The secret world of liggers: ‘Free booze is everywhere’
Sam BungeyThe ‘eventing scene’ is all about blagging free food and booze at galleries, openings and other events to which you were not technically invited. So what are the tricks of the pros?
It’s a chilly Tuesday night in central London and the pro-smoking lobby group Forest is throwing a drinks reception at the Institute of Directors on Pall Mall. Moving among the sharply dressed young Conservatives and red-faced publicists is a man in a pinstripe suit and charcoal grey overcoat, quickly emptying a bottle of Beck’s.
A film crew working for Forest is gathering vox pops, and they buttonhole this man, Tom Rigby (not his real name), to ask his views on proposed cigarette-packaging regulations. With his black-rimmed glasses and spiky grey hair, Rigby might be a political flack, or a high-minded libertarian. He speaks gamely for a few moments.
What the crew doesn’t know is that Rigby isn’t here for politics or cigarettes. He’s here for more substantive fare – the drinks and hors d’oeuvres.
“I look like I could be someone, don’t I?” Rigby tells me later, waving a fun-size kebab. “It’s all bluster. I have a bubblegum stain on my trousers, that’s why I’ve got my long coat.”
Rigby’s hobby is attending events where there is free food and booze. Later tonight he’ll drop in at a nearby mixer for networkers, and then, if he fancies it, a talk at the University of the Arts London. He calls what he does “ligging” – which means gatecrashing with intent to snack. “The French would call me a pique-assiette,” Rigby says as we approach the bar. It translates roughly as “one who picks from others’ plates”. Others on the scene prefer “eventing”. Rigby estimates there are 50 regular liggers in London, mostly middle-aged single men. He’s on nodding terms with about six of them.
Rigby uses Eventbrite, the listings site that conveniently groups dozens of events by category and cost. Here’s a typical evening for Rigby, sent over in SMS form: “Atm I am on route to the Royal Institution, Piccadilly for a quick gig. It starts at 5:30 thence to UCL thence Rich Mix. Fancy a glass at the RI?”
A gig like Forest’s is his bread and butter. The lobby group gets more than 90% of its funding from the tobacco industry, so Rigby knew the event would be busy and well-catered. Politically, he leans towards liberal, but a good ligger has to keep an open mind.
“Look to the sponsor,” he counsels, “free booze is ubiquitous. It’s good food that’s the challenge. The problem is that left-of-centre events rarely have free food. Say you go to an event for Palestine solidarity, you might get some dates. You won’t get anything special.”
It also helps to have a story. Though Rigby is currently unemployed, he will occasionally tell people he is in science communication, or that he’s a journalist. On a recent application to attend the launch of a brewery in north London, Rigby selected the box for “investor”. “They’re nice to you if you’re an investor,” he explains. “The next box asked how much might you invest. So I thought, well, I might invest £10,000 … and you go along, y’know.”
But he doesn’t present an entirely invented character: he is himself, he says, but with an imaginary pay cheque. “It’s not like one day I’m a vicar, and another day an academic, but each day you wear the right things to fit in.”
‘It’s hard to dress up posh’
Rigby has a BBC lanyard that he picked up in a BBC gift store, which he wears slung around his neck with the empty ID holder tucked discreetly in his inside jacket pocket. He also collects lapel pins – from the Equity actor’s union, the National Union of Journalists and so on. The espionage community, he points out, calls all this “pocket litter”. He generally shuns baggage – it’s better to look like you’ve just dashed over from work – but a tote bag from Deloitte or the British Medical Association says the right thing, as long as it doesn’t look like it’s from a charity shop. A notepad can be useful, too, or a BlackBerry.
One look Rigby never tries is “rich”: “Unless you’ve got the money, it’s hard to dress up posh. Someone who knows will look and say: ‘Nah, I don’t believe you.’”
Rigby grew up in Peckham, south-east London, the son of a grocer and a teaching assistant. His ligging career began more than a decade ago, when he was a guest speaker at conferences himself, running a small business making educational presentations at schools. He found that his speaker’s badge allowed him to wander between events, meeting new people. Then a few years ago, when an aunt he had been caring for died, Rigby went off the rails. He closed the business and started leaning on ligging both for company and sustenance.
Nowadays these receptions offer a vicarious taste of the professional life he might have if he were still in work. Rigby says he finds it difficult to form close relationships, preferring the semi-anonymous social interaction of these receptions. He gets a thrill out of the blag, too. “I’m a bit shameless like that. I’m a non-intimate extrovert, so the idea of being in a totally alien environment doesn’t faze me.”
If this all sounds a bit Wedding Crashers, Rigby prefers another film reference: in Fight Club, the protagonist seeks out human contact at support meetings for men with testicular cancer. That character goes further than he is willing to, says Rigby. However, he concedes he once attended a crack addiction support group in Bromley, because it was catered by Pret a Manger. “Maybe that’s not great company to be keeping,” he says.
A loose coalition of liggers exists around London. “Jaysea” first met Rigby a few years ago at an art show in East London, and occasionally sees him around at events. But ligging is generally a solitary pursuit – for one thing, it’s easier to keep your story straight. For Jaysea it’s also a question of reputation – he is interested in the whole event, often reading up before a talk or conference, while others just show up for the reception. Plus, some overbook and become known for no-shows.
As a result, Jaysea, who always wears a suit and waistcoat to events, tends to go solo. Jaysea has been going to events at least once a day – sometimes as many as three – for the past six years, and has developed a connoisseur’s tastes. “What I particularly enjoy are the unadvertised receptions,” he says. He has more than a dozen email addresses and uses them to apply to events, posing as a researcher, in anything from medicine and finance, to statistics and security.
He tells an anecdote in which he took a rare trip south of the river. (Most events take place at venues in the West End or the City.) He showed up at the appointed time at a Battersea art gallery, only to find he had the wrong address. “It was empty except for a really lovely lady. She brought up some glasses of wine from downstairs. Nothing was lost,” he says.
Despite his reservations about his associates, Jaysea acts as an organiser in the “eventing scene”. He sends out a daily newsletter titled Jaysea’s Event Mailing List to 70 or so subscribers, cribbing the day’s free events in London from Eventbrite. He also maintains separate weekly special-interest newsletters for history, literature and medicine and arts events.
‘It’s work-replacement therapy’
One subscriber, Ron, began going to free lectures in the evenings while still working as a planning engineer with BT, hoping to fill in gaps in his education. Now retired, the 64-year-old goes to several lectures a week. “It’s work replacement therapy,” he says. “You’re not supposed to sit at home watching television, it’s better to go and see real people.”
Several people I spoke to were more guarded about their hobby, fearing that exposure might lead to tightened guest lists – “killing the goose that lays the golden egg” as Rigby puts it. But Damien Clarkson, who runs the event catering company The London Kitchen, says it’s difficult for organisers to turn people away. In the social-media age, organisation of events is often fast and loose, and if a name isn’t on a list, it could simply be an organisational error. At the door, it can be a question of who blinks first.
“There’s a brinksmanship that can happen,” he says. Generally organisers tend to tolerate liggers, he says, so long as they’re dressed appropriately. Galleries in particular are often happy to have the people. “The worst thing that can happen for many organisers is no one turns up,” he says. Personally he admires the moxie: “Blaggers are the adventurers of the industry.”
Simon Clark, director of Forest, says ligging is “clearly not uncommon” and he has no issue with the few people who seem to turn up to all Forest events, regardless of the subject. “The more the merrier,” he says. “I’m not saying it’s quantity over quality but we do want to get bums on seats. It creates a buzz. I’m not so penny-pinching that I mind someone coming along for a few beers.”
‘I’m just here for the gory pictures’
The last time I meet Rigby it’s to crash a talk on maxillofacial reconstruction at Guy’s hospital. The lecture, titled Reconstructing Identity, features distressing slide shows of gunshot-wounds and cancer-fighting surgery, and impenetrable science. Struggling with the spelling of “osteoblastogenesis” I abandon my notes and instead look across the lecture theatre at Rigby who has ditched his suit in favour of a professorial knit sweater. He has a diary-size notebook out and is making occasional jottings.
After the talks Rigby perches three glasses of dry white wine (two for him) on the sill of a window looking out on London from 30 floors up. He spots a vacant-looking floor in the Shard building. “I could squat in there,” he says. An organiser approaches and asks if we’re taking the tour of the lab’s 3D-printing facilities. Presumably she thinks we’re surgeons. We’re rumbled, I sense, with rising panic. But we’re saved by a suave deflection by Rigby.
“I’m not a clinician, I just come here for the gory pictures really,” he says.
Tom Rigby’s five rules of ligging in London
1. Be ready to bluff Just pop your head in somewhere promising – a gallery, university or charity, say – and see if there’s something on. Say you have it in the diary you’re supposed to be here, or that your work-experience guy should have emailed to put you on the guest list.
2. Eventbrite is your bible This site is an indispensable tool for the modern eventer. Set the price filter to “Free”.
3. Look for the word “reception” Without this word, there will be no mini-falafels.
4. Check who the sponsor is The tech corner of Old Street in central London is good for beer and pizza; Holborn’s universities have budgets for decent wine; Mayfair art galleries are buzzing on Fridays. Events organised by the legal profession, or indeed any industry that requires you to clock up a certain number of continuing professional development hours, are a good shout. Free booze is everywhere. The challenge is good food.
5. Don’t get pissed Showing up drunk is frowned upon by the ligging community.
This article was amended on 26 May 2015. An earlier version said that the Forest event was additionally funded by the Institute of Economic Affairs. This is not the case.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaKSZm7KiusOsq7KklWR%2FcX2UaKSasV9ngXC%2FxJypnqxdrLyzuMNmpp9lnJ60qLHRrGSfqpWaeqO7zrOc