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It was our third wedding anniversary today - an incredible achievement, principally for my wife for managing to be with me for this long without (as far as I know) contemplating divorce. Those three years have whizzed by. It’s slightly unbelievable to realise that by this time next year (presuming we’re still together) we will have been married for about half of our relationship.
And in three years of marriage we have accrued two cats and one baby, so mathematics tells me that if we can make it to 30 years we will have 20 cats and 10 babies. You can’t argue with statistics.
We celebrated with a day together as a family and then a night out as a couple. Having a baby certainly makes you appreciate going to a restaurant a lot more. We went to a posh place where we’d been for Valentine’s Day a couple of years ago. On that occasion the place had been packed. I assumed it wouldn’t be so busy tonight, but when we arrived (a little bit early for our booking at 7.30pm) I was surprised that we were the only customers. I thought that more people might arrive at 8 or 8.30, but we were to have an almost entirely private dining experience for the whole evening. In some ways that was rather cool, we had our own chef and waiting staff, but in another it made me slightly uneasy. Were the people working there annoyed that we had booked a table and forced them all to work? Was this restaurant about to go bust and only we didn’t know that it was rubbish or had recently poisoned all its customers? Had they had to get in all the food on the menu especially for us and all the things we didn’t choose were going to end up in the bin? I was a bit surprised that the restaurant hadn’t got in touch with us before the meal and offered £100 not to come. This couldn’t be cost effective for them. I couldn’t recall ever having been in a restaurant (certainly a fancy one) in which only me and my companion had been the only diners.
We were dressed up smart and had a couple of cocktails and a nice bottle of wine and had a really relaxing and enjoyable time. We didn’t even talk about Phoebe all that much (her Nanna was looking after her and we knew she was in good hands).
As we got to the end of our main course some other diners finally arrived, which was a relief. And they turned out to be quite good value as an unfolding drama. I suspected that they had been employed by the restaurant as a theatrical dining experience. They were clearly rather drunk when they arrived and dressed in expensive casual clothes and checking their smart phones. They had to be truly well-off to treat this fine dining establishment with such casual indifference. This was not a special, once-a-year experience for them. This was like a trip to Pizza Express. They were clearly a couple, which they made more clear by snogging a bit after they sat down. I am sure they were a bit disappointed that there weren’t more diners there to be shocked by their inappropriate behaviour. They were a bit loud and a bit kissy, but I found them fascinating and wondered if they had been devised by Mike Leigh. At one point they got out of their chairs to go and look at a big work of art on the wall at the end of the building. They stood much too close to it and took photos saying to each other how amazing it was. And then they returned to their seats and started watching Youtube videos on their iPhones with the volume up. The Maitre D thought this was a step too far and rapidly approached and shushed them with his hands. They turned down the volume but carried on watching. We both found it amusing, though I wondered what they might do next. It broke our illusion of private dining, but they were so prickish as human beings that it didn’t seem to matter. And as if to prove that this was an upmarket version of our of those Fawlty Towers dining experiences, the couple had a (what they thought was) hushed conversation, though even though I wasn’t trying to listen the phrase “You should have a pregnancy test” came through very clearly. This was better than Eastenders! “Did you hear that?” I whispered to my wife. “Yes,” she replied, “Do you think they heard you saying, “Did you hear that?””
“I don’t know,” I whispered, “But they might have heard you saying “Do you think they heard you saying, “Did you hear that?"
If they did hear any of it, they didn’t say anything about it. They quickly ate their expensive food and were out of the restaurant in 30 minutes from start to finish, leaving me wondering about their relationships, their lives and the fate of the child that might be gestating inside one of them. I saw the Maitre D and the chef having a discussion as I went to the loo. The chef seemed upset about something. Such hidden drama everywhere. I wondered if they’d been ghosts and we were stuck in a West London "The Shining".
We didn’t want to waste our one baby-free night and stayed drinking after dinner for as long as seemed fair, but gave them a good tip for their trouble and then we got criminally overcharged by a taxi driver for the short journey home - this is the kind of tax on the rich that I think is acceptable, even if we were only pretending to be part of the culture for one evening and the rude, entitled and maybe pregnant couple deserved the rich and stupid tax more than we did.
