Have six years really gone by since I worried about becoming forty? Soon I am going to have to start worrying about turning 50. But not yet. That's ages away. Just cos six years passed in the blink of an eye, that doesn't mean four years will go by even quicker.
I had a brilliant day of fun with my fabulous wife. We had lunch in a little bistro in town, which was only slightly spoiled by two women talking very loudly at a table nearby. Their boring conversation and raucous laughter grated and occasionally actually made me jump. They were drinking wine, but had done very well if they were pissed by now. I think they were just loud and had no care for anyone else. And I hate to generalise, but as so often in these situations they were posh and loud. As if being born into a family with money meant they didn't have to think about other people's lives or be concerned that what they were saying was too dull to warrant such volume. I can't think of a time when this has happened when the person talking loudly is not only ex-public school, but also happens to mention the fact that they are ex-public school in their conversation. Given that generally I have only heard a tiny snatch of their conversation that must mean that they mention having gone to public school every thirty minutes or so. I know private schooling builds confidence, but how do these people get through life without being killed? My wife wanted to ask them to quieten down. But I wonder if they are similar to the hard guy in the pub who wants to be challenged so that he can punch you. Are they willing you to ask them to be quiet so they can act affronted and say they're just having a good time?
It makes it hard to have your own conversation with someone else's chat blasting in your ears. The low point for me was probably their ten minute theoretical discussion about what they would do if they found a certain amount of money in the street. This was not, I don't believe, based on them having been actually really placed in this quandary. The really loud one was saying that if she found a small amount of money she would keep it, and if she found a really huge amount of money she would also keep it, assuming that it was probably the proceeds of something dodgy, but for anything between fifty and a hundred thousand pounds she would hand it in. Her reasoning was that anything between £51 and £99,999 would be a sum of money that would mean a lot to the person who lost it, but any less and it wouldn't be worth the effort and any more and it was dodgy anyway. I wanted to chip in and challenge her. Because, for example, surely 50,000 pounds would be unlikely to have slipped out of someone's pocket and surely her range should be a bit smaller. But I was also pretty confident that she'd keep whatever money she found. Would she really care about the person who lost it? She didn't care about wrecking people's 46th birthdays. And anyway - why was she spending 10 minutes going over and over this pretty unlikely turn of events. When had she ever found more than £20 in the street? Was she going around discovering abandoned drug deals and bank robberies on a daily basis.
I was relieved to get out of there and we went on a long walk around the British Museum and then the unbelievably quiet and leafy backstreets of Bloomsbury. I couldn't believe we were in the heart of London, much of it was like being in a tiny village. I was excited to see the actor who plays Samwell Tarly in Game of Thrones crossing the road in front of us. I nudged my wife. "It's the bloke from Game of Thrones!" I mouthed, "Act cool so he doesn't think we're idiots."
He didn't notice us.
We passed through a park that was once a graveyard which included the grave of the grand-daughter of Oliver Cromwell and happened to chance across the house that Charles Dickens had lived in in Doughty Street
which is now a museum so we had a look around. Oh yeah, I know how to party on my birthday. I touched the desk that Dickens wrote "Great Expectations" on. Even though it said not to touch it. One day, I presume, people will be walking round my house, looking at my staplers and stuff and getting to see the actual snooker board that I do Me1 Vs Me2 snooker on.
We had a really excellent dinner in a posho restaurant, that was so posh, it's the kind of place that clearly tells loud posh people to shut up, because we didn't hear any of their conversations. But I'd had a couple of drinks by then, so maybe I was the one talking too loudly. It's been known.
