OH presented me with a cup of coffee, a home-made card and a fantastic bouquet of roses by the bed on Valentine's Day morning, and that really made my day. In return, I'd booked us in for a Valentine's dinner at a small Italian restaurant in town that we haven't been to in years. It's a tiny unobtrusive place and the food is always nice, even though the menu rarely changes, and the wine is personally chosen by the padrone -- let's call him Flavio. Flavio is a small round man in his early 60s and hilariously stereotypical. He loves to talk to his guests in between courses. He has outrageous opinions. He clearly loves and is proud of his daughters, both very accomplished in their chosen fields by the sounds of it, but complains loudly about how much they cost him. I'd have sympathised if he then hadn't told us just how cheaply he got his restaurant for during the property crash of the 90s. Once we'd finished our meal, he stayed at our table and largely ignored the other couple, and told us absolutely everything.
Maybe that was because, by way of a conversation opener, I had asked his opinion on the Pope's resignation earlier in the week, thinking that most Italians are Catholics of some description and would have something to say about it. He couldn't care less, he said, and then regaled us with a long and convoluted tale of his hometown, of disappearing gold donations, a Virgin Mary statue with a broken arm, and a priest who was still ghosting around the town at 2am in the morning. I couldn't quite make sense of it all, a bit like a psychedelic Pier Paolo Pasolini film, but that might have been the New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc.
I reflected on why we didn't go to eat at his more often. Probably because, somehow, even though I picked the £16.50 three-course menu including coffee, we still end up with what OH calls "an 80-bar evening". An 80-bar evening is a once-a-year thing for us, and there are quite a few good 80-bar establishments in our area that contend for our custom.
Then again, the homely atmosphere makes for unusual conversations. The restaurant is in the middle of a terrace that was clearly formerly a residential property with the front lounge turned into a dinky little 20-cover dining room. The back half is the kitchen, and to get to the loos, you squeeze past the washing machine and a duvet hanging over the radiator to dry. Flavio's wife, let's call her Sarah, is the unflappable cook ("I'm afraid we don't have horsemeat.") and both live in the tiny flat upstairs, together with the many musical instruments that their daughters had left behind.
When we arrived, we were the only ones there and it felt like being seated at someone's private dining table. About half an hour later, we were joined by a mother and her little girl, and to my delight, I picked up that they were German. I turned to OH, triumphantly: "MY people! On a Friday night, WE celebrate the start of the weekend PROPERLY by taking the family to an ITALIAN restaurant." The girl was amazingly well-behaved -- she was only four. I managed to resist the tribal urge to say something to them in my language for almost the entire meal, constantly thinking of that scene in Loriot's Oedipussi where the protagonist tries to strike up a conversation about fridges with fellow German diners in a posh Italian hotel restaurant. But OH, who knows quite a bit of German, beat me to it.
So we ended up chatting to the mother and daughter after all and discovered that they had only been in the country for six weeks and were visiting our area as tourists. OH was laughing his head off afterwards. I'm notoriously awkward with children and most children tend to give me a wide berth anyway, thinking, quite rightly, that I'm a child-eating witch. This little girl evidently didn't think so or didn't mind: she took a massive shine to me, of an intensity that only an excitable four-year-old with as yet few life disappointments can muster. She told me everything in the space of half an hour, happy to speak her language to someone other than her parents. When her Mum went to use the facilities, the little girl whispered to her if she could perhaps sit on my lap in the meantime. Her mother went: "Darling, no, you can't ask people that." but I, utterly charmed by that point, went "Of course she can!" So Mum went off to the loo reassured that her daughter was unlikely to now vandalise the restaurant in her absence and I, thinking it quite proper that anyone sitting on my lap deserves to at least know my name and I theirs, finally and formally introduced myself to Sophia, in both German and English: "Nice to meet you." Then she hopped on my lap and kept talking.
Mum came back, the two of them settled up, I got a final hug and they sailed out of the little restaurant and into the night and might well be found today at the Hunstanton Sea Life Centre watching the baby seals.
"Awwww," I said to OH, "They were lovely!" Then Flavio was back at our table, with a dusty bottle. He'd clearly felt neglected by us while we were conversing with the other Germans. "That's the Amarone I told you about. £30 a bottle. My wife, she brews her own wine. Rose-petal wine, I mean, that's not real wine!" -- "Ah!" OH interjected, sparked up by his favourite topic, "Yes, it is, and I can tell you how to make it..." And off they were.
At the end of our meal, we toddled off into town to visit our Turkish friend whose birthday it was, to congratulate him and drink a glass of raki to his health. He was thrilled we'd come in but was out of raki so it had to be sambuca instead. The joint wasn't exactly rocking -- "It's February," he said, "it's normal." -- so he had plenty of time to talk to us, about how he helps his partner's son with his homework, about technological progress ("I remember riding on donkeys in my village in Turkey, and here I am, listening to music via the internet!"). A little while after, a guy came in for a meal, a bodybuilder on his own, who I felt needed our friend's friendly listening ear more than his kebabs: "...you make a lot of sacrifices for bodybuilding, your girlfriend leaves, friends drop away, even my family are having arguments with me, I had an argument with my Dad the other day..." and off he went on one, bless him. I looked at him -- he was maybe in his late twenties, early thirties. I hope he realises that dumb-bells won't cook his meals, cuddle him, visit him in hospital, and drive him to the doctor's when his health fails.
Woody Allen made films of little episodes of the sort we encountered today, the small coincidences, the tiny but memorable connections made between strangers. At around half past eleven, OH and I extricated ourselves and wandered off home, full of food and impressions.
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