Pastiche Band have tonight played a gig at The Hurlingham Club, London.

2:40am. I sit down in the kitchen, take a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon 2011, and a fruit scone. Just home from an engagement, aka a "gig":

“The origin of the name ‘Hurlingham’ is unknown, it is therefore permissible to speculate that about 1,500 years ago a boat load of ‘Hurlings’, the family and clan of ‘Hurla’, landed on the Thames bank somewhere near the present Club and established a little ‘ham’ – home or settlement.

In 1867 Frank Heathcote (1811-1879) obtained the leave of Mr Naylor to promote pigeon shooting matches at Hurlingham and soon after formed The Hurlingham Club, originally for this purpose and ‘as an agreeable country resort'. The Club went on to lease the estate from Mr Naylor in 1869 and in 1874 acquired the freehold for £27,500.”

There is, allegedly, currently an eight-year waiting list to become a member.

Pastiche Band have been a hired to play at at the Hurlingham many times. We have played for the wild and the sedate; big corporate functions and intimate birthdays; the reverent and the irreverent.

Drummer, 'Sir Twirl', suggested that the best music grows from a root – takes hold, and shoots up to have a life of its own.

There were pink Smarties embedded in chocolate atop marshmallows, chocolate hearts, champagne and happy birthday songs, and a surprise flash-mob dance for the birthday girl to the Mary Mary song Shackles – an almost tactile sense of love and joy from family and friends. The event was a joy for Pastiche to play for.

We drive home through streets close to deserted (a far cry from the recent New Years Eve), a drunk weaves an erratic dance on the road across Putney Bridge, and home to red wine…