Where Few Dare Venture

Of course, you may get one or two of them on your own local High Street, but more often or not they are completely hidden away down a backstreet where few people go, unless they know that such a place exists down there. Even then, few will venture near such places alone, especially at night.

There was a time – inconceivable to civilised people nowadays – when political parties were quite popular. Sometimes people would even confess to being in a political party quite openly and without any of the shame that, these days, attaches to the practice.

Nowadays, though, to even know where your local Conservative, Labour or Liberal club is, is to be regarded with suspicion and - in more genteel places – to risk ostracism. People these days tend to regard the avowedly political as somehow tainted, as infected with some unmentionable disease that could be contagious and so such people are best avoided.

Legend has it that this fear of contagion by politics was the reason for the building of these political-party controlled ‘clubs’ as places – similar in many ways to mental hospitals – here those infected with politics could be kept, isolated and controlled and far away from decent people. These ‘clubs’ were envisioned as places where those infected with the disease of politics could spend their lives without them escaping into wider society and infecting anyone else, or – indeed – doing what those infected with politics usually end up doing – fucking it all up for the rest of us.