How the other half lives…
I have mentioned in this column before that my beloved (and possibly misguided) wife has had a major birthday this month. So major, in fact, that your correspondent has been saving up for over a year to splash out on the present which involved a night in a hotel east of Oxford and a meal cooked by someone called Raymond.
To say that this sort of thing is well beyond any pay grade that I have ever had goes without saying and to be fair it is a little overwhelming when your bathroom is the size of the entire ground floor of your house. That said this was what you pay for ( and boy do you pay!) so by the time we approached dinner we were in the right frame of mind for the seven-course tasting menu. On receiving the menu I rapidly dispensed with the idea of the accompanying wine flight of 5 different wines ( 125ml each) for £999.00 and settled instead for the cheapest bottle of red on the list ( £59). We were ushered into the dining room and the evening and dishes rolled out before us. It was fabulous, in every way worth every penny until across the room a couple began to have a domestic. FFS. A domestic in a 2-star Michelin restaurant – everyone there was celebrating some very special occasion and these two, who plainly inhabited the world wherein this was just a normal night, start effing and jeffing and waving cutlery about. The brilliant staff were at a loss. This patently didn’t happen often.
After the third fuck in a sentence of six words I asked the Maitre D if I should go and have a word. This was met with a full management conference as three waiters tried to persuade the offending couple to ‘dine in the comfort of their room’ and several others sought to reassure me that my possible intervention would not be required. Immediately afterwards one of the offending party left the dining room never to return whilst the other looked moodily into several glasses of wine. They didn’t ruin the evening, far from it, but they did remind me, again, that there are some fucking wankers out there whose selfishness knows no bounds.
I saw them the following morning, one of them tripped up whilst going up some steps. It made me laugh. Am I a bad man?
This week I’ve been listening to some groovy stuff, old and new. Robb Kunkel serves up 70’s weirdness and Malojian carries that feeling on with his brilliant offering. And then, of course, there is this week’s Sounds from beyond the Shed featuring a lot of Wilco related material as well as Brown Horse, Purple Mountains, Stevie Ray Latham and Small Town Jones, Ryley Walker, Flypaper, Dan Raza and much more. As ever take what you want or need.
