Day 10: A really dirty curry

Friday 9 October 2009

I am not alone. You might be, but I am not. Various people are joining me for mini versions of the month off, and Rioja and Jim claim to be joining me for the entire 30 days. Rioja’s thunderous disposition was a dead giveaway that a) she was aiming for more than a week; and b) she was probably only a few days in. I capitulated to her raging inner drunk and whizzed her into the Bangalore Brasserie for the big fat curry she was hankering after. “And they might do Cobra Zero…” she pondered wistfully as we were hastened tablewards.

They didn’t do Cobra Zero, the fuckers. Something new I am discovering is the horrendous discrimation faced by teetotalers. It is no wonder we are a nation of heavy drinkers given the alternatives. For slightly more than the price of a Becks (aka, a golden pintful of joy) you can get a non-alcoholic cocktail. Rioja had a tropical fruit punch (essentially a £4.50 smoothie). I selected a tropical pine sparkle. For £4.50, and without a shot of rum, I at least expected glacé cherries, a frosted rim and an umbrella. What did I get? A glass of Lilt. Utter, utter bastardry. It’s like how some pubs will kindly rustle you up a lime & soda for a minimal price – like 30p – but then other places charge you £2 for something that only costs 0.0003p to produce in terms of both materials and manpower. That’s quite a markup.

So we drank our smoothie and Lilt angrily, glaring at other diners and bitterly remarking to one another: “Look – they’re having two pints of lager”. Rioja was on Day Four, and not handling it especially well. Back at home, Jim had been racking his tap-water-addled brains for non-alcoholic activities to a backdrop of  Rioja barking: “There’s no point if we can’t have a drink.” This amuses me since one of the things Jim suggested was badminton, and I have visions of an Rioja lurching around a court with a shuttlecock in one hand and a bottle of Merlot in the other. It will be a dragsome month for them both if they cannot find something else…

Not that I came up with the best plan to display the cheering possibilities of non-drinking to their best advantage. I’ve been to Bangalore Express before on a Sunday lunchtime and found it to be clean, spacious and wholesome. Yet tonight, my fish jalfrezi was a besmeared atrocity. The fish was grey/white and had a jelly-like centre. Combined with a curiously rectangular shape, I started to believe I was eating a curried sanitary towel... one of the ones with a lock-away core to be more precise. The curry sauce drizzled over the top looked alarmingly like someone in the kitchen had squits.

I sent it back. That’s the first dish I’ve sent back since I nearly shattered my front teeth on a creme bruléen in Brighton in 2000. They replaced it with a dish of carrot batons luxuriating in the same brown, runny sauce and, as a special extra, they included a long, black hair. Our poppadoms were snatched away before we’d eaten, them and they whisked away my dreg of £4.50 Lilt (a mouthful – so at least 40 pence worth). I swear it was not so bad last time. Or perhaps last time was my judgement clouded by Cobra? Hmmm. 

It wasn’t quite eight when we left the ‘restaurant’. We swirled and dithered on the pavement. Rioja proposed a pub, but after an hour in a restaurant of inedible food, I did not want to be in a pub of undrinkable drink. So what else is there for two women in their prime to do on a Friday night in the greatest capital city on Earth? Go and sit outside Costa on the concourse of Waterloo station naturally.

As we sat huddled in our coats, spying on the two-toed, poorly pigeons and hoping the tramp who’d sat next to us wasn’t going to accost us with a crazed rant, we noticed a strange thing. The table we were sitting at had slats painted onto it. Really. Someone had taken the trouble to produce a laminated frieze for each tabletop consisting of fake wooden slats, and fake painted ground beneath. We felt that this was a details we might have missed out on had we been drunk, yet remain unsure as to how much this knowledge actually  enriched our evening. A better observation was that if you walk up the escalator and across the concourse at Waterloo station sober, everyone walks into you. If you do it drunk, you weave with the graceful fluidity of an Olympic-level synchronised swimmer. Either that or other people take one look at your mad, shambling, oaf-like staggerings and go “Oh crap – let’s avoid them!” I think we had head-on collision with at least 12 fellow pedestrians en route to our lattes.

And so we sat there, 8.30pm on a Friday night, gazing at the Tie Rack opposite and living the dream. Rioja related a seminal story of drunkenness from her recent holiday to Nice, which ended with the immortal line “…and when I came back Jim had got another Leffe and I said ‘No – we have to go. I can’t see doors.” Not being able to see doors is an excellent reason to stop drinking for a bit. Clearly not only will you start seeing doors again, but also false table slats will reveal themselves to you, so definitely well worth the effort.

By 8.45 (“What do you mean it’s quarter to nine? I thought it was half eleven!”) we were ready for home. As already observed, sobriety really does slow time down. It’s all very well and good getting this extra time, but, well, I still haven’t worked out what to do with it yet.  Answers below please: 8.45pm, Waterloo station. The night is yet young but you can’t drink. What would you do?

Units dodged: Nine. Even if we’d been drinking we’d have been turfed out of the vile and very express-like Bangalore Express within the hour, so only enough time to drink one Cobra anyway. A very definite three pints of lager in either The Windmill or The Walrus would have followed under normal circumstances… if only to swill away that fishy aftertaste.

The Unit Dodger