The Rest Of The Weekend

Well. Having assisted Russ with the moving duties, I spent the rest of the weekend at Mum's. Well that's not true. I was so mind numbingly bored (to the point where my brain melted and flowed out of my ears) that I found as many excuses to go out as possible. A quick visit to Vic's mum's (no, there's nothing odd about visiting your ex's mum) and an evening over at Stut's were in order to provide some relief.

Although there was nothing to report from my ex-mother-in-law's (actually, technically not an ex-M.I.L. yet...) the visit to Stut and Dan's was somewhat more interesting.

We popped out to a small pretentious french cafe in Westbourne. That's all it was, a cafe. But it seemed to have a a very high opinion of itself. The waiter had a preposterous accent and appeared to be hard of hearing. My saussicons a la something or other turned out to be sausage and mash, which was fine by me, but the waiter didn't seem to appreciate me asking for Sausage and Mash, or even Sausage a la Mash. Eventually, stubbornly refusing to even attempt to pronounce the unpronouncable, I had to point to the menu. It would seem that I'm not allowed to speak English in my own country. We then had a discussion around our drinks order.

"You want wine?" asked the waiter, frenchly.
"No, thank you" we said.
"The house red is very good," he informed us.
"That's nice. Just a coke, please."
"It is imported from the owner's vinyard in France."
"Very good. Coke, please."
"Just coke?"
"Yes."
"No wine?"
"No."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes. Coke. We're very thirsty, now."
"I shall leave you the wine list in case you change your mind."
"We don't need it." Dan leaned conspiratorially to me, "We don't like the wine here. I can get better in the Offie, later."

Unsurprisingly, the waiter went off in a huff at this point. The service was amazingly slow. We waited about 30 minutes for our meal and it wasn't exactly busy in there. After waiting almost 10 minutes for mayonnaise, Dan eventually had to go to the bar and organise it himself. Meanwhile, the waiter continued to flaunt his pythonesque french accent around the cafe.

After the meal, which was perfectly tasty, we had terrible trouble attracting the attention of the waiter for the bill. Eventually, once again, we had to approach the bar and request it, somewhat curtly. A few minutes later, it was dumped unceremoniously on the table. Having added exactly the right amount of cash - we didn't feel that the accents were quite convincing enough to warrant a tip - the waiter collected our money with a decidedly un-french 'Cheers' and we went on our way.