It’s fair to say that I wasn’t a big fan of boarding school. I sobbed every day for the first three years and sulked every day for the next five. But one thing it left me with a taste for (apart from, oddly, rissoles) is communal living.
A favourite topic among my friends is what our joint retirement home will look like. Mostly this involves joking (not joking) about how we will all move into the grand country house owned by the one friend who has been supremely successful. We happily imagine gentle exercise and afternoon tea in her grounds and aqua aerobics in her pool with a fleet of buff young nurses/butlers/instructors.
Excitingly, this week I was able to refine the vision further. There will be a London outpost at the newly opened Arlington, the restaurant previously known as Le Caprice. Just as Arlington is the hottest place in town today, Le Caprice was the hottest restaurant in London in the Eighties and Nineties, about the time I started working at a glossy magazine. I was a passionate regular, visibly overexcited to find myself in such a hotbed of glamour and sophistication.
Walking through the revolving doors was like stepping back in time. The decor is identical and still feels startlingly modern, and the menu has all the old favourites plus a few new dishes that feel as though they were there all along. Even the wicker chairs are the same. Every sense is astonished by familiarity. It’s Proust’s madeleine but on a significantly more lavish scale. The importance of a table for my ageing friends and me is not to be a buzzkill for the bright young things now populating Arlington. Rather, it’s therapeutic.
The famous 1979 psychological study Counterclockwise found that if older people were surrounded with memorabilia from their youth, there were clinically measurable benefits to their cognition, health and wellbeing. This echoes the theory behind reminiscence therapy, which is used widely in care homes around the world. Reflection on prompts such as photographs or music leads to significant increases in cognition, self-esteem and life satisfaction and is a very effective treatment for depression.
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I’m just lucky that my chosen reminiscence prompt happens to be a luxurious restaurant in the heart of Mayfair.
