Restaurants | 16 April 2005

I am taking my mother’s cousin Norma and her husband Harry out to lunch and I want them to have a good time, not just because I love Norma to bits but also because… nope, that’s it actually. She used to babysit us when we were little and would make us eat our supper backwards, saying if we didn’t finish our ice-cream there would be no main course, absolutely not, no way, and even though our bedtime was meant to be 8 p.m. we’d all still be up at midnight when she would shout: ‘All of you… time for… CAKE! And I mean IT!’ So I loved Norma then and I love her now. As for Harry, he seems very pleasant (only joking, Hazza!).

Anyway, it’s not that easy taking Norma out for lunch. First off, she is an observant Jew, so kosher, and secondly she has a horror of answering the telephone, as I do. We don’t properly understand where this horror comes from, why we have to leave the answer machine to pick up every call, but think it has something to do with the possibility of the call containing a nasty surprise that we might have to react to on the spot, which would be tiresome. I have a similar horror of answering the door when I’m not expecting anybody, but this is because I fear it might be the bailiffs, the VAT people or some born-again nut who wants to talk about how God sent his son, in which case I always want to say, well, if that’s the case, you’d think he’d offer to babysit for mine every now and then. I might add that I haven’t been a great fan of Jesus ever since secondary school where I was known as the Christ Killer, particularly by the RE teacher who would round on me in class and ask, ‘Why did you kill him, then?’ Dunno.