Lisa Hilton

At risk of sounding like Glenda Slagg, don’tcha just hate those mealy mouthed drink aware advertisements which are crawling all over the Tube? You know: “Party this weekend – it was a party, right?”. Because we all need to feel just that little bit worse right now. What people seem to forget is that bingeing Britain is not a modern phenomenon. But until the temperance movement came along and encouraged everyone to die of cholera, no-one used to worry about it. Dr Johnson recalled that in his youth all the respectable people of Lichfield got drunk every night and no-one thought the worse of them for it. And at least when they went in for warnings, the eighteenth century did it in style, whatever Kingsley Amis said about gin being for pussies.

And still the band plays on, though the chairs are beginning to tilt imperceptibly down the deck. Perhaps there’s only so much wretchedness people can take. Aside from the fact that the jewellery dealers of Hatton Garden now feature boxes of tissues on their counters, like divorce lawyers (turns out diamonds were a girl’s best friend after all), London seems frenetically intent on squeezing out a few last drops of debauchery. Hatchard’s Christmas signing last night was packed with readers swigging wine and lugging green bags of hardbacks, while the usual quota of deranged Gissing characters clustered with their autograph books. Signatures are apparently still sound and one could hardly grab a seat in the Ritz.

Nice to know that frivolity still has a function in politics, if only as admirable sang froid in the face of Armageddon. The Bad Sex awards at the In and Out club last night had a Regency air, from the torches outside to the Rowlandson physiques of the burlesque group Satanic Sluts. Accepting her award for Shire Hell in suitably spunky style, Rachel Johnson whooped up the triumph of a Tory chick over NewLab ninja and Bad Sex also-ran Alastair Campbell. David Cameron’s congratulatory text didn’t quite have the élan of Wellington rising from the Duchess of Richmond’s supper table and asking if anyone had a map, but it was an elegant touch from a man about to go to the front line.

Commerce has always deferred conversationally to art.  It’s assumed that painters and writers are fascinating talkers, but from the Mermaid to the Colony room, I think they’ve only ever had one subject: money and their lack of it, or the outrageously unfair amounts of it bestowed on (naturally) less talented peers. The legendary wit of the Algonquin was a myth fabricated to cadge martinis: Dorothy Parker and Scott Fitzgerald weren't doing anything at the Round Table other than slagging off their agents". One effect of the credit bore though, is to induce a positive perkiness amongst creative types. At dinner at silkmaker Felix Spicer’s  boho-baroque railway arch last week, a rather alarming optimism prevailed.