Clive Martin’s first Frieze: “There are more age gap relationships here than at 2 am on the Pattaya strip”

You exit the station. You’re not entirely sure where it is. You’ve only ever crashed a few of the fringe events and after parties before. You look for someone to follow, and hey presto, appear a taut-faced 70-something-year-old woman in a blue velvet frock coat and a strapping young man in a Martine Rose leather racing jacket. Surely, they can only be going to Frieze.

You make your way to the back of the boundless, sprawling queue. This is the 11 am on Wednesday VIP slot, the high rollers slot, the major players slot. Someone says that if you get a slot on Thursday (or god forbid Friday) you might as well be dead.

You’re surrounded by middle-aged men in Commes suits, with crimped hair and small, round glasses. There are a lot of guys here who could be Hans Ulrich Obrist, but aren’t. There are a lot of guys who could be Yohji Yamamoto – in their parachute pants and wide-brimmed hats – but aren’t.

There’s Grayson Perry, and there’s Katie Grand. They’re headed to the back of the queue. That probably speaks to the pull of the event. Because people like that don’t usually queue.

There are also plenty of 30-somethings in short shorts, MA1 jackets, boots and scruffy baseball caps. The kind of people who roll their eyes at you when you ask what they do. They don’t usually queue, either.

You flash your QR code and you’re in. Immediately you spot a friend, a high-flying PR girl. She hugs you and introduces you to someone else – a bald guy who looks like he knows the score here. He tells you that, “It’s very exciting, there are lots of Americans around.” Later, someone else will tell you there were “no Americans around.”

You walk around the Focus section, the place for younger, hipper, broker galleries – now (somewhat controversially) moved to the front of the house. You spot someone who kicked you out of a party ten years ago and make a swift heel turn.

You look at some art. Because that’s what you’re here for, right? There are a lot of portraits, a lot of memey, internetty cartoon figures and tasteful, soulful, textured canvases. At the Carlos/Ishikawa booth you spend some time looking at Moka Lee’s huge oil portrait of a girl with a can of Red Bull. It’s the first thing you notice when you walk in. It strikes you as very Trance Party.

You turn a corner and come across something of a commotion. A throng of art types are all witnessing some kind of happening, practically salivating behind their iPhones. It turns out to be Billy Childish, in the middle of a live painting. Childish twizzles his moustache and drags his knackered old brushes against the canvas. There is a little boy with him, who must be his son. The son looks quite normal. The Childish family paint in unison like some kind of YBA Britain’s Got Talent act. Your friend suggests someone has probably bought this work before it was even created – an exclusive commission to be realised at Frieze. Funnily enough, they’re right opposite the Tracey Emin booth.

You pace up, down and around this vast white tent. Everywhere are little asymmetric booths, stocked with the great and the good of the commercial galley world. You glance at all the anxious young assistants clutching iPads to their chests. Some have desks, and some even have their own uniforms. Their ageing bosses take loud phone calls and kiss people on the cheek. It reminds you of a car boot sale or the beauty floor of a suburban department store.

You make your way to the ‘blue chip section’ at the back of the marquee, where Sadie Coles and White Cube and Sprüth Magers are to be found. There are Sarah Lucases, Rose Wylies, Richard Princes and an enormous Georg Baselitz here. You spot Jay Jopling, parading through the battlefield like some kind of warrior king. He’s quite charismatic in person.

Then you see that other great Jay of Mayfair, Jay Rutland. Husband of Tamara Ecclestone, purveyor of terrible street art and dodgy geezer extraordinaire. He’s got another Essex boy with him, who blurts out: “There’s some pretty decent stuff here actually. It’s not all weird!” Rutland flashes him a look.

You keep perusing the booths, almost hypnotically. At no point does anybody confuse you with somebody who has money.

But there is plenty of capital here, no doubt. This is ‘collector’s hour’, and the art world “whales” appear in a distinct set of subcultures; pampered oil widows in Max Mara coats, finance cowboys in navy blue suits, heavy-breathing Frenchmen in full Dover Street Market regalia. There are more age gap relationships here than at 2 am on the Pattaya strip.

Time for lunch. The chic end of culinary Soho is here; Maison François, Sessions Art Club, Rita’s, Bao. But the behemothic, industrialised Gail’s is where most people are headed. You queue for ten minutes, before buying a bottle of water and a smoked salmon & schmear sandwich. You have to Google what “schmear” is in the queue. It costs you nearly 13 pounds and you eat it standing up next to the bins.

After lunch you head to Frieze Masters, where an acquaintance has told you “The vibe is worse, but the art is better.” You take the 14-minute walk through the park, on what turns out to be a glorious autumn afternoon. The mustard yellow leaves crackle and crunch beneath your feet, and the sun shimmers behind the trees. It feels like being in an Instagram Reel.

But then, a man on a bike – a central casting Camden weirdo – bombs past you. He steams right through the middle of the Frieze crowd, intent on causing chaos. A lady in an expensive wool coat doesn’t see him until the last second, too immersed in her phone. He nearly ploughs straight into her, and she shrieks. Finally he swerves, flashing a malicious smile. It turns out the lady was Princess Eugenie.

In the Masters tent, the art is indeed better, and the vibe is quite possibly better as well. You head into a booth which holds a trove of mediaeval paintings and architectural nicknacks. A fussy art historian type who looks like James Delingpole points out the unusual curvature in a portrait of some ancient bishop to a prospective buyer. It’s strange that – at what is ostensibly the same event – you can buy both a trendy video installation from Arcadia Missa, and a chunk of York Minster Cathedral. But I guess that’s all part of the fun.

There are a lot of Italians at Masters. A lot of popped collars and loafers and sunglasses. They’ve all congregated at the ad-hoc Nobu that’s been set up there. You think one of them might be Giorgio Armani, but can’t be sure.

One person you definitely do see is Bill Murray who strikes you as genuinely, tangibly famous (unlike the rabble of ES Magazine stalwarts you see at the main event.) He’s mooching around, looking at old paintings, keeping a low profile. For a second, you forget he’s cancelled to fuck.

You decide that if you had the money, the one thing you would buy from here is a pair of 14th-century Chinese dragon sculptures. Yeah, that’d be sick.

Another thing you enjoy at Masters is the antiquarian books booth – one of the few sellers to be fully-enclosed and air-conditioned. There are first edition Jules Vernes on display, and an atlas apparently used (and signed) by Christopher Columbus. Unlike almost everyone else, the booksellers have the good grace to actually put a price on the atlas: £1.2 million. You wonder what all the postcolonial artists at the main fair would think of it.

You head back to mainline Frieze. It’s way busier now. You try to look at the art again. You stop for a moment at Benedikte Bjerre’s helium penguins, which have been splashed all over media coverage of the event. Is it any good? Or is it some collectible, gimmicky work – akin to a KAWS or a Banksy? Apparently it’s about climate change.

At Thomas Dane, you come across a Paul Pfeffier video, which takes a brutal Deontay Wilder vs. Tyson Fury fight and digitally removes the latter. As Wilder’s body is battered and thrown about by this invisible opponent, it appears to you rather brilliant.

A severely-tailored, performatively busy woman with a phone to her ear nearly drags a canvas off the wall as she rushes past. Straight after, you hear someone say “I’m sorry, she’s a sweet girl… but she’s a fucking idiot” to a cackling accomplice.

Frieze strikes you as a terrible place to look at art, but a great place to look at people.

You bump into Dean Kissick and he introduces you to the real Hans Ulrich Obrist. The overlord of the London art scene asks you what you’re writing, and you mumble something about an “experiential dispatch of the circus of it all.” He’s heard that one before.

At this point you decide to write the piece in the second-person, choose-your-own-adventure style. A cheap literary gimmick, perhaps, but it seems the best way to conjure up the out-of-body energy of it all.

It’s loud here. Really loud. All that gossip and commerce and “uggghh”-ing starts to build to a disorientating crescendo. In this clinical white space, with its high ceilings and dead-ends, the noise reminds you of the deathly wails in a cattle market. You probably aren’t the first person to make that comparison.

Later that evening you head to an after party, the one run by LOEWE and Studio Voltaire. You haven’t been to one of these things in years, and they haven’t changed a bit; a lot of mingling, drinking, “oh my god what are you wearing?”, and not a lot of dancing.

Not only is there a free bar, there’s table service too. A heady combination. As the badly-salted margaritas keep coming, you start to feel like an American tourist at a Cancun all-inclusive – sedentary but shitfaced.

You meet someone who used to do something for Frieze and she whispers the real gossip in your ear. Apparently the booths cost tens of thousands of pounds to hire, but actually, a lot of the works on display have already been sold. It’s all about “showing face” – and Frieze doesn’t actually sell that much. Post-Brexit import tax has fucked a lot of things up, and the big American collectors are obsessed with buying at Paris because they love all the ceremony and the restaurants and that whole vibe. Plus Art Basel will always be Art Basel. But you know, you’ve got to do Frieze. Did you know it’s a better week for London taxis than even Christmas?

Still, nobody is dancing. So the DJ reaches for the big weapons. She drops Gasolina and then, the Macarena. A few Dazed 100 types move towards the floor, but nobody actually does the dance itself. This strikes you as something of a travesty.

Is that Azealia Banks?

No, it’s not.

Three middle aged men in white shirts and plaid trousers pile out the same toilet cubicle. “Oh, dude,” one of them teeters. None of the people who told you they would be here are here.

You stumble out of the bar and into the biting autumn night, not quite sure what to make of Frieze. It’s a trade fair, it’s a flea market, it’s a spectacle, and possibly, a scam. But hey, someone bought an Arshile Gorky for $8m USD.

In the cab home you think about an alternative universe where you have two 14th-century Chinese dragon sculptures in your living room, and wonder, “If I bought that one trendy painting, and then sold it up, and kept selling, would I ever get there?”