We had a very splendid evening.
As you know, I spent yesterday afternoon on the taxi rank.
I was waiting for Mark to finish installing rural broadband so that we could go out and eat somebody else’s cooking instead of a taxi picnic.
Taxi picnics are very nice but lack ambiance and alcohol.
By early evening I had not earned very much money when Mark called to say that there was no more rural broadband needed anywhere, and he was coming home.
He came to join me on the taxi rank, where we had a cup of tea and considered our options.
We are in the astonishingly fortunate position of living in a tourist village. Hence there are a dozen excellent restaurants which are all less than two minutes’ walk from our house.
There are a lot more just down the hill in Bowness, but it is a mile away. We would probably want a taxi to get home and we thought that this was an expensively reckless extravagance, to say nothing of being rather risky. It was entirely likely that all of the taxis would have gone home or worse, would see us standing in the rain and think it was the most amusing thing in the world just to drive past, waving.
Hence we were limited to Windermere, and we sat in the taxi for a while, contemplating the options.
It was Tuesday night, so the Italian restaurant was closed, and so was the little steak restaurant. We did not want Spanish, Indian or Chinese, and neither of us wished to go and sample Ginge’s cooking at the restaurant which has, until recently, been employing Oliver.
They might not be washing up properly now that he is gone.
We did not want to eat at either of the restaurants that insist you order on their app first, not least because I still do not have a telephone that will do anything like that, and I did not want to eat at the one which is mostly an hotel, with a side order of pub.
We considered the fish restaurant, because we like fish, but I raised the usual objection about the crabs and lobsters.
I do not ever want to eat some poor creature whose terrible fate has been to be boiled alive, most especially one which has considerably more facility to feel pain than we do.
They even have sensors in their claws.
Such a thing is, to my thinking, utterly and completely wicked.
Not only will I not eat it, but I do not even want to eat somewhere where it is going on in the next room.
If you are going to eat lobsters, and I can see that people want to, because they are delicious, then they should be stunned with a special electrical lobster stunner, and then frozen. This is not exactly a magnificent death, but at least it is a painless improvement on being boiled.
You can’t even kill a lobster by bashing it on the head or stabbing it behind its eyes, because their brains go all the way down their backs, so don’t believe anybody who tells you that you can.
Henry VIII made being boiled alive the punishment for poisoners, because he was worried about being poisoned, and it was the nastiest deterrent he could think of. It is wickedly wicked, and should be illegal, which it is in Switzerland, hurrah for the Swiss.
Mark feels the same as I do, although in a less stroppy sort of manner, and offered to call the fish restaurant to find out the extent of their compassionate nature.
He came back shaking his head, and explained that they seemed to think that we would be impressed by their belief that Fresh Is Best, and we would not be eating there for the foreseeable future, if indeed ever.
That was the fish restaurant out. If anybody is ever in Windermere they are called Hooked and they do not kill their lobsters the way the RSPCA says that they should. Just so you know.
Francine’s restaurant was full, which left the bistro.
We like the bistro anyway.
We were about to go home and change, when some people came tootling up to the taxi rank, and some of them wanted to go to Langdale and some to Grasmere, so took the first and Mark took the others.
These were long journeys, and they made us late for dinner, but between the two, they paid for it.
We were very pleased with ourselves when we reconvened at home some time later.
It was almost eight o’ clock, but it did not matter. We showered, hastily, and dressed ourselves in our going-out clothes.
It is so long since we have gone out that they had been shoved to the back of the loft and we had to search for them.
Fortunately they still fitted us.
In the end it turned out to be a completely joyous novelty.
We have not been out together, just the two of us, on a Night Out, for over two years, because taking Oliver back to school does not count.
Of course we have done things occasionally. We have been out with the children once or twice, but we have not gone anywhere together, by ourselves, just because it is a nice thing to do and we felt like it.
When we did it last night we remembered what a nice thing to do it actually is.
There was so much ambiance you could practically feel it slinking down the stairs and lighting a Sobranie Cocktail cigarette. We had actual cocktails, in tall glasses with foliage attached. We ate huge platefuls of pasta and tastefully decorated pudding. Then we had a brandy.
We would have had more brandy, and quite possibly more pudding, but the restaurant staff were looking at their watches and yawning, so we trailed reluctantly home.
This did not take long, because of just being on the other side of the road.
We emptied the dogs and collapsed into bed. It was early, because restaurants finish sooner than taxi drivers do, and we slept for nine whole hours, and woke up feeling blissfully contented and refreshed.
We must do it again.
