And yeah, the Estuarine Whine. Other diners. They really should behave better, I'm in grabbing distance of sharp, pointy things. We're in the church of the anti-cow, an echoing litany of orders for the steak, when the waitress finally admits defeat. There is no more steak.
Now the Estuarine Whine can't not have heard this, but she's biding her time, so of course, when the waitress arrives she orders the steak-that's-no-more.
'But I can't eat anything else on the menu,' she says in a voice that sounds like someone trying to saw through old tin cans. I'll be honest, she didn't look like a woman who'd had trouble finding things to eat. I reckon she'd go for anything she didn't have to chase. She'd probably eat the menu if it wasn't written on a blackboard. 'I CAN'T' grinds the human jigsaw of despair. Now, the waitress was charming and effective and far better at the entire waitering business than I ever was, and I don't think I'll be doing her a disservice by saying that conjuring up a cow was probably outside of her skill set. Even Jesus topped out with fish and the ever-sawing Estuarine Whine insists on telling us that she 'doesn't eat fish' either. Jesus, who I think we'll agree pretty much had a monopoly on patience before he started to hand it out to saints, would have roundhoused her.
Now the sensible thing for the waitress to do at this point would have been to use the woman's head as a bongo but she tries to reasonable and explain that it's 9pm on a Saturday night and there's no more steak and little likelihood of obtaining any because there's no such thing as the Meat Santa and even if there was, he probably doesn't come at 9pm on a Saturday night in June. The woman keeps grinding away because she's one of those sullen bullies who knows that the poor girl has no choice but to listen as she starts to work her way through what sounds like an entire rusted scrapyard of complaint.
This is the point where I start to play the game of What Would Jess Do? Jess, if you don't know her, is south London's only vampire librarian, the occasional inadvertent saviour of Croydon and, more incidentally, the world. She's a proper vampire and only eats people. She's got dining standards though. I decided she'd pull off the woman's head and use it in an impromptu puppet theatre. Jess, sadly wasn't there because she's doing whatever vampire librarians do on Saturday nights, but my wife was and she's from Southend, and as such even Jess doesn't argue with her.
Anyway, I don't even think King Arthur is going to pull that fork out of the woman's forehead. It's in deep.
White Range Rover driver, natch. It's the one with a dent in the driver's side door.
