Restaurants | 9 June 2007

This is about a mother who takes her son out for dinner for his 15th birthday. Normally the son would not agree to go out for dinner with his mother. Normally the son treats his mother as something of an embarrassment, as well as a middle-aged nag, drag and bore. The mother is perplexed by this. The mother knows that while her parents were middle-aged nags, drags and bores when she was a teenager, she is not, no way. The mother may even say, ‘How can you think of me as middle-aged nag, drag and bore when, just last week, for example, I stayed up one night until nearly half-past nine?’ She may or may not then add, ‘And it’s not true that I live in John Lewis. Sometimes I don’t go for a whole morning!’ The boy should wake up and smell the coffee, which has to be better than Lynx, the masculine fragrance so delightful it makes not just the mother gag, but also the father and the cat.

So, anyway, the mother gives the son his annual birthday treat, which is a shop in town, and involves ricocheting between Topman and Niketown and Carnaby Street and the Quicksilver shop while the mother trails behind but is tolerated for this thing she has which would be called style and pizzazz if it weren’t instead called a ‘credit card’. This year, the search is on for ‘skinny jeans’, which the mother thinks look rather gay — are you? I won’t mind. We can watch The Wizard of Oz together — as well as hideously uncomfortable. So skin-tight, from top to bottom, like sausage casings. The mother could not be doing with skinny jeans, as she likes air to circulate. The mother prefers ‘Fatty Jeans’ for herself, although this doesn’t mean she isn’t hip.