TROUBLE

The Century Club in Soho, London is not an easy find. I suspect its entrance is designed that way. The scruffy black door set back from the footpath is more like the back entrance to a kitchen than a members-only club.  There’s a doorbell, a dark staircase and a front desk where you give your name before being permitted entry.

It’s a peek into a London I didn’t expect to see. And yet, here I was earlier this year, sipping wine in an exclusive rooftop bar after the privilege of listening to two esteemed women discuss a topic that many of us have a morbid fascination with.

In an expertly moderated conversation where the room of women (and a few men) was held through anger, grief, and hard questions, journalist Afua Hagan and barrister Dr Charlotte Proudman spoke with a familiarity they probably wish they didn’t have about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. They discussed the changes needed in areas such as the treatment of survivors, the accountability of political figures and the monarchy, and the media's responsibility. I felt I finally understood the fascination, but it was more than that. Something about that night has continued to prod at me. 

When I moved to London 18 months ago, I was determined to bust the myth that it's almost impossible to make new friends in such a metropolis. Not wanting to disrupt current relationships by expecting inclusion through friends-of-friends connections, I went on the hunt for a community of like-minded women. A “networking group”, if you like.

Networking seems to be one of those terms that puts as much fear into people as public speaking. Stilted small talk, exchange of business cards and/or LinkedIn details and promises of future coffee meetings that never eventuate. That is exactly what many networking events can be reduced to. I have had some experience both attending and facilitating them. There’s an art and skill to the organisation, much the same as there’s an art and skill to public speaking. You don’t just turn up to a stage, give a 20-minute talk and expect a million views. Nor can you just find a venue and enlist a couple of speakers on a topic of note. This might fill a space, but there won’t be much networking or community building. The people who come together will stick together, and those who come alone will likely leave alone.

The best networking clubs are about widening your life on purpose, in a way that ensures people feel they belong. It’s about ensuring the space is as much for each individual as for anyone else who might attend. And then facilitating conversations and connections in such a way that is almost invisible to those taking part.

This year, I have been to events as diverse as the Epstein discussion, a night in a Marylebone church filled with self-effacing joy at the hands of Caitlyn Moran and Bryony Gordon, a drinks night in an Islington bar, sharing experiences of life-changing illness, the launch of a book about sexual pleasure and a breakfast in an iconic London venue where we learnt how to design tiny experiments to build new habits. 

All of these events were run by a single London-based organisation dedicated to building a community that empowers women through shared conversations. They’re called The Trouble Club.

Left to my own devices, my calendar defaults to my lane. The things I know I will enjoy, or that turn up in my algorithm. Being a member of the Trouble Club forces useful randomness. The talk I would never have booked for myself, such as one called “Bimbo” with a speaker I had never heard of, turns into an article on my Substack page and a rethinking of my opinion on feminism.

I’ve also read a Maya Angelou book I had been meaning to read for years to prepare for a discussion night in a bar and discovered poetry that taught me a lot more about English sensibilities than I thought possible. I’ve learnt about British politics from a woman who has been on its front line for more than two decades and learnt the meaning of resilience from another woman who was run over by a London train. Twice.

I've met people who have become friends (myth busted!) and others who’ve become clients. Counterintuitively though, in this sort of environment people can become both. One of the loveliest friendships I’ve made began with a conversation about a photograph of a woman peeing on a London bridge. This conversation prompt, which appeared on a crafted conversation card at a Trouble Club dinner, created a thread that showed we had more in common than either of us expected. We swapped numbers on the way out, the way you do when you actually mean it.

A few weeks later we were both due at another common event – the one on Jeffrey Epstein –  and arranged to have dinner beforehand. She asked what I did. I told her; she said she was interested, and we left it there. Parked, deliberately, until a proper discovery call the following week. My new friend signed up for six weeks of storytelling mentoring. In between, we kept turning up to the same events. These days we get coffee or drinks between events, and this week she’s giving me my first ever reflexology treatment.

I've stopped trying to sort the people I meet into one column or the other – friend, client, neither, both. And that's really the point of this whole year. None of my growth is down to a single event, a single person, or a single book. It's that I kept turning up to rooms I hadn't fully chosen, on topics I wouldn't have picked myself, and letting whatever happened next happen. The Trouble Club doesn't hand you an outcome. They hand you more rooms than you'd ever have found on your own, and better odds that something in one of them changes your year. Or even your life.