoked salmon – and there was a scrum for the buffet. Anna and I stayed till the bitter end (about 5.30), staggered out into the freezing darkness, and went to wait for the 176 bus which rather conveniently runs all night.

Update: it took me about 3 days to recover from this all-night shindig. I'm not as young as I used to be...