I forgot to say – on Friday night I went into the Bulldog, on the grounds that I can’t mock a place without having been there. Now I can.
I went to the “nightclub” Bulldog on Leidseplein, not any of the coffeeshops. It was a total sausage fest, the ten or so women in the club of 300 were circled by leering drunk Englishmen in matching tour tshirts. I quickly determined that this was an observation-only excursion, decided to have a drink and watch the show. I sat at the bar next to a “drug dealer” who was selling legal herbal cocaine to unsuspecting poms, and his mate who smoked no less than 3 jumbo joints in the hour I was there.
In a room of 300 men, only the women had any dancing skill at all. Apparently beats and movement are not combined in Britain, and movement is kept to a minimum anyway. The poor girls on the floor were having a hard time as you can’t turn your back to every direction at once, and so there was always someone in their face for a few seconds until they turned away again.
A few transvestites started to come in, to the delight of my drug dealer mate, who was perving openly. They started to congregate around him, perhaps they wanted some of that fake coke. I didn’t see him pass any, so I guess not. Shortly afterwards the Rick Astley song Never Gonna Give You Up came on, to loud applause, which was God’s signal for me to leave. And so I did.