Farewell the Colony Room

Ben Hoyle in the Times today writes a nice piece about my club. Yes, I'm one of the 240 members of the infamous Colony Room. And we're about to close. Now this isn't a swear blog, but reader I must share with you that Hoyle paints a slightly bowdlerised version of the conversation in the club. Apart from misnaming Ian Board as Ian Beard in the piece, he omits an essential adjective from Board's legendary riposte to a request for salted peanuts.

In 1997, celebrating the club's 50th anniversary, we gathered in an obscure east end gallery hung with members' works; Damien did some ducks in formalin. Patrick Caulfield did something jolly and Bavarian. Lisa Stansfield submitted a small square canvas bearing the term in common use for the act of Onanism. It was sponsored by some vodka firm whose name I cannot now recall, but whose generosity with the product I can. At one point I took refuge in the rough east-end pub next door to escape the relentless celebrity for a few minutes, only to find Anita Pallenberg on the stool beside me trying to do the same. Anyway, the time came to pour Ian Board's ashes, his mortal remains, into a bronze bust sculpted by Kate Braine. Hands were unsteady. The table was crowded. Much of Ian missed the small hole in the bust and fell into puddles of spilt vodka on the table, forming a sort of gritty grey spooge. It was, I thought, what he would have wanted.

Hoyle mentions Damien's naked stint behind the bar, but neglects to mention the chicken bone stuffed in his foreskin (apologies to those who have just spluttered their tea across the keyboard). Too many of my Colony anecdotes are just not suited to the harsh light of the written word; they're convivial late night stories, shared with warmth and whisky, a fire crackling in the grate and the air fuggy with tobacco smoke.

And now that familiar walk up those narrow creaking stairs in Dean Street will be a thing of memory. But what memories.