Day 81: Phileas Blog

Phileas Fogg circumnavigated the globe in eighty days - the exact length of time I've been blogging.   His is the greater achievement*.

Phileas Fogg means two things to me - tortilla chips (see left), and the Reform Club, which is the setting for the whole Round-The-World-In-Eighty-Days wager.  I've visited the Reform Club twice.  I don't remember much from the first time.  It was a twenty-first birthday party and the drinks were strong and various and numerous. 

The second time was last year, courtesy of a friend who is a member.  After a time-warp supper (soup tureens, aged bewhiskered waiters, fish course, and pudding trolley - 'Trifle please, Nanny!'), I am shown around.  Marble pillars, backgammon and sherry, Burgess and Maclean.  The bathrooms are fantastic - unadorned boarding-school functional, with vast porcelain tubs and wide-bore taps designed to thunder hot water in extravagant, steamy quantities.  No condensing boiler trickle here. 

A small secluded library - not the main one, but another, hidden away on the first floor.  And, apparently, custodian to SECRETS.  Over the years, members have used the books in this room as discreet carriers for messages - a way of keeping things untraceable and anonymous.  But sometimes circumstances (eg death, dishonour, amnesia etc) meant that these were not collected, so they have just remained folded silently into the pages.  Only to be found many years later, when all the books were catalogued.  Along with carefully stashed bottles of vintage spirits, concealed behind dusty volumes.  Old buffers jealously guarding their Bowmore '55, and taking the secret of its whereabouts to the grave (suspended in time behind 'An Economic History of the Punjab').  I've always wanted to find a secret message in a book, preferably in a second-hand shop.  (Who doesn't?)  But a library would do.  Particularly in a dusty, fusty London club.

* This is counterbalanced by the fact that he is a fictional character, and therefore this is a fictional achievement. So not an achievement at all.  Blog beats Fogg.