by oucho » Tue Sep 06, 2016 12:14 pm
I think we need to find an extremely cool cafe/bar/pub that we all hang out in and as a result incidentally bump into each other on the regular. It will serve nice coffee and vegan lunch items, however I shall exclusively drink absinthe. The owners will be two old women who dote on us and enjoy the attention of young folk (especially me as I am the most charming). Out back they have an English style wild meadow with Ox-eye daisies and Yellow Rattle, this area is exclusively accessible to members, Riaz has to hang around at the entrance waiting for a member to let him in, all the rest of us are members. We will never organise care meets, communicate with each other or hang out outside of the bar, and all hangouts in the bar will be entirely incidental.
On the second floor the bar is separated into several rooms which reflect escalating social importance. There is no clear way to move up the rooms and the bar owners deny any social significance to the rooms. Every few weeks the rooms shuffle around due to ongoing and neverending DIY projects which are only ever half finished. As a result of this it's hard to be sure which room is which, leading to embarrassing social miscues and general chaos. Apparently the best way to move up the ranks is by gaining interviews with esteemed members who may then recommend you, but even if pursued relentlessly this can still take years with no apparent progress being made. On top of this the only way to secure such an interview is to hang around the bar for hours and hope that a member takes an interest in you. Unfortunately it's considered bad form to discuss work or social positioning at the bar so you may end up spending hours in conversation with a complete nobody. The bar is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and always has about 25 people inside, it doesn't get noticeably busier or more empty at any times of the day. Electronic equipment is not allowed inside but members can often be seen working on paper, members often forget their work at the bar and as a result their is a large underground room full of moulding stacks of paper. This would imply that their work isn't important to them, but all the members appear to be very rich.
The members of the bar are all keen followers of fashion trends, the correct turn up on your trousers can mean the difference between social advancement and the cold shoulder. These trends are unpredictable and tricky to follow, even the most savvy of dressers has been caught out wearing raw denim on the wrong day. Some trends are extremely short lived, for example one afternoon last Summer it was considered the height of taste to wear corduroy blazers with elbow patches, but by that very same evening two bouncers had been hired to forcibly throw anyone trying to gain entry in such a jacket into the gutter! The most mundane of items can be considered extremely offensive, for example it's considered quite uncouth to wear khaki trousers right now, whilst more extravagant items can remain in fashion for months; since February at least half the people seen in the bar have been wearing marble print trousers.
Where can we go that is most like this?