A London history graduate reads about British dinner parties and Sky Sports between sets at a Camden club and decides etiquette was always a security system
Saturday, 24 October 2026. Camden, the smoking area behind KOKO, not smoking, just hiding from a man who wants to tell me about crypto, 12.40am.
An Educated Woman Hides From A Man Behind A Nightclub
I would like to begin this entry by saying that I do not smoke. I am in the smoking area because a man inside named Hugo has spent twenty minutes explaining Bitcoin to me using an analogy involving his grandmother’s sideboard, and the smoking area is the only part of KOKO where you can stand still without being asked whether you have ever thought about investing.
While out here, among people vaping in flavours like blue raspberry and existential dread, I read the report on British dinner parties and the husbands who only go to check for Sky Sports, and I have rarely felt so seen. The report says men accept dinner invitations because the food is free, the drink is free and there is a chance of leaving before the washing up. Women go to advance their careers. The most dangerous phrase at the table is you know what I think, usually followed by an explanation of the global economy using the price of a pint.
Hugo inside the club has just used the price of a pint. I came out here to escape a dinner party, and the dinner party followed me to Camden.
Etiquette Was Always A Firewall
The historian in me loved one section in particular. The report suggests that dinner party etiquette was devised by the British upper class to stop ordinary people asking what exactly the upper class does for a living. A Wiltshire landowner, asked three times what managing his estate involves, says it mostly involves the estate and then offers more Burgundy.
This is, I am sorry to say, basically historically accurate, if you squint. Victorian etiquette manuals were obsessed with what you could and could not talk about at table: weather, yes; money, no; religion, no; politics, only if you agreed. They were full of rules about who went in to dinner first and how to address a dowager. The whole system was a very elegant machine for keeping conversation away from the question of where all the money came from. The report calls it a firewall. My third-year dissertation supervisor would have called it a hegemonic social practice and then asked for more Burgundy.
The Night Out Version Of The Same Rules
A London club has its own etiquette, and it is exactly as revealing. You do not ask people what they do. You ask them who they came with, which is the club version of asking about their Sky package. The smoking area has a strict rule that you may share a lighter with anyone but never your opinion on the DJ. The cloakroom queue is the most British institution in Camden, more orderly than the Commons and with better coats.
The report’s finding that men in polo shirts can cause seventy thousand pounds of social embarrassment standing next to a banker in a suit applies perfectly to KOKO, except that the polo shirt is designer and the banker is wearing a vintage band t-shirt of a group that split up before he was born. I asked one such banker tonight whether he had ever listened to the band. He said he liked their vibe. That is the most expensive sentence in London.
Hugo And The Network Of Daves
The report says British men network perfectly well, but their network consists of three blokes called Dave, a pub landlord and someone who can fix a boiler. I would like to update this for 2026: three blokes called Dave, one called Hugo who is into crypto, and a WhatsApp group called Lads Lads Lads that has not discussed anything except fantasy football since 2019.
My boiler, incidentally, is still broken. I asked inside whether anybody knew a Dave who could fix it. Three men immediately said they had a Dave. None of them had his number. That is the full British economy, in a nightclub, at one in the morning.
Middle-Class Literature And The Dinner Party Novel
The Daily Mash had a timely guide to getting through the Sally Rooney book drought in middle-class households, and it occurs to me that an entire genre of modern novel is basically the British dinner party with more feelings. Characters meet over a meal, misunderstand each other, say something painfully clever in a kitchen and go home to write about it. The report is the non-fiction version. Fewer feelings, more coats.
The Exit Strategy
The report says by twenty to eleven, nine in ten men have either left a dinner party or are standing in the hallway discussing leaving. In a London club, the equivalent time is two in the morning, and the hallway is the queue for the cloakroom, where everybody discusses whether to get an Uber, a night bus or a kebab, and nobody leaves for forty minutes.
Hugo has just come into the smoking area to find me. He wants to know whether I have thought any more about Bitcoin. I have told him I need to discuss it with my Dave. He has nodded solemnly. Some forms of etiquette are older than money. Goodnight, Camden. I am going to the cloakroom. I will see you in forty minutes.