Bottomless brunch: it sounds disreputable, to start with. There’s the suggestion of indecency; that lower garments are optional, perhaps on the part of the poor waiting staff, like those ‘Butlers in the Buff’. And ‘brunch’ is surely the louchest of meals, invented purely so that people could roll into a restaurant after a long lie-in and commence drinking before noon. There is none of the briskness of ‘lunch’ or the cosiness of ‘dinner’. No one’s going to go for a ‘constitutional’ after brunch. No, they’re going to have ‘just one more’…
I’ve had some lovely brunches in my time. A glass of champagne, a brace of Bloody Marys (or, even better, Bloody Marias, with tequila) and all the newspapers an outside table on Brighton seafront can hold was for decades a lovely way to spend a Saturday morning. But even I, as a big fan of excess, remember thinking ‘that won’t end well!’ when I first heard of the bottomless brunch: basically, one meal per person and all the – selected – booze you can get down you in two hours, tops.
Hogarth himself could not have come up with a better illustration of how the most respectable of women lose their inhibitions than a ‘BB’ at the Cocktail Club in Shaftesbury Avenue in 2022 which recently ended up in court. On one table, five off-duty policewomen. On the other, a mother and her three daughters. It started wholesomely enough, with the rozzers singing High School Musical songs and the family group presumably chatting about family matters. Lubricated, both parties got up to dance – and the trouble started.
Rose Webb, the matriarch of the smaller group, took exception to the way PC Tanisha Whitlock strutted her stuff, Wood Green Crown Court was told, to the extent that she yelled ‘Fucking lezza!’ at her and a stand-off ensued. PC Whitlock’s colleagues Daniella Andrean, Binal Valji, Megan Pearson and Bethan Thomas went to Tanisha’s aid – and it all kicked off. The CCTV shows amazing footage, like a grown-up Girls Gone Wild, the massive brawl lasting nearly five minutes. Two men who tried to break up the barney were helpless in the face of female aggro.
Webb and her daughters Casey, Emma Dee and Billie Jo Jackson were cleared of affray after claiming they had been acting in self-defence. Defending them, Dominic Thomas opined disapprovingly that the Territorial Support Group girls were ‘strutting around’ as if they ‘owned the place’. What was a public room has become the TSG dance room’. He blamed Whitlock’s ‘manic aggressive’ dancing for the fight, adding: ‘The best way to describe it was an angry chicken.’ On the other side, prosecutor Alex Balancy told the jury: ‘The whole thing erupted into an almighty melee… these defendants, under the influence of alcohol, went over the top.’
Like the Asbo Granny, ‘BBs’ reveal there is still a – sometimes scrappy – schoolgirl inside many a matronly figure
If you met any of these women in the street, I have no doubt they would prove delightful. But the demon drink can distort a personality beyond all recognition, as I know regrettably from my own behaviour. I wasn’t surprised to hear that the ‘bottomless’ bit referred to prosecco. It seems so harmless – like a fruity pop! – but, when drunk competitively in a short window, is just alcohol like any other. Yet people, particularly women, believe somehow that it ‘doesn’t count’ – like food eaten while standing up in front of an open refrigerator. Lots of men believe prosecco doesn’t count as wine for other more snobbish reasons. It’s true that you don’t generally see imbibers of the fruity treat sniffing at it suspiciously and rolling it around their mouths like mad things, but so much the better.
The Americans, who tend not to drink like we do, make brunch a far more elegant affair. I doubt the Sex and the City broads would have put away as much prosecco as they could before getting into a brawl with some off-duty femmes from the NYPD. Far more refined than Brit broads, they’d be sipping mimosas and discussing the pros and cons of sodomy.
Crude though it may be, I prefer the British way. Like the Asbo Granny or the female half of a SKI (Spending Kids’ Inheritance) couple, BBs reveal there is still a – sometimes scrappy – schoolgirl inside many a matronly figure. From a wider perspective, our high streets will be miserable places when the watering holes are gone. Pubs are now closing at a rate of one a day, having been forced to raise their prices to a point increasing numbers of punters can’t afford to pay – part of the reason why the BB is in the ascendent. Let’s rage against the plan to keep us all at home, drinking supermarket booze and eating food from Deliveroo. Men have football and as long as we have the bottomless brunch, female friendship – and occasional fisticuffs – will continue.
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