Friday Night @ ESCAPE

3:48pm Thursday 12th June 2008

Recently I've been getting rather concerned about my cognitive function - or apparent lack of it.

Not only did I fail to see that going to review Escape necessitates booking the night off work, but I also picked Friday as the day that I would climb the enormous - and seemingly unscalable - tree in my back garden.

'Climbing a tree at your age?!', I hear you cry out in horror! But as I've demonstrated before in the column, I often forget how old I am and subconsciously decide to flip two fingers up to the aging process.

It was my personal Everest and I managed it without an oxygen supply. But unlike Brian Blessed, I forgot to plan my route down. Stuck 20 feet in the air, I started to panic and invent stories that I might tell to the firemen when they rescued me.

Eventually, I jumped onto the roof of my house - and experienced on impact the sort of pain I feel could only be appreciated by a Magdalen Bridge jumper on May Day morning. It was the sensual equivalent of television static between channels with the volume turned up to the max.

I then struggled through an entire shift at the pub barely able to walk, and afterwards a taxi took me to Escape. I hobbled up the stairs feeling very sorry for myself, and entered the bar area in a less jovial mood than normal.

Dancing was out of the question - but for the first time in a while I was able to simply observe, sip a drink and listen to some ear pounding tunes.

There's not much more you can ask from a night out than a packed club, good mates, cold drinks and some gorgeous girls throwing themselves around a pole-dancing pole. Escape delivered on all four of the aforementioned points.

There is however the age-old topic of why Escape shows 'Fashion TV' on every wall you look at. Please stop - it mortally offends me, and I struggle to enjoy my night out because I'm too busy thinking about why they have chosen to inflict this superficial drivel upon their paying guests.

For a normal person like yourself, it's simple to overcome this issue - just don't look at the screens or think about it. I'm half-joking of course; Friday was great and the only struggling that I did was when I moved my spine.

My friends and I gave Friday night at Escape a big thumbs up, which in my head was in the style of a Roman Emperor pardoning a gladiator, just for the over-dramatic effect.

It was great to see a busy club because some places that I've been recently have just been empty.

I nearly assumed on a number of occasions that I had stumbled into a dummy building in a nuclear testing zone - especially in some places on the Cowley Road where the only inhabitants closely resemble the mutants from The Hills Have Eyes.

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