Taking Mum for lunch

I’m currently treating my mum to lunch once a fortnight. I admit that there are better places I could take her but you can’t beat a Marks and Spencer prawn sandwich, cheese tasters, tiny Jaffa cakes and jelly babies.

The other diners have kept us entertained and we have shared some eye rolling over things we have seen and heard.

In the waiting room (I know most restaurants don’t have waiting rooms but this is quite a special place) the maitre d’ came over to a woman, who had been waiting to be seated for 45minutes.
“I am sorry but they’ve written down your reservation wrong in the diary. It should be tomorrow. You’ll have to come back tomorrow. You can’t eat today. It’s a day too early.”
The woman looked shocked and thought about getting cross but decided she didn’t have the energy. She looked at her companion and said, “Can you do tomorrow?”
Her friend was overly cheerful, “Of course,” she bubbled, “These things can’t be helped.”
Mum and I both thought they could be helped and rolled our eyes at each other.
The Maitre d’ was very apologetic and waffled on about how busy they were. Everyone wants a seat before Christmas.

When we finally took our seats, we looked at the other guests. Most people sat in pairs but there were a couple of solitary diners. Some, who were visiting for the first time were excitable, giggling about their choice of sandwich or offering the waiters jelly babies. Others who had been many times before knew all the staff by name, often sitting alone and eschewing all food, prfering to concentrate on the free cocktails that the people in the comfy chair got.

This is a long leisurely lunch. Five and a half hours is a long time to take over a prawn sandwich and so being a work and a book-a-holic I had both with me. My work caused the man in the next chair to give me his life story. Apparently, sorting scores of Christmas carols is just like the time he wrote something about radiation in refrigeration units that had a print run of one thousand. He had made an error where he put a ‘the’ instead of an ‘and’, which was only spotted by a proof reader after the copies had been made.He had the choice to do it all again or change each one by hand. I bet you can’t guess which one he chose? Apparently, that one small word changed the entire meaning of the piece. I must admit I was confused as to what was similar to sorting my Rudolph score from Santa’s Coming to Town but he was insistent that it was exactly the same. He had never made the best of his education and music was a total mystery to him. The waiter agreed and told of how he had been told to mime by a teacher while the other boys were to sing louder. I said that music wasn’t as complicated as it looks and all it takes is practice. The waiter thought that teachers were more patient these days but the man quoted the Daily Mail on the fecklessness  of teachers and how so many children were leaving school without the education of an eleven year old. I tried to protest that most children work very hard, some will always find things difficult and that standards have changed but he countered in time honoured tradition, “I bet they can’t even use a slide rule!”

I tried to share an eye roll but Mum just said, “I wasn’t listening. It sounded boring.”

She was having much more fun watching the waiter attach a bottle of cocktail juice to someone’s jumper.

It was so much fun, we decided to do it again in two weeks time.
“A little earlier next time,” she suggested, “If we go an hour earlier, we might not have to go home in the dark.” Although I think that might be a little optimistic.