Table for More

I’ve been going through an insomniac phase, not the sort where you lie awake all night or manage only short fitful periods of rest, no this, in typical fashion is self-induced. I get into bed with my i-Pod and listen to Janice Long on Radio 2 until the wee hours. Of course on the nights were I go even later into the ’whoa! It’s time to get up’ hours, The Lish is particularly sparky making it impossible to steal more than a few extra minutes of sleep. I’ve been doing this all week and it was beginning to catch up with me manifesting with things like shoes in the fridge and plates in the bathroom (unless I have a poltergeist at home).


Anyway, last night at around 7pm I realised I was expected at dinner with friends. I was butt-arsed tired. I racked my brains to come up with a semi-realistic reason for not going but given I’d influenced the choice of restaurant and the fact that there is no excuse for self-inflicted handicaps – I dragged myself along managing somehow to be the first one to arrive.

In kamikaze fashion, I brazenly ordered a glass of Sangiovese red. Let there be dark. But then I realised that in all my life I have never been so engaged. The old me would not be sitting there with a glass of wine but at home with a glass of guilt and another bridge burnt. That perked me up a little. I substituted the wine for water…Jesus would not be happy. And then the girls arrived.

These are very new friends for me. They are mothers of The Lish’s friends at pre-school whom I met during the briefest of daily drop offs/pick ups which just goes to show how wonderful London people are. In 2 and a half years of drop offs/pick ups at daycare in Oakville, Ontario I didn’t make one single mum-chum. No judgement, just an observation. Anyway – this isn’t about that.

So a barrister, a child psychologist, a film producer and a slattern settled into what became one of the best nights in recent memory. I want to tell you the sort of things we talked about…but I fear you might blush. I can tell you that lesbianism was discussed and men of course were dissected with the reverence you would a frog in a biology class. It made a refreshing change from scrapbooking in The Tundra I can tell you.

The food was rather good too: I had the black taglionini with scallops in red pepper sauce.  Yumsters.

But best of all (in a way but not really), last night, I slept like a dead woman.