Making a Meal of it (Part II)

The continuation of last night's tale of a meal like no other.

The wait continued for many minutes, I am unsure exactly how long and I don’t think the time we waited would convert back to the real world, but it was a lengthy period.  After quite some time footsteps were heard and our hopes were raised, at least there was still life and we weren’t the only two people left on the Public House equivalent of the Marie Celeste.  The person didn’t come in, but I was ready to waylay them and request menus.  After waiting for so long we weren’t going to give up so easily.
Meals were ordered and more drinks were obtained.    And considering the time difference between us and the outside world, the food arrived very promptly.  Which was handy because we would be eating it for a month. 

Yes, there really are that many chips on the plate

You may not be able to tell from the photo but that is a diagonal stripe of chips running from corner to corner on what was a massive plate, and the chips are piled about a foot high.  This is my wife’s plate, mine is just the same, except I had steak not lasagne.  The meal itself was great and I would certainly not want to complain about too much food but it did go to make the evening just that little bit more surreal.

The rest of the meal passed off without a hitch and was very good.  We were not joined by another single person for the entire time that we were there, which made the evening feel like we were just eating at home in someone else’s dining room, listening to someone else’s music and using someone else’s cutlery.  Having finished, all that was left was for us to wait for the bill, pay it, and leave.  This wasn’t going to be easy either.  The wait for the bill rivalled the wait for the menus in terms of length.  Fields of wheat have grown and been harvested in less time than we waited.  Both of us are pretty timid and didn’t want to go snooping around for someone, but in the end the very real danger of being locked in for the night forced us to abandon our posts and try to find someone.  This proved harder than you might expect.  Waiters and waitresses were thin on the ground, and it took some minutes before we found one and asked for the bill, only to be told that we should have just gone to the bar to pay as soon as we were finished.  We found our way back to the lounge and emerged, blinking into what we thought would be the real world.  However, there was just one final moment of exquisite madness to overcome. 

Coming to the bar we told them where we had been (Narnia) and presented them with the bill we had received in the Nether world.  Half expecting them to stare in bewilderment and claim that they had no such dining room and that Annette didn’t work for them.  Sadly this wasn’t the case and I handed over my card to pay.  A short moment later it was being handed back to me and I was discovering that they had no facility to take the card and that we would have to pay with cash.  Cash was not forthcoming from either mine or my wife’s wallets and so, as I couldn’t drive, my wife had to go with my card to the cashpoint, some distance away to retrieve the cash with which to pay.  All the while I was left to sit in the deserted bar as security, though I’m not sure they would have got enough from my sale to cover the price of the chips we ate.  I thought time passed slowly while I was waiting for a menu.  It turned out that was nothing compared to the wait for my wife.  Minutes turned into hours, hours turned into days, my stubble turned into a beard that rivalled Santa’s.  And then my wife returned with the card, the food was paid for and we were able to make our way back into our own dimension.

It’s been good, after almost two years to have got that out, thanks for coming with me as I relived one of the strangest nights of my life; normal baby-and-father related service will be resumed on Wednesday.