Desperately seeking rehab from overindulging in the social scene, I set off recently for Barbados, a darling pear-shaped island of catnap calm, fly-fishing fun and Sunday gospel and cricket.

I’m stationed – very happily I should add – far from the hip western part of the island, where the triple-hyphened toffs and broken-nosed football heavies like to mix and where Tiger Woods famously teed his way into matrimony. I’m on the east side, where the coastline zigs and zags, the scene sings with serenity and my own set-up involves a big Italian monastery-like rental villa. My mixed rum punch of housemates includes a U.S. Army man direct from Iraq, a seven-months-pregnant New Jersey woman who so doesn’t need a man, a water-phobic German who apparently irons his shorts, the requisite pair of Australians, a few Canadians and a bead maker from Florence… It resembles Three’s Company – plus 10.

Being a social columnist in Osama-like hiding, this week I’m not interested in going to parties per se. I mean, does Nobu Matsuhisa like to eat sushi on his days off? (He probably goes to KFC.) One day, though, the shorts ironer proposes we make a trip to the wild side for a party. It’s being hosted by some people he’s “met” via that la-di-­da Website, www.asmallworld.net, an invitation-only Web boîte designed, ostensibly, for jet-setters, Tatler subscribers and the likes of Naomi Campbell. Launched last year from the nation responsible for ABBA, the Sweden-based site is a kind of buddy system for the bold and the beautiful to exchange party 411 info. I imagine them asking each oth­er questions like “Who’s the maître d’ at Cipriani?” or “Who can I get to pooch sit my poodle in Saint Moritz?” or “Where’s the best possible place to go snog with Argentine polo players?”

Well, why not? I decide to embark on the group blind date. Maybe I’ll bump into Hugh Grant and his lady luvvy, Jemima Khan, who have been about the island of late. Or, at the very least, Minnie Driver, who grew up here and still comes to do the occasional goodwill hunt, or possibly Mick Jagger, one of the many boldface Brits who regularly stomp to Barbados and have turned it into a kind of Harrods with sand.

When we get to the party on the sand, though, there are only the two English hosts, Annabelle and Louise, three other guests and some sad-sack satay chicken. Annabelle is nice but has a lot of trouble hearing. Louise looks like the poor, poor, poor man’s version of Emma Thompson and announces – just as I’ve informed her that I’m a writer – that she doesn’t read and goes on to talk at length about the London Tube.

I have fun despite it all – how can you not when you’re on this idyllic island? – but at the same time this isn’t quite what I expected from the fancy-schmancy “small world” Website I’ve been hearing so much about. Does membership have its peculiarities? Is the world really so… small?

Or is it simply like most things we imbue with desire in modern culture – New York nightclubs, a pair of Ugg boots, the right car – in that it’s over before it has begun, collapsing inevitably under the pressure of its own fabled fabulosity? It’s a thought worth considering as I stand here on the ocean’s brink with Annabelle and Louise, watching the waves, big and sonic, crash around me.

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Shinan Govani is the Scene columnist for the National Post and frequently appears on television commenting on celebrities and the social whirl. Write him at sgovani@enroutemag.net.