My wig faux pas

I listed for Catriona the reasons why I did not want to go out to dinner that evening at the posh new restaurant in the village.

The Hammers were on telly that evening and we had a fire lit. Plus, I was only just back from the hospital at Marseille where another half pint of turps was tipped into the tube in my neck, which would easily do for my supper. Also I wanted to lie down.

Also that day the Omicron variant, in its speed and spread across France, was doing a fair impression of Rommel. Why should I with my double-asterisked low white blood cell count take an unnecessary risk of catching the highly infectious version of Covid by eating poncy food in a small dining room with a lot of strangers? Yes, I was vaccinated, and everyone would have to show their Covid pass before going inside the restaurant, but that didn’t mean nobody would have it or that I couldn’t catch it. Not according to the Mail Online.

Catriona’s annihilating counter-argument was that Michael, who had booked a table for three, would be disappointed. So I put on my coat and dropped two sachets of anti-diarrhoea powder in the poacher’s pocket.

There wasn’t a top-drawer eatery in this touristy village until an entrepreneur bought the foreign correspondent’s house last summer and turned it into a restaurant. Michael, who is the strictest and most knowledgable judge of food and service imaginable, deems the place excellent. I’ve been before. Normally I am paralysed by posh restaurants, but seated at one of the widely spaced tables in the garden last September I felt unalarmed to an almost alarming degree.