i made her cry

When we were in Madeira we booked a table at a nice restuarant on Saturday night. This is the fourth year that Madeira has celebrated the Atlantic Festival. I'm not sure what it's all about but they have a massive, and I mean massive, spectacular, fireworks display every Saturday night during June. Last year the display was sponsored by Australia. This year it was Japan's turn. We decided to book at table at the same place we went to last year. I don't know if you remember but it was the place that found Mrs McMuffin's purse after she lost it. Last year the food was great and we had a lovely evening. This year the food was absolutely the worst I have had anywhere. We sat for over an hour before our starters arrived. I had mussels. They served up those massive foreign green lip things which they probably bought frozen from the local supermarket, and then they overcooked them until they were like tastless leather. Ms Gypsy Tart had limpets, which had been fresh at some point because they were still gritty. These they managed to turn into leather too. I can't remember what the others had, only that it was all crap. We waited another hour for our main course to arrive. To add insult to injury we watched people arrive after us eating their meals. We managed to drink three bottles of wine with hardly any food, and we were all getting a little bit drunk. Me, I was just getting angrier and angrier. I finally couldn't stand it anymore, and I called the waitress over to complain. She was deeply apologetic, telling me that the food would be with us soon. I asked her what she was going to do about this mess. She told me that I would have some lovely food. We went through this a couple of times. Then she told me that the poor service hurt her because we were very special to her. I gave up at this point and gave the universal sign for hard cash, at which point she started to cry. She said that we would have lovely food and then rushed off towards the kitchen.

During all of this Mrs McMuffin was having a paroxysm beside me. She is very Welsh and English at times like this, which can be terrible combination. She hates to complain, and she hates me to make a fuss about anything in public. So, we hissed at each other through clenched teeth for a few minutes. You could have cut the atmosphere around our table with a knife. I could see that other people were turning to watch us. Fortunately I was a little bit too drunk to give a toss. The rest of our party just sat in silence, slowing getting drunker and drunker, even Ms Ginger Cake, who hardly drinks at all.

When our main meal arrived I picked at it for a second, but I just couldn't bear the idea of paying for that meal, so I made my excuses and left leaving the rest of them to decide what they wanted to do. I like to think that I did this with a considerable degree of grace.

I watched the lovely fireworks sitting at a nearby cafe drinking coffee, all by myself. A lovely end to the evening. Turned out later that eveyone agreed with me about the meal, and they all wanted to leave, but couldn't quite bring themselves to cause a fuss. At times like this it's hard to believe that in the not too distant past most of the world was frightened of the British. Little did all those countries that we took over, just because we could, realise that all they had to do was put us in a position where we had to make a fuss or complain about something.