Still life....

Is there anything as fascinating as eavesdropping on listening to other people's conversations?

Doris took Mrs Doris and I out for a meal last night, to a restaurant which has just opened in Bruntsfield. Sadly, the food itself was pretty uninspiring, but the diners round about us weren't!

By the window, at a table for two, sat a very handsome young couple. I decided they were probably on their fourth or fifth date (they looked far too delighted with each other to have been together longer! ) and they kept leaning across to stroke the other's face, or whisper something private. (Frankly, they'd have been utterly nauseating if I hadn't been in such a good mood!)

Anyway, their romantic tryst was absolutely shattered by the arrival at the next table (only about a foot away) of two massive lads who had come for anything but a quiet evening. One of them had the loudest bray laugh I have ever heard. He was like a donkey whose foot had been caught in a gin trap...and it was relentless. (His dining companion was clearly the most amusing person on the planet.....) I felt so sorry for the date couple - they ate their main course at hypersonic speed, passed on pudding, and exited, stage left, with faces tripping them.

At the table next to ours were an older couple. He was dressed in a formal suit, with some sort of club tie, and she was head to toe in tweed, complete with a hat the shape of a sunken raspberry souffle. She wasn't happy. I know this because she kept telling him she wasn't. (That, and the fact that she had a face on her like a bulldog sooking a lemon.) She wanted to be in town, at a 'better class of eatery' (I hate that word....even if she hadn't been a major pain, I'd have disliked her, purely for crimes against vocabulary) and kept repeating that she'd been much more at ease 'when she was at the captain's table'!

(I was fascinated.....had she recently returned from a Caribbean cruise? Or was it the Gourock-Dunoon ferry? )

She hated her meal - the monkfish was dry, there wasn't enough bread, the wine list was inadequate, the potatoes were the wrong sort (!), the iced water wasn't cold enough, the napkins weren't linen.....on and on and on.....

Her husband didn't say a word all evening, until they got up to leave. After he'd helped her put her coat on (for God's sake George, hold it properly) he looked her in the face for the first time all night.

'Gloria,' he snapped, 'if I'd killed you when I first met you, I'd be out of jail by now...'