Going Out in Your Forties Without Feeling Out of Place

Choose the room, not the outfit. In a room where everyone came up on the same records, at the same time, nobody is looking at you and you will forget the question entirely about two tunes in. The feeling of being out of place almost always comes from picking the wrong room, and that is a fixable problem rather than a fact about you.

Everything below is about stacking the odds. Go where the crowd matches, go with people you like, wear something you can move in, and give yourself half an hour to settle before you judge anything.

Read the Room Before You Book

The biggest signal is the music policy. A 90s and 00s dance floor like Dreamworx draws a crowd who were there the first time. An over-25s door does the same job another way. Daytime clubbing filters hard as well, because a three o'clock start does not suit anybody with a nine o'clock pre-drinks routine.

Put those together and you get a room of people in exactly your position, which is the whole trick.

What It Costs

A good day out is not an expensive one, and knowing your number in advance takes a surprising amount of the pressure off.

• Getting in and out of town. Metro or bus in, taxi or Metro home. Sort the return leg before you go.
• Drinks. City centre prices across an afternoon. A kitty in a group of five or six beats rounds.
• Food. A proper meal beforehand, which doubles as the start of the day if you eat together.
• Nothing new to wear. This is the one to cut. You almost certainly own something that works.

Set the number, tell whoever you live with, and then stop thinking about it. Half of feeling comfortable somewhere is not doing sums at the bar.

Wear What You Can Move In

Six hours on your feet in a warm room rewrites the rules. The best-dressed people in the room are almost always the ones who dressed for the room rather than for the photograph.

Shoes you have already stood up in for a full day. Trainers are completely normal. Something with a bit of give in it, in a fabric that copes with heat. If you are cold walking in, that is usually a sign you have got it right.

One thing you like a lot beats a whole new outfit. A jacket, a pair of boots, something you feel good in. That is enough, and it takes ten minutes rather than three weeks of thinking about it.

Go With the Right Two People

The company decides more than the venue does. Two or three people you genuinely want to spend six hours with will carry any room. A group of twelve, half of whom you have not seen since 2011, is a logistics exercise with music on.

Go with someone who will dance. That is the actual requirement. One person who will get on the floor early gives everybody else permission, and the whole afternoon opens up from there.

It is also worth being honest about who drains you. There is usually one person in every group who needs managing all day, and six hours is a long time to spend doing that. You are allowed to organise a smaller day out with two people and let the big one happen separately.

The First Half Hour

Every room feels wrong for the first twenty minutes. It is quieter than it will be, you do not know where anything is, and you are still in outside mode. That is not a verdict, it is just arriving.

Give yourself a job. Find the bar, find the toilets, find a spot you can come back to, get the coats in. By the time that is done the room will have filled and you will have stopped thinking about yourself.

Then get on the floor for the first flashback you recognise. A flashback is a proper oldskool tune, the sort that draws everyone on to the dancefloor, and dancing to one is the fastest way to stop being a person standing in a club and start being a person at a club.

Phones, Photos and Not Performing

Take the photos early, in the daylight, while everybody still looks how they wanted to look. Then put the phone away for the middle of it.

You do not owe anybody a highlights reel. Nobody in the room is filming you, they are filming the drop and their mates. Enjoy the fact that at this point in your life you can go out purely because you want to hear the music loud, with no one to impress and nothing to prove. That is a much better night out than the ones you were having at twenty-two, and it is the reason these rooms are full.