Evenings and weekends.
Absolutely no breakfast.
Still working. Still creating. Still ambitious. Still causing trouble. And yes, still got a pulse.
The idea
Why should the young people have all the fun?
Somewhere along the way it was decided that once you pass fifty your evenings belong to the sofa, your ambition is a nice hobby, and the only club going is one that meets at seven in the morning so you can hand a stranger a business card.
We grew up with punk and Britpop. Most of us are still running things, still building things, and still perfectly capable of a late one. We would just rather not do it at 6am.
Under 25. Under 30. Under 40.
Then the lists stop, and the work carries on.
So this is not a campaign, and nobody is going to stand up and complain about ageism. It is a club that has a better time than the people who left us off the list. That tends to make the point on its own.
How it works
Same night, same place, every month. It is in the diary so you never have to decide. Miss one, come to the next.
Everything else hangs off it. Whoever wants the karting night organises the karting night. That is how youth clubs have always worked.
When something has a cost, we each pay our way. You will always know exactly what that is before you commit, and nobody gets sold to in the bar.
What we get up to
In that order. The business looks after itself once people actually know each other.
Same night, same place, every month. No agenda, no running order, no one gets asked what they do for a living within the first ten minutes. Turn up if you are about.
No league, no ladder, no table pinned up anywhere. Just darts, sometimes, when somebody fancies it. Talent optional.
More chalk, and a great deal of arguing about whether that counted as a shot.
Grown adults discovering they are more competitive than they had been letting on. Bring a neck that still turns.
Somewhere with sand, or a hill, or a view. Most of us spend the entire summer looking at the good bits of the country through a windscreen.
Someone genuinely funny, a room that holds enough people to laugh properly, and something to eat that is not a warm sausage roll.
Somebody has a guitar in the loft. Somebody else used to drum. It will be terrible and that is entirely the point.
Sewing. Jam making. Whatever somebody knows how to do and fancies showing everyone else. A youth club runs on whoever puts their hand up.
Outward bound, or something like it. Not yet. When there are enough of us that it would actually be a laugh.
Things you will never find here
Nothing against the people who like all that. It has its place, and that place is a hotel function room at quarter to seven in the morning. We are doing something else.
Who it is for
There is no date of birth on the form and nobody is going to check. If this page made you want in, you are the right sort of age.
Bring your other half. Bring the friend who has been saying they never go anywhere. It is a business club in the sense that a lot of us run businesses, not in the sense that you have to talk about them.
The bit nobody puts on a website
By fifty, most people have been through something. Businesses fail. Marriages end. Parents get old. Health does something inconvenient. Somebody sells the company they spent twenty years building and then sits there on the Monday morning wondering what on earth they are supposed to do now.
None of which is what this club is for. It is not counselling, it is not a support group, and nobody is going to ask you to share anything.
It is just that having a few good people around who have been through a bit of it themselves turns out to help. That is most of what a club is for.
Get on the list
Nothing to commit to. Leave your details and you will hear when the first night is in the diary.