...Somewhere between the legal fight over Club One and the divorce coming through, I found myself sitting in the Crown and Garter in Coral Gables on a Tuesday afternoon with nowhere urgent to be. Which, for me at that point in my life, was almost unheard of. I ordered a pint, picked up yesterday's Times newspaper, read the sports pages and put it down next to me. The bar wasn’t particularly busy and I found time to think.

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I’d been thinking about a conversation I’d had at The Grand a few nights earlier.

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By that point I'd shaken hands with Sinatra, sat opposite Princess Margaret at dinner and  watched Ronnie Wood drink his way through my spare room for two and a half weeks one Christmas. From the outside, by most measures, it looked like I was living the life.  

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What it felt like from the inside was harder to describe. Not bad exactly, it obviously wasn't. I'd had a hell of a time, still was, and made a name and some money for myself. But it did feel precarious in a way I'd stopped noticing because I'd been moving too fast to notice anything much.

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Looking back, there was no grand plan. I just kept walking through the next door that opened, sometimes a little unsure of myself but always with curiosity. 

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Getting Ronnie on board for Woody's hadn't happened because I was clever. It happened because Nick Cowen trusted me enough to make a phone call, and Nick trusted me because of how I'd conducted myself with people he knew in rooms before that one. 

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Barbara Hulanicki came back for Who's in the Grove because Woody's had been done properly. We’d agreed on a plan and stuck to it. Dick Ashby became one of my closest friends, because the first conversation we had in Miami felt straight. 

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That's the whole story. Relationships built quietly, over time, through nothing more complicated than showing up and behaving decently. Half the things that had gone right in my life traced back to something that simple.

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The things that had gone wrong were usually things that I either couldn’t or didn’t control properly. Suncoast didn't struggle because the idea was wrong. It eventually closed because I'd locked in prices against a pound I assumed would hold and never properly asked what happened if it didn't. I'd fallen in love with the version of events where it worked and ignored the arithmetic underneath. The currency markets didn't care about my enthusiasm. They just moved.

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As for the clubs, people saw the names at the door and assumed the money matched. But there were plenty of mornings when I sat with a coffee doing the maths in my head to make sure the place was able to pay staff and suppliers. 

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None of that was what I was really sitting with that afternoon, though.

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What I was sitting with was Flora's voice in the dark. “Melissa asked me today if you still live here. I didn't know how to answer.”

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I'd told myself for years that I was doing it for them. Building something. Providing like any good father and husband would. And I knew part of that was true. But the other part was less flattering. I kept moving because stopping felt dangerous. Not financially, though that was part of it, just dangerous. Like if I ever sat still long enough I'd have to reckon with the gap between the life I was performing and whatever was actually going on underneath it.

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My father never talked about the mountain in Italy. The rescue he made under fire, carrying a man on his back while shells came in. He mentioned it once, briefly, then filed it away somewhere no one was allowed to go. For years I thought that was a generational thing, that stoicism was just how men of his era were built. But, sitting in that pub on a Tuesday, I started to wonder if I wasn't doing something similar. Not with a war but with everything else. Keep moving. Don't examine it too closely. If something hurts, open another club.

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I wasn't sure I'd worked out the difference between resilience and just being too stubborn to stop. Maybe there isn't one. Maybe you only find out which it was in hindsight.

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I finished the pint and ordered another one, picked up the Times and started at the front this time.

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José Oro was propping up the bar at The Grand that same evening, with a story that would eventually take me to Barbados. But I didn't know that yet.