If only I could have back all the thousands of pounds I have wasted on strippers and drink over the years I would go out and spend it all on strippers and drink (17th October 2006)

If only I could have back all the thousands of pounds I have wasted on strippers and drink over the years, I would go out and spend it all on strippers and drink. Our sad tawdry addictions are the best of us. If I did not have things to be sadly addicted to, I would kill myself. Our vices are the best of us. They are when we glow brightest and most brilliant. Oscar Wilde would not be celebrated today, would not have the West End full of his plays, would not have his own statute in Adelaide Street and his own stained (of course) window in Westminster Abbey if not for his vice. To watch young women take their knickers off on a stage. What a sad, empty experience, but as sad, empty experiences go, one of the absolute best. And at the Scotsman it has been refined to its most pure and simple state. The Nag’s Head and the Old Axe could be this good, but are not. Dodgy doorman demanding an apparently arbitrary amount of pound coins in their hand before they will let you in, body searches for concealed..what? An endless stream of 20 or 30 girls constantly asking for private dances. The fact that the FS does not offer private dances seems to me one of the most beautiful things about it. Anyway, if any of my Scotsman girls gave me a private dance I think I would die. It would be too much, after all this time longing for them. 

So a Journal about the FS pub, and yet so much of what occurs there must remain unsaid, sub judice. 

People criticise the FS because nothing is spent on it to modernise it, but that seems to me the knub of its absolute charm. It is like stepping back into Victorian London. With the Thatcherite revolution, the Millenium, the old Soho basement strip clubs were replaced by the mirrors and champagne and poles of the Stringfellows, and Sophisticats, and For Your Eyes Only, and we were told it is all right to go to strip clubs now, because they had gone upmarket, and respectable. Since when should sex be respectable? Sex should be down and dirty and sleazy or what is the point of it at all. The FS shines out like a beacon in the Stygian gloom, a glowing candle in the peasouper fog, by having resisted the tide. It is as close as you can get to the old Soho experience. It is like a fly trapped in amber. It is a Lost World at the bottom of a hole on a high South American plateau, where Tyrannosaurus Rex still roams and Pterodactyl still fly in the sky. It is the Pterodactyl brought back to London and escaping and circling above the Geographic Society against a Full Moon. 

KARL KRAUS. “Why do I always act so dumb, seem to fuck things up for fun. Just can’t help behaving, as if my head needs rearranging”. It is always something exotic, and steamy. Exotic, steamy, King’s Cross.