It’s called a lounge — though I cannot think why. The music is usually too loud to have a conversation. The lighting is so dark, when you aren’t stumbling on the floor or being jabbed by pointy-edged furniture, you’re probably popping the potpourri in your mouth, mistaking the flotsam and jetsam of some garden’s debris for a delectable snack — at least I have and, alas, oftener than once. And while on the subject, can someone tell me why they coat the floors with a sticky substance, so you can’t help feel you’re standing on someone’s dinner — or what must have been a honey-based sauce before it found its way to the soles of your shoe and turned to glue?
Given my considerable research, I can safely say a lounge is a bar with attitude. You don’t usually have a lot of furniture, not even in designated party zones — which is where friends, for some inexplicable reason, have taken to having their birthday flings — so you end up standing a lot. It’s probably a good thing to have hollow legs in which to pour the whisky, which is probably why they hose the floors down with whatever dip that’s left over, so even when you’re feeling you ought to totter, on account of having had one too many, you can’t because your shoes are stuck to the floor — remember?
It is my theory that friends who invite you to a lounge are closet exhibitionists. Why else, say about the time when the milkman is doing his morning rounds and you wish you could lift your sticky shoes and go home to bed, does the host decide to do a jiggy-wiggy performance on the bar counter? The bar dance is as inevitable as having ice in your drink, but sometimes things can get a little distraught when the hostess decides to entertain the guests with a striptease, or pole dance, and the host doesn’t think so, and they exchange insults about their relatives’, and in-laws’, peculiar mating habits, which should but never does get a standing ovation, and then everyone finally gets to go home.
If I’m peculiarly swathed on these evenings out, it’s because experience counts. Like mythical goddesses, lounge habitués sprout extra elbows grown, so they can jab you in the solar plexus. I now take the precaution of padding myself with a pillow slip or a towel, under my jacket, to cushion the inevitable hail of flailing elbows, but it doesn’t do to then find yourself on the dance floor where the cascading linen can make a mockery of the hostess’ attempt to be sultry, so you’re confined to a corner and told to get sober.
For those who do genuinely need sobering up, the fried food should be a good start. Lounges specialise in fries. They’ll fry your fish and mushroom and the previous evening’s leftovers, they’ll dunk your sushi in sizzling oil till you can’t tell the tuna from the prawns, and if the chicken tastes suspiciously like soya, or paneer, or stale bread, it probably is. And you’d better eat it fast, because if you don’t, the waiters will whisk it back to the kitchen for the chef to fry all over again, which is how you reckon it’s probably oil from the snacks that’s sticking your shoes to the floor. Though I’m not sure if that’s the reason you didn’t go home in the first place, even though a lounge is, the loud music and dim lighting considered, a pretty boring place to be.