The Restaurant

The restaurant wasn’t busy. It’s never busy in the summer because - to be honest – it’s on its last legs and even the tiniest air conditioning unit is an expense that the company can’t justify which was a shame. Due to the fact that the restaurant resides in the roof of an old Methodist church, the triangular ceiling traps the searing heat turning the entire place in to a giant sauna. Prospective customers can just about muster up the energy to struggle up the stairs only to be hit by an intense wall of scolding air upon entering. If they do brave the gauntlet, they will normally find me propped up against the ice machine in the bar area with the knot of my tie hanging desperately around my midsection, sweating profusely and staring with a listless expression at the customer shaped mirages twenty feet away. Nine times out of ten I just hear a faint, disapproving mutter and they will be gone, leaving me free to concentrate on important tasks such as catching wasps and putting them in the dish washer, learning how to spin the pepper grinder in one hand and most importantly, staying alive. It has to be the best job I have ever had despite the humidity, It’s the kind of job I don’t actually mind going to every day. So good in fact, that when I’m on my days off sitting at home watching Bargain Hunt and spending all my hard earned cash on E-Bay buying taxidermy piranhas, I quite wish I was actually at work. This concept is completely new to me. Until I started as a waiter two years ago I was used to having two or three shifts a week and would be literally counting down the minutes before I had to go back to whichever personal hell it was that was slowly erasing my sole at the time. I spent a long time thinking that it was because I was work shy dole scum, but on retrospect I really did have some fearsome jobs gracing my C.V. My parents sent me too work at the tender of age of twelve, scrubbing pots and plates in the sailing club cafeteria. We as a family were pretty well off, and I didn’t really need the money but I can now see that they did it to teach me some kind of important life lesson. The lesson it taught me is that when you get fired after two weeks, don’t pretend you still have a job and spend the next few weeks. riding your bike around the block a couple of streets away because you will be spotted, identified and subsequently humiliated. As a student though, I had all the shit jobs too end all shit jobs. Whilst living in New Cross- London’s answer to The Bronx- I worked at a bar called the New Cross Tavern, it had recently been completely revamped from being a dark, sleazy dwelling for hells angels into the urban, hip hop capital of England. Being a long haired, hippy, white, student. This whole scene was just about as far from ideal as is conceivably possible, but the rent needed paying and this was as good a job as any in the destitute wasteland I had chosen to call home. The whole thing basically ends with me crouching behind a bar being showered in Jack Daniels and glass trying to survive a bar brawl consisting of guns, knives and people getting their heads split open with glass ash trays. As if this whole scenario wasn’t nightmarish enough the whole terrifying ordeal was sound-tracked by the musical phenomenon that is gangster rap. It may be circumstantial evidence but I have never been more convinced that rap music is an evil, evil entity that should be banned before it can make the entirety of Britain’s youth talk as though they have been pummelled in the mouth with a lump hammer. Needless to say, once I had given my statement to police - for the third consecutive week - and the bouncer was having his torso stitched back together in the back of an ambulance on his way to the Royal London Hospital I went home and never returned.

Working in my Pizza restaurant is wonderful though, and I can’t think of one shift when I thought I was going to be killed in a gangland massacre. I love my colleagues, my boss lets me get away with murder, he is much more like a friend than an authoritarian figure, and in these long baking summers I basically get paid to serve a couple of pensioners a couple of pizzas and a couple of glasses of house white wine which gives me time to power my way through a couple of novels, a couple of crosswords and a couple of crates of beer. It is unfortunately, only a matter of time before the whole organisation crumbles under the weight of its own unpopularity. And though this will be initially devastating for me, it will hopefully encourage me to do something with myself and not have to be burdened with the guilt of looking back on my death bed as an old man and realise I spent my life delivering garlic bread to the tables of Kentish aristocrats. There is a lot of interesting things to say about pizza and pizza restaurants, hopefully half a books worth, otherwise there isn’t really much point in me writing any of this at all. For instance did you that in the sixth century B.C. at the height of the Persian Empire, it is said that the soldiers of Darius the Great (521 – 486 B.C), accustomed to lengthy marches, baked a kind of flat bread upon their shields and then covered it with cheese and dates? And did you know that in 1948, the first commercial pizza-pie mix,”Roman Pizza Mix,” was produced in Worcester, Massachusetts by Frank A. Fiorello? And did you know that people who put ketchup on their pizza are retarded and need to be hung, drawn and quartered?

Most people, at some point in their life, will find themselves working in a restaurant, pub or bar. I think – like national service - it should be made mandatory to spend a year as a tool of the catering industry. You learn so much about your fellow humans when you are given the job of serving them. You learn about tolerance, you learn about manners, you learn communication skills and above all you learn just how rude you have to be to your waiter until you are blessed with an unhealthy portion of mop-bucket water glazed over the surface of your pizza. You also learn that it is stultifyingly annoying when large tables order jugs of tap water and don’t drink it, and when teenage girls come in and only eat caeser salads, and when people laugh after agreeing to browse the dessert menu as if they are somehow being really naughty,

‘Would you like to see the dessert menu?’

‘Oh go on then we’ll have a look Haahahhahaha’ they always answer.

‘HAHAHAHAHHA THAT’S REALLY FUCKING FUNNY!!!’ I reply whilst driving my corkscrew into the customer’s eye.

It’s annoying when people stroll into the restaurant as if they own the place and sit in the only reserved table after ignoring my doorway greeting, and when parents don’t make their horrible children put the lids back on the felt tip pens, and when German people don’t want lettuce, and when little Jessica wants a peach on her pizza instead of cheese, and when blind people come to the restaurant. I know that’s a terrible thing to say, but when you’re desperately trying to deal with the problems associated with blind people; menus, bills and bathrooms a part of you wishes you could suddenly become blind so that you could go home and claim a disability benefit from the government and stay at home instead of having to deal with these relentless problems. One girl, Gemma, visits the restaurant regularly. She claims to be blind. She carries the stick and too all intense and purposes looks blind, but she can’t half scoot around the restaurant with minimal effort. Gemma is very loud and self confident and makes it hard for you to feel sorry for her at all. I suppose when you’re born blind you just sort of get on with it and can’t understand what all the fuss is about this thing called vision. She is a lovely girl and is constantly telling me how mad she is and apologising for being loopy. Normally when people proclaim their own insanity they are pathetic individuals who need to go out and get some friends, but in Gemmas case I think she might very well have hit the nail on the head. She will never stop talking at me - Presumably she has no idea that I have fifteen tables waiting for me to serve them – and will goofily tell me tedious anecdotes about her life. They usually end for some reason with somebody getting a glass of water tipped over their head. I have no idea why this slapstick notion attracts her so much, but I fear one day - if she doesn’t shut up - I’m going to tip a beverage over her head as well. Gemma also has the ability to view the most innocent comments in the world as innuendo, barking – in her semi autistic fashion, ‘OH, that sounds a bit rude doesn’t it?’ in response to a question like; ‘would you like some ketchup with that?’ or, ‘Is everything alright with your meal?’ It really is a particular kind of sexual frustration that most people will never relate too. Gemma is just one of those people who are so harmless that it difficult to find her truly irritating, but I do wish she’d go away and never come back.

Some customers on the other hand leave you with no choice but to apply yourself to the restaurant stereotype of doing terrible things to people’s food. It was a busy Friday night, the restaurant was teaming with customers and I was running around as if somebody had poured the contents of a termite mound into the croch of my pants. I had a permanently pained expression painted on to my face because every time I would go to open a bottle of wine or take a tables order, there would be more people waiting at the door to be seated. It’s in this crucial moment between about 8:00 and 8:30 that everything has to run like clockwork or you can loose the night. Food starts to go cold, customers start to get forgotten and subsequently heads start to roll. I darted over to the couple on table 20 - in the furthest corner of the restaurant – with the bottle of Montepulciano they had ordered.

‘Would you like to try the wine?’ I said.

The husband, a wretched looking 40 year old businessman type replied.

‘No just pour it’ whilst his pretty – painfully retarded- wife just sat that in silence grinning inanely at her husband, a man who looked to me like the kind of person who had been in his penthouse apartment in Canary Wharf all week sleeping with his 22 year old secretary and selling dodgy insurance policies to senior citizens. I hated him already. 30 seconds later after I had gone to the other side of the restaurant, I looked over to see him clicking his fingers at me as if I was a peregrine falcon, trained to fly over and perch on his forearm at any given command.

‘Everything OK?’ I said’

‘No this wines horrible, I want a different one’ he said starring at his wine glass as if it was full the brim with human excrement.

‘Well I did ask if you wanted to try it’ I replied patronisingly.

‘Bring me a bottle of house white’ he muttered, his stupid wife’s gaze still transfixed on her husband as if he were some kind of saint as appose to an utter twat.

I returned with an ice cold bottle of Soave.

‘Would you like to try the wine?’ I said, this time with a sigh of lassitude.

‘No just pour it’ He said as if he were some kind of happy go lucky, easy to please, laid back sort of customer.

I poured two more glasses and edged away tentatively towards table 4 who had now been waiting for about half an hour for me to take their order, and had resorted to eating the lily in the centre of the table.

As I had feared, Captain Intolerable on table 20 was snapping his fingers and I was fairly confident that he wasn’t going to give me a tip for recommending a damn fine bottle of grog. Instead of course he perceived with his plight and once again found fault.

‘What’s wrong with all your wines here? This ones revolting as well…and warm’ he said.

‘Are you sure you actually like wine’ I replied sharply.

‘Oh… just get us two diet cokes for fucks sake’ he snapped. Luckily for both me and the coroner he and his mentally unstable spouse had got up and left whilst I had been beavering away in the kitchen with a glass of diet coke and bottle of industrial strength bleach.

This truly is a job that can drive you to whole new levels of mental turmoil, and it’s not difficult to see why waiters have a reputation for thinking they are better than anyone else, they probably are.













It was summer 2005 and everybody was coming back to Tunbridge Wells after being at university for three years. I agreed to go out for a drink with Tom Page and Alex Dagger, a couple of school friends who I had barely kept I touch with for the entire duration of our higher education period. Page and I had met when we were about 2 years old, and had been at all the same institutions throughout our lives up until leaving school, and we were perhaps more like cousins than friends, keeping in touch almost out of habit than because we necessarily liked one another. Dagger (the Geordie) had joined our secondary school when we were about thirteen when his father’s career uprooted him from his friends in Newcastle and deposited him in a harsh new world where he would become the butt of every joke for the next five years, much to the relief – I would imagine – of all the geeks and weirdoes. Anyway, we managed to keep in contact throughout university in the form of me phoning him when pissed up after departing a bar at 3:00 in the morning and conducting a one way conversation for which I would usually win the National Gibberish Awards, until my phone credit ran out.

We greeted each other, bought a beer and sat down in the roadside beer garden under the uncomfortable ferocity of the outdoor heaters. We talked about university grades, relationships, which hillbillies in our year had already got married, old times and plans for the future which allowed Dagger to tell us about his plans to fly over to Thailand and walk around Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam for a few months. He had inherited somewhere in the region of £8000 pounds from a dead relative and was in the process of spending it on an Asian adventure. His plan was to ride down the Vietnamese coast on the roof of a train, to idly float down the Mekong River in the inflated inner tube of a tractor and to wander around the ancient ruins of Angkor Wat. It sounded truly romantic and awesome. I was hanging on his every word wishing that I too could be jetting off to the other side of the world on a backpacking exploit.

I couldn’t though. I had very little money left of my student loan and me and two of my closest school friends had been planning on moving down to live in the west country to start a surf board company since we were at school. Sven was to build the boards, I was in charge of artwork and design and Aaron was planning to do something constructive instead, something that might actually further his life. We had been talking about getting our own place in Falmouth or Newquay since we were about seventeen, and now five years later it was still on the cards. But here I was listening to Dagger talking and I realised that this was what I wanted to do, No! Needed to do. I’d been wanting to immerse myself in the clichéd, student travel, finding yourself bollocks for years, and years and here I was about to retire to a cottage by the sea whilst Alex Dagger – the clean cut boy who used to only wear designer labels as a rule – was going over to the Orient to adopt a beard and a compendium of dreadlocks. I sat in silence for a few minutes, whilst Dagger and Page chatted, with the logistics of my decisions running through my head. Dagger stated how he was ‘dead exited’ but was nervous about the solo element of his exploit.

‘You should come with me’ he said in a in a way that suggested that though he was serious, he didn’t for a minute expect that I was ever going to say yes.

‘I’m actually thinking I might’ I replied, concerned that I was even considering it due to the minimal amount of time I would have to find the funds and the fact that Sven and Aaron would actually never speak to me again if I bailed out now after all this time, just weeks before we were due to go. We had even gone three ways on a boat from E-Bay so we could go fishing off the coast of St Ives on a nice spring evening. We really were calling it a day before we had even lived. So I told Dagger that I’d give it some serious thought and the conversation moved onto to more pressing matters like, who had the biggest tits at school and who consumed the most alcohol at college.

I went home, and after lying in bed for perhaps five or six minutes - mulling over in my mind the logistics of this unforeseen excursion- I picked up my phone and informed Dagger that I would be joining him.



The next day I found out I that I needed, booked and received my Hepatitis A and Typhoid Jabs, I informed my friends during our poker evening that I would not be retiring with them after all, at least not for another fifty or sixty years, and the day after that I went up to Covent garden to book, pay for and collect my aeroplane ticket and travel insurance much to the surprise of Dagger, who’s entire preparation thus far solely included the purchasing of the lonely planets guide to South East Asia. He did though –very thoughtfully – e mail me an itinerary of our schedule, an A4 sized map of Asia featuring at least nine or ten pixels and a rather sweet packing checklist telling me how many pairs of pants to take, which brand of sandals I should acquire, and a list of modern technology including i-pods, digital cameras and portable playstations that I was unlikely to be able to afford this side of the millennium.

And so it came to pass that I had no money. I had exactly eight weeks to find £1000, which I thought was a reasonable budget for about three months in one of the cheapest places in the world. I was also fairly confident that as soon as I went anywhere near a travel shop I’d be stupid enough to be suckered into buying things like a self inflating bicycle watch, a battery operated anti mosquito flame thrower or a vale of sherpas who could carry all my stuff from bar to bar when we arrived in Bangkok. It was a good thing then that I had a job which didn’t make me want to kill myself, because for the next few weeks, it was just going to be and the customer.

I went into work and had a look at the rota. After picking my jaw up off the floor, I realised it was probably a good thing that I was working twelve hour shifts for fourteen days in a row. I get paid slightly less than a ten year old girl in a sweat shop