I saw them again early on Sunday morning. I was on my way to my daily appointment with the sunrise, and they were pouring out of a nightclub. Some were clutching their plastic mugs of beer, and others their handbags.
Yet others were hand in hand with their lovers, while the rest held onto each other in solidarity, but probably also to maintain their balance after a long night of revelling and indulging in alcohol and possibly drugs.
Outside the club, the motorbike taxis were revving up, ready to take these stragglers from the night before home, or possibly to the next party. Those with cars were gathering their ‘ride or die’ buddies.
Once upon a time, in what seems to be a lifetime ago, I used to be them. While the thought of going out clubbing until the crack of dawn fills me with dread today, there was a time I thought those halcyon nights would never end.
I remember being about 12 or 13 and wondering when I would be old enough to go to a nightclub or disco. The stories I had heard from my older cousins, various uncles and aunts, and even my parents, made clubbing sound like a magical, mythical experience, and I was dying to discover it for myself.
In fact, I recall just after sitting our CPE, one of my friends and I were in Mombasa and had been turned away from the door of one of the hottest nightclubs at the time.
His older sister, 16, and her friends had been allowed into the club, and we fooled ourselves into thinking that if we deepened our voices and acted mature, we’d get past the bouncers at the door. The bouncers were not fooled and shooed us away.
Foiled in that exercise, we managed to get a pliable adult to buy us a couple of beers and went home to drown our sorrows at being bounced from a disco. One beer in and we were really quite tipsy. I don’t think we ever opened the second one. Shockingly irresponsible behaviour, really, but I appear to have survived to middle age.
I never got to breach the entrance of a nightclub until New Year's Eve of my 15th year. That night, two of my older cousins, both over 18, and a youthful uncle from their father’s side of the family were going to the New Florida nightclub in Nairobi. I was spending the holiday with them, and after they consulted their mother, my aunt, they were given the green light to take me with them. Looking back through a modern lens, I suppose that was some sort of acceptable adult supervision.
It was an experience like no other: the glamour, the excess, the music, the lights. I was hooked, and I knew it.
Sure enough, over the next 30-odd years, I more than had my fill of discos and nightclubs. In fact, there was a list doing the rounds on WhatsApp not so long ago, asking how many of the more than 70 clubs, pubs and legendary hangouts mentioned on it one had recalled visiting, and I think I had been to at least 80 or 90 per cent of them.
When I was in my mid-30s, I remember an older friend, they were in their mid-40s, predicting I would tire of the constant clubbing and partying. I remember I looked at them as though they had gone soft in the head.
I thought I’d be like the members of the Rolling Stones and partying well into my old age. In the end, it took less than a decade after that conversation for me to wind things down a whole lot.
Nowadays, even when the spirit is willing,
the flesh reminds me it is weak. That said, I do occasionally have the odd late
night out. Though, whereas before, the party would only
get going at about midnight, these days, I am exhausted by 1 am and just want
my bed.
After all that, though, doubtful as it may seem to me at this moment in time, perhaps I might get a second wind. I only hope that by then, there will be clubs for oldies that open at 6pm and close at 11pm.
