It sits there forlornly in the corner of the dark mirrored room, beside a stage on which a pneumatically breasted woman is grinding listlessly against a greasy pole. I’m not sure what it is about the tree’s presence here that’s so jarringly awful. Possibly the fact that everything Christmas is supposed to represent – family, love, kindness, joy – seems totally alien in a place like this, where blokes are essentially paying large sums of money to forget those concepts exist.

I’ve whiled away most of the day sitting silently at my desk, either moving exclamation marks around at random on Frankenstein’s WAG or checking my phone to see if the agent’s email has arrived (it hasn’t). But now it’s 4 p.m., and I am walking into Archie’s Strip Club in Shoreditch with the ten other members of the all-male Thump team.

The overpowering blend of cocoa butter and sweat fills my nostrils as soon as we step past the bouncers. The Archie’s design team have really gone all out on the Christmas theme in here: as well as the sorry-looking tree, there are also silvery scraps of tinsel draped across the L-shaped black leather sofas, green and red baubles dangling limply above the bar, and a few of the dancers are even wearing Santa hats.

This was my first visit to a strip club – the second came during a stag weekend for an old school mate a few years later – and I have to be honest, I still cannot see the attraction. I mean, obviously, objectively, it’s nice to look at naked women. But doing it in a place like this requires a level of self-detachment – maybe even self-deception – that I just don’t seem capable of.

In a weird way, I find it more interesting to watch the customers than the dancers. These hunched, baggy-faced men in bad suits, who still manage to look desperately unhappy while smiling. The horrible, hungry glint in their eyes that makes you feel vaguely ashamed to be the same gender.

We all walk past the bar, where five women in silky underwear are smiling coyly at us and attempting to make eye contact. I remember arguing the case once to Daphne that this is what men actually come to these places for: the feeling of being wanted. It’s not really about the boobs and bums and simulated sex, I told her: it’s about experiencing the simple, mind-blowing novelty of a beautiful girl trying to catch your eye. Because for the average bloke, that just does not happen in the real world.

I don’t think Daff was convinced, to be honest. She just laughed and said that whatever the reason was, it was pathetic. Even so, she wasn’t particularly angry about me coming here today. I think she just felt sorry for me because she realised how much I didn’t want to go.