AFTER 112 years, millions of pints and more turns than a corkscrew factory, York's INL Club is facing a foreshortened future. It has too few members, and too few of them are using it.

The committee met this week to hear the worst. The Speculation Street premises is accumulating debts but lacking income. Use it or lose it is the president's cry.

But will people take heed? Society is less social these days.

Once, Britain was a nation of joiners. People loved to join in. They would enlist in the darts team, the union, the war. Major employers would maintain staff morale by subsidising socialising: trips to the coast, am dram, sports teams.

But the workers weren't the only ones at it. Club class transcended social class. Our nation's rulers and playboys would invite each other to "meet me at my club", a phrase to conjure up a Wodehousian world of old buffers snoozing in leather chairs.

And the most exclusive society of all is still stuttering along. Club HQ: the Palace of Westminster.

Some people are nostalgic for a world where everyone knew their place: workers in the working men's club; ex-forces down the Legion; management in the golf club; gents in the St James Club; and women just in the club.

Most are glad that the days have gone when society was as rule-ridden as the most tyrannical club handbook.

But have we gone too far the other way? I have never been a joiner. Few of my contemporaries are joiners. The HMS Membership has long since set sail while we're all at home watching Midsomer Murders.

The only clubbing my generation was ever keen on was nightclubbing. And that's about as sociable an activity as gastro-enteritis.

Unless we have a hobby, like ferret weaving or drain spotting, we have lost the knack of going out and meeting new people. We are members of the Anti-Social Alliance, but none of us can be bothered to organise the annual general meeting.

Evidence of this trend is everywhere. Membership is falling, not just at working men's clubs, but at trades unions, charities, voluntary organisations.

Employers offer health care insurance or cheap gym membership to keep their workforce well and at their desks rather than involve themselves in staff's after-hours activities. Thus, Nestl relinquished responsibility for York's Joseph Rowntree Theatre.

In a recent Property Press, three bed and breakfasts on the same York street were up for sale; more and more holidaymakers prefer the social isolation of a Travelodge to a family-run B&B where interaction with the landlady might be required. Similarly, the rise of the anonymous pub chain has come at the expense of the friendly local.

(And Parliament is plainly struggling to attract members of sufficient calibre.)

What is sad is that, deep down, people still want to meet new people. But they have abandoned the structures, such as the INL Club, that let them. They may instead spend hours behind closed curtains tapping out messages on a computer keyboard to a fellow Internet user hundreds of miles away, while the club up the street is almost empty.

If people realised exactly what was available on their doorstep they just might make the effort to go. There must be a demand for what the INL Club offers - cheap drinks, snooker tables etc - in a city full of loud, crass, ludicrously over-priced bars. But the club committee should realise that many people have an out-dated view of what working men's clubs offer, and how easy it is to join.

A promotional campaign, involving all York's affiliated clubs, could bring in some new blood.