Making a Meal of it

I mentioned a story about a meal in the last post which doesn’t really belong on the blog as it has nothing to do with me being a father, but it’s my blog and my rules and I think you’ll probably appreciate it, and I really need to tell this story to get it off my chest.

It was the last night of the holiday in Northumberland and we had decided to go out for a meal to celebrate our anniversary.  We chose a place relatively near to the cottage basing our decision on an entry in the visitor’s book and some judicious Googling.  The visitor’s book having, amongst other things, mentioned something about asking at the bar when we went in if we wanted to eat in the restaurant, we ventured bravely out forewarned and forearmed and strode in to the pub ready to request our meal. 


The exterior of the pub seemed normal enough, and even when we went in there was nothing to make us suspicious, until we got around to asking about eating.  Those were clearly the magic words which sucked us out of our universe and into a parallel world where nothing was quite as we had ever experienced before.  Having asked, we were directed out of the bar, the waitress taking a different route whilst explaining she would meet us at the other door to the room we were about to enter.  We went through a door and into someone’s living room, complete with settee and television in the corner.  I’m pretty sure I imagined the dog curled up in front of the fire, but it wouldn’t have looked out of place.  This was not what we had been imagining, but we carried on through this room, meeting up with the waitress, who remained silent about our excursion through the looking glass, and led us into a corridor and through another door.

A door which led into a dining room, although by the end of the evening we would have come to know it affectionately as ‘The Land that Time Forgot.’  Another couple were sat in the opposite corner to which we were being ushered, but other than them we were alone.  With a promise of some menus the waitress left us to it.  We settled back to wait for our menus and talk about the fact that we had just left someone scratching his head and wondering why two people had just disturbed his night in.  We presumed that this would have been it for the strange experiences. We were wrong.

Time passes slowly in a parallel universe.  The couple who had been finishing off when we arrived left and we were still waiting.  There was a stillness in that room which was oppressive, and still we waited.  Then a waiter arrived, a sigh of relief was breathed and we took to looking at our menus.  Although that’s not strictly true, the waiter had no menus, just a CD of maudlin love songs which he popped into a CD player and pressed play.  And then he was off, leaving the music at an unfeasibly high level as though instead of it just being us there were 100 people whose voices he had to drown out.  Such was our surprise at this that we didn’t manage to mention our lack of menus, still believing deep down that the waitress would come, menus would appear and things would go back to normal.

Due to the escalating length of this tale we will pick it up tomorrow when you will get to find out the exciting denouement and answer the question, why has that man’s wife just run off with his wallet?