Thirteen

I have mentioned before - but just in case you've forgotten - that our friends Mike and Sarah run a fab food stall on Chorley Market (which is a small wonder in itself). This evening, they were running a pop-up restaurant in St Laurence’s Church, and so we went along, not just out of loyalty, to be honest, but because their food is always so good. 

We were sat on table thirteen and the number thirteen always reminds me of Hong Kong, where my family lived for three and a half years between February 1975 and September 1978. I was eight - nearly nine - when we arrived there, so I was already aware that there was no tooth fairy and, to be honest, the only reason that I wasn't 100% sure about the non-existence of Father Christmas was that none of the grown-ups around me seemed willing to let him go.

But it was pretty clear to me, as an eight year old, that there were a load of things that you were told as a child that simply weren't true, even though all of your favourite trusted adults maintained they were. The fact that these people all loved me unconditionally at least made me feel that that the deceit was somehow to my benefit, that somehow I was being indulged and not simply duped. (We'll not bring religion into this post.)

However, in the hotel where we lived for our first six weeks in Hong Kong, there was no thirteenth floor. I mean, there was, it's just that it was labelled the fourteenth floor, just as the fifteenth was called the fourteenth. And, in fact, I'd noted previously that there was no row thirteen in the aeroplanes we'd travelled in. 

My folks explained to me about people being superstitious and how they wouldn't sit in a chair in the thirteenth row or stay I'm a room on the thirteenth floor. It was the first time that I realised that even if grown-ups knowingly made up stories for their kids, there were as obvious fictions that they couldn't resist themselves.  

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Reading: "Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant" by Anne Tyler.