31 tasks

Completed Task #1: Clubbing

It’s all about stepping outside comfort zones – setting aside the sheltered confines of the known routine in favour of new experiences.  It’s a theme that will appear in other tasks but is epitomised here in the first completed task: Clubbing - Go dancing until dawn. 

The rave scene of the nineties passed me by, whilst the cheesy discos of my student days hardly constitute ‘proper’ clubbing, so embracing modern dance culture was always going to be a personal departure.  The groundwork was in place after a sleepless Sunday night at Glastonbury 08 and a night at seOne at London Bridge, watching the (I am lead to believe) legendary Richie Hawtin.

But it would take an bigger occasion to fulfil this task (admittedly before a 31 task list actually existed) and the opportunity came from my school friend, Bryan – already the architect of the previous clubbing experiences.  A facebook invitation to ‘I love techno’ was hardly likely to elicit an immediate “Yes” from me, but was that just the comfort zone talking?  My mind was changed when I found out about the details however; it was being held in Ghent, Belgium on my 30th birthday and involved “35,000 whistle-toting morons” in six enormous rooms.

Suddenly this wasn’t a night out, it was an adventure.

And so the morning I left my twenties behind saw me on the Eurostar, with a mini-apartment booked for two nights.  After a transfer from Brussels there was little time to get my bearings in Ghent, before meeting Bryan, Ian and Graeme to get the tram to the Expo centre.

Once we were past the euro-scrum at the door I could only marvel at the size of the place.  An immense central hall greeted us with five 6,000 capacity rooms branching off, each well under way with techno, electropop and house assaulting our senses.  Midnight came and went with the night developing into a blur, as I moved from room to room enjoying the friendliness of the multi-national mass of humanity along with the eye-catching costumes on show (demonstrated by Sarah, below) and finally the euphoria of Underworld’s anthemic “Born Slippy”.

Leopard print catsuits. Big in Belgium.

As dawn broke, I was running on empty both physically and mentally and it time to make the return tram journey back to town and collapse gratefully into bed, though not until I’d firmly but reasonably turned down a doorstep request from a young man asking for booze, drugs or “company”.  Hmm…

At which point the task was complete.  There remained only a bleary day in Ghent before travelling home, unaware that this was just the beginning.