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It was Catie's birthday and we went to the poshest restaurant in Hertfordshire- Chicken Cottage- to celebrate.
Not really, though apparently on the first of her birthdays that we shared that's where I told her we were going (before going to the roof top restaurant at the National Gallery). We went to the Ivy in St Albans, where you can get old school food from your childhood that costs more than the entire weekly shop would have done back then. We had the prestigious 5.30pm booking slot, so we could get back in time to put the kids to bed and have some cake with them.
We don't have enough dates and it's been a very stressful month, so it was great to relax and spend some time together and try to connect as partners rather than parents and unpackers. Catie had a very nice selection of delicious looking booze but I was happy that I got my non-alcoholic beers in frosted glasses. It also meant I could drive us home. It's nearly four years since my last drink and I noted that I had only drunk for 11 months in the last six years, which doesn't seem right, but I guess I made up for it with those 11 months of mainly lock-down boozing in 2020.
I lamented how much I have failed to remember of the time since the kids were born, in spite of my sobriety. I think the exhaustion of being a parent is a lot of it and I am glad I have the blog to remind me of some of it, but my years of sobriety are a blur. Maybe I was so used to the blur of alcohol that the non-blur of sobriety now appears to be blurred. Maybe I am just old and fucked.
My memory and my penis have been my best qualities and both are shadows of their former selves. I've given up booze and I am going to have to stop eating sugar. What's left to me? The love of my family? Pah! At least time is passing ridiculously quickly.
Other diners arrived at more reasonable times including a couple comprising a very dowdy man who was, I think a few years older than me, with a very attractive, heavily made up, flamboyantly dressed young woman. Now I don't like to make snap judgements about strangers, but I still do it and it makes me feel awful and God knows that I was on shaky ground as a 57 year old man dining with a younger and disproportionately attractive woman, BUT we're just been watching Alma's Not Normal (and if you haven't seen it yet, then do give it a watch - it's excellent) and I thought that there was a chance that this young lady might be an escort. I might be wrong, she might have been the man's grand-daughter, in which case the scenario is much worse as she was really flirting with her grandad.
No shade on anyone involved - quite the opposite. Much respect to the woman for this empowering move and even more respect to the older man for still having some juice in the tank and having the confidence to not care about being silently judged by hypocritical pricks like me.
I would find the whole situation mortally embarrassing from start to finish and would hate to do any of the necessary parts of this transaction in public (or indeed in private), but again as Catie pointed out Alma shows that flaunting the situation and throwing yourself into it is part of the fun. Well done to this dowdy looking fella for being such a world-class kinkmaster.
It just made me think about how I would get on if I had to go into being an escort (I imagine not very well in terms of getting any bookings, but there's someone out there for everyone). If I'd made the decision to do it then I don't think the sex part would be the bit that I found tricky. I'd lay back (or more likely forwards) and think of the cash. What I would object to is having to sit with some boring old man and pretend you found his jokes funny. Now maybe this guy was a regular Louis CK, bad example, Bill Cosby, no wait, Russell Brand..... are there any moral comedians? Maybe he was unexpectedly the funniest man in the world - but let me just say my wife was at a table with the funniest man in the world and she barely cracked a smile - but I doubt it. But his date was enthralled by him, which is obviously part of the contract, but that's the bit that I wouldn't be able to do. I'd be tapping my watch and saying, "Come on, big guy, eat up and let's get bumming. Your jokes are hack and your stories boring. You must know that even if I did laugh I would be pretending, but then I suppose you're not too bothered about all that, given the transaction we're involved in."
We all have our line and mine is pretending to find lame jokes amusing. For money. I do it all the time for free.
And I know that if my wife laughs at anything I say then it's a genuine laugh that I have earned. Admittedly it rarely happens after 17 years together, as she has now heard all three of my jokes, but that just makes it mean all the more when it happens.
