There was a fight in the nightclub last night.
It wasn’t really a fight. One young man, full of drugs and angry about some affront to his dignity, about some imagined earlier insult, walked up to another, coldly and without discussion, and smashed a glass in his face.
The other was hurt, quite badly so, although his eyes survived. We watched him being helped into the ambulance, dazed and drenched in blood.
Obviously the police came as well, and the two young men went their very separate ways.
My customers had been beside them at the time, and had seen it all. The young man responsible was their friend and colleague. They were frightened and angry, full of drugs themselves, and utterly uncomprehending.
I took them back to the hotel where they all worked, and listened to them talking.
It would be all right, they thought, their friend would be on breakfast shift in the morning, serving fried eggs and orange juice to guests just as usual.
He would apologise, they guessed, and the other young man would probably not press charges. The police would not want to be bothered. They would understand and it would all be over by breakfast.
Sometimes it is hard not to interfere.
I said that I thought it very unlikely indeed that their friend would be back in time for breakfast, no matter how sorry he was or what his victim said.
He might be easily be charged with attempted murder.
The girl in the back agreed that the police had said this.
I said that they needed to find somebody to cover his shift in the morning, and write down every single thing that they remembered, because they had all been witnesses and might be called to make statements.
Not a single one of them could believe that either of these two courses of action might be necessary.
It was beyond the understanding of all of them that the thing that had just occurred, the event they had all witnessed, had been, for the people involved, a cataclysm from which there was no turning back.
One young man would be scarred for ever. Another young man would almost certainly be jailed, his life over, or at the very least turned down such a different road that it would become unrecognisable. Two families would be turned upside down, two mothers brought to tears of grief. A few moments of anger, a flash of drugged-up rage, and their world had irrevocably changed.
None of my customers could understand this, in their intoxicated and drugged state, and I went home and wondered how any young people make it through these years intact.
I am so glad I am grown up, and the hot intensity of youth is passed for me.
I spent my day baking cakes, because I am fifty three and my passions have ebbed to a pleasant manageability. It is lovely to be made happy by cakes that have risen well.
We are going away tomorrow, and so today was very satisfyingly occupied in preparation. I baked Easter Egg cakes, to replace the thirty that Mark and Oliver seem to have eaten already, and I made fudge.
Now that have got Hard To Spell Disease I have been preoccupied by the challenge of how one might manufacture healthy fudge, and you will be pleased to hear that I have cracked it.
You add brown sugar and good-for-you pretend butter to a couple of tins of condensed milk, but instead of cream you add yoghurt. The thick creamy sort is best, because then you don’t notice the difference. Then, just to make certain of its health benefits, you chuck in a few ounces of raspberries, which as everybody knows, are packed with nourishing Vitamin C.
You boil it just like normal fudge, until the surface looks like a nasty outbreak of acne, and you have a good trace on the spoon.
I confess that I melted a couple of bars of chocolate in at this point, so mine might not have been quite as good for you as it could have been otherwise, but I expect it is every bit as healthy as all of the Fruity Fitness bars that you get in supermarkets, the sort in cream coloured foil lined packets with green writing and which cost £2.75 for about half an ounce.
Perhaps I should have put some oats in it as well, that would have sorted it out nicely.
We are going to the theatre tomorrow, and we are going to take it with us, because it won’t have rustly packaging and it will be good for us.
I am looking forward to this very much.
Have a picture of some Easter buns. I didn’t take one of the fudge because brown chocolate and raspberry fudge tastes very nice but just looks a bit like dollops of poo.
