Just had my first drink in a week. And the second, third, fourth, etc.

It was meant to be a quiet night. And considering the difference between what was on offer and what actually happened, it was. I just swung by Thomsk's with a bottle of wine, hung out with him and Joe for a while, and then got a very rare couple of hours uninterrupted quality time with Jane, our kid's longtime lady. (For those few not in the know, this is a quite different Jane from the one who comments here - who is herself a truly remarkable human being, far beyond compare). This was quite special because Jane and I very rarely get chance to talk without Thomsk being there, despite the fact they've been together 2.5 years. So it's good to know we can actually do it.

But like I mentioned, a much larger Tuesday night was on offer. Yup, there's that word. Tuesday. As in Club. As in out 'til three in the morning and very fragile the day after. I don't mind admitting that tonight I wussed out (albeit within the Tuesday Club's charter). But barely 36 hours after finishing night shifts, I'm really not equipped with the level of patience to cope with the silly children knocking about in a club, let alone a four-deep border between me and the bar.

Quite apart from this, though, I'm not yet sure how comfortable I am with the concept of Tuesday Club. Yes, it's all good fun, and just the few of us lads together, but it has elements that unnerve me. And these aren't confined to the fact that the club's just a little Masonic in nature, with its exclusivity, votes on membership and rules ad infinitum. Last week we voted to allow women in as associate members, but not full, thereby deprived of voting rights. I had to push for associate level to be acceepted, but still this never sat easily with me. For a start why would any self-respecting girl want to be in on this lads' drinking night folly? But more importantly, wasn't the fact that they couldn't be equals against everything I was brought up to believe in? Granted, it's just a bit of fun, but I'm sure that's what the MCC was originally, and look at the mess over membership they ended up in. In reality it doesn't matter a damn - it's just the principle.

But even deeper than this is the way I feel about clubs themselves. I've never been the kind of person who's been in a gang. I've always been an outsider or, at best, a member of a group of outsiders, or sometimes the funny guy that one of the established posses tacks on from time to time. So over time, having been so used to relative isolation by the cool kids, I've become so wary of cliques that I've developed an affinity with Groucho Marx's timeless phrase: Time Flies like an arrow. Fruit Flies like a banana. Sorry, I mean: I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member. I start to feel uncomfortable if I'm exclusively with the same group of people for too long, or find myself falling into too much of a routine. To be brutal, I'm not meant to be one of the chosen few.

It's like when I was at university. I had several very close friends, four of whom were a pretty tight-knit unit with a couple of foreign girlfriends from a similarly close group. We knocked about together most of the time very happily. Then came a point where the ladies left the country for a couple of weeks. At first, we thought nothing of it. (Well, I didn't anyway. Can't speak for the chaps who were missing their girlfs). But by the first weekend, I was going stir crazy, what with spending all my free time with these same four men. The lack of diversity was more than I could take, and I had to find refuge in the company of other people. Looking back, I'm fairly sure in thinking that the group initially took this as something of a snub, but it wasn't. The fact was I had to pull back in order to preserve our friendship. While it's good to know your friends as well as you know yourself, too much predictability can take the fun out of a relationship. And by having a wider range of experience I felt I was able to bring more to the whole group, and be in a better position to offer the benefits of what I gained from these close friends to others.

What am I trying to say in sharing this? I don't know other than that I don't want Tuesday Club to reach that point. I don't want to resent the people I'm spending time with, because I love most of them dearly, and the others could well turn into good friends. Yes, I'll turn up and have fun, but on my terms.

So in the absence of anything more tangible, let's leave the last word to Groucho: Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.