I was out for Sunday lunch in a local pub. It was about 1 o clock but it wasn't very busy, which maybe should have been a sign, though possibly the credit crunch means everyone else is at home eating dry bread and coal dust. Personally, so far, the credit crunch seems like an excellent thing: petrol is back down to under a pound a litre, I am paying less interest on my mortgage, there are hardly any queues at the M&S Foodhall and loads of wankers from the City have lost their jobs because of a situation created by their own collective greed. But apparently it's a bad thing.
The pub smelled faintly of something that I thought might be human faeces, but my companion thought it was like cabbages. Either way probably not ideal to have a hard to identify smell in your pub. And the fact that it was faint almost made it worse than if it was clearly identifiable. It meant that we were harder to smell it to try and work out what it was. Had it been more pungent we could have just left. Though to be honest I was so tired and hungry that the waitress would really have had to shit on a plate in front of us to get me to leave. In fact, even then I'd probably have stayed. Because such an extraordinary event would have made for an excellent Warming up. I am not sexually excited by waitresses defecating on crockery and anyone who says I am is lying.
We ordered our food and settled down to read the Sunday papers.
When our food arrived the waitress put down my salmon and my friend's pork loin and then seemed to apologise for something and quickly disappeared. She returned with some napkins and I realised that she had accidentally tipped some of the gravy from my friend's plate down beside the table. It had gone all over my gym bag, which unfortunately had been slightly open at the top, so some of it had gone inside. To have gravy poured into your bag at a restaurant is special attention to detail, that even Basil Fawlty might have baulked at.
But anyone can make a mistake and luckily it hadn't gone anywhere near my laptop and she was very apologetic. Being English and forgiving by nature I made absolutely no fuss about it at all and in fact happily took the napkins myself to try and clean up the mess. In hindsight I might have expected her to at least take the bag away and try and clean off the gravy with a cloth, but not wanting to make a fuss I kind of shooed her away and tried to do the job myself. It's one thing being reasonable and forgiving, but I lived up to my national stereotype by almost taking the blame myself for having a bag filled with gravy.
Perhaps some people might have thought that pouring gravy into your bag might be a good excuse not to leave much of a tip, but even though the room smelled and the food had been expensive and didn't really taste of anything and that my gravy covered bag would probably now make me the Pied Piper of dogs for the next week or so, I didn't want to be a dick. In fact it was one of those places where the tip is actually added to the bill in any case. Which I don't really like either, but as you can probably ascertain I wasn't going to complain.
So I paid up, though the total came to something like £34.32 and usually I would have just left £35, but allowed myself a small victory by actually taking the 68 pence change. That would show her. I think she would think twice before pouring gravy into someone's bag again. Yes I felt quite the big man as I walked out the door into the non-stinking fresh air of the outside world.
