For valentines this year I went to Grandma’s 85th birthday party.
And not my even my grandma. It was my boyfriends grandma who shares her birthday with valentines weekend. Despite taking the place of the dinner on a night which me and my man traditionallly see as an excuse to go somewhere ridiculously expensive for dinner, it was great fun. We ate, drank champagne, reviewed the new super sausage game and talked about whether or not the natwest app was rubbish.
Yes as you may have guessed all my friends and relatives are heavy iPhone users. In the days when iPhones were rare people used to joke at our dining table which always had at least 4 iPhones nestling between the usual clutter. A lot of my friends work in digital media (hence the glut of iphones) and so we spend all day staring at computer screens, googling technology and trying to persuade the boy (who is not in digital) that twitter is not a waste of time but a great learning tool.
Sometimes though for this girl who loves books and who often has to stop herself from touching art at galleries (for me the sense of touch is so much stronger that just looking) all this virtual stuff gets too much. So when I heard about the parlour, a pop up venue in shoreditch I knew I had to go.
The brainchild of Mien, a new etiquette magazine, the parlour is a pop up venue free of mobiles, technology and stress. Running a series of quaint events such as letter writing and parlour games, the aim of the venue is to make us Londoners slow down and ‘enjoy a unique old world experience’. This is the perfect idea for people in a city where we barely have time to see our friends, let alone make time for people you don’t know. (As a comparison to this, I recently spent 15 minutes talking to the chemist who I had met just moments before when I handed in my prescription- when would this ever happen in London?)
Tickets are either pay what you can or pre-purchase. Check out their facebook page or the Parlour website for more information.
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