Guest...

The very delightful Healy Sequoia from The WhinoRhino Preservation Society
(Belfast Office)

sent me a charming little story of dining out in Belfast on the back of last weeks Botherer bit.

Charming little city really......

I am still not recovered from last night. I am sick to my stomach and horrified by the whole thing. And I hardly even had a drink! Let me tell you the tale if I can with out reliving the trauma too much…

It started out so well. Colleen and I went out to celebrate because we agreed an offer on our house. I wanted to go to this cute little restaurant, Darcy’s, which I had noticed walking past Bradbury place just a few blocks from us. So we dressed up and went over about 8pm hoping to get a table. What luck, one table for two left in this quaint, busy restaurant. Now to appreciate the story you need to know that this place is packed. And the tables are about 2 inches away from each other.

We are the second to last table in the row closest to the kitchen, and the last table is occupied by a middle aged couple who politely scootched over to let me in to sit on the long bench seat that ran along the wall. I am now sitting next to the middle aged woman and colleen is in a chair opposite me next to the man. On the other side of us is a young couple with a lot of fake tan and faker bling.

We sit down, order some wine and some appetisers and are chatting gleefully over our house sale and of course dissing the crack-whores that we kicked out of our house. The older couple to my left start making small talk with us and seem quite friendly and normal, if a bit irritating.

But then our food comes so we think, ok now we’ll just go back to our own meals and small talk is over. Well NO. It would seem that these people have gone from semi-over friendly and buzzed to drunk and obnoxious. Marie, as the woman was named, would not let me alone to eat and kept asking me a million questions while of course telling me her life story about how her first husband was mean to her and she was better off with out him but she has no friends yadda yadda. Colleen was having to contend with Willie who took his teeth out and put them in his pocket to eat.

Eeek.

We didn't want to be rude to them because that would ruin our meal as much or more than they were already, so we were polite and answered their questions and smiled a lot of forced smiles. Well our main course came and I did my best to make it clear that our conversation was over now, but there was no where to go – no where to run to!

The place was so packed we couldn't even move an inch or two away. And at this point Marie is practically on top of me. She is even leaning across our table to pick a fight with the over- tanned people to our right! Willie, perhaps having seen this happen before, and had who must have had some sense left, decided they better leave before things got any worse and said he would go to the bathroom and then they were going. Well, as soon as he got up, Marie went absolutely insane. She kept hitting my arm every time I went to take a bite of my food to get my attention and ask me really rather rude questions.

I was mouthing “HELP” to Colleen.

Then Marie decided to actually help herself to my food. This woman I've never seen before in my life grabbed one of my chips, swirled it around in the sauce on my chicken and ate it. Then she said “give us a kiss” and tried to kiss me on the mouth! I was turning away and trying to push her off me and so she ended up licking my face.

Disgusting!

All of this is happening so fast at this point – I’d only had maybe 2 bites of my dinner. Colleen jumped up from her chair like she was gonna deck this woman, luckily she didn't actually hit her, but she threatened to! The man came back and colleen told him he better get her out of the restaurant this instant, which he did. Coll then told the waiter we were leaving because of what had happened and they had better watch the sort of clientele they let in the place. They didn't even try to stop us, but Coll was so riled up by the incident she insisted on leaving our number for the manager (who was not there) to call us if he had a problem. I must admit, I was quite shaken by the whole thing.

Really, I know it will be a funny story one day but right now I kinda want to puke. Luckily I didn't eat anything. Ironically when we sat down I was worried that the man on the other side of us, a tangoed bling-y guy, would be annoying cause he was talking really loud and being a show off to impress his date. There’s more details to this story that I am rapidly struggling to forget like Willie’s teeth going in and out of his gob and Marie’s insistent queries about what lesbians do in bed!