Aunty Who?

Moving from Brighton has been easier than I anticipated all in all. Of course, I miss the people horribly, but the rubbish weather this summer has softened the blow as I haven’t had to endure endless tales of amazing beach parties, BBQ’s, watching the sun rise over the sea after heady nights of fun etc. I still have a little internal tanty when I hear of fun nights out, but as long as I hear about the gossip, via my Corns hotline, mostly I’m appeased.

One of the biggest pangs for me has been realising that I wont be around as much to see one of my bestest friend Sarah’s little boy grow up so this weekend, I visited Brighton for a night out with Katie and Sarah and spent a day with the Williams’ on Saturday reminding Jack who I was.

Friday night I arrived at Katie’s to find that they had already guzzled a bottle of wine. I got offered the leftovers and then got made to play catch up with some vile house white at the local pub ‘The Railway’. By the time we left there, we were sufficiently tanked up and we headed into town and found ourselves a spot in Yo Sushi. I have to say, of all the foods to order when you’re drunk, Japanese isn’t the easiest. As a result we mostly took to grabbing whatever whizzed by that took our fancy. Cold dumplings, prawn tempura. In ten minutes we’d munched on around 6 plates of food, and hadn’t even started getting our hot dishes yet. An hour later things started getting really messy. We decided to start putting our used dishes back on the conveyor complete with origami napkins covered in soy sauce, ginger etc to create the effect of a ‘unique new dish’. This continued until we got into a mess on our table and given the absence of waiters I decided to get rid of our dirty plates on the conveyor belt stacked up high and teetering like a house of cards.

This, it seemed, was the final straw. Like a scene out of ‘Enemy of the State’ the head waiter swooped on our table and informed us that we’d been ‘watched on CCTV all night’ and that he thought we should ‘pay and leave right away’. Of course we realised we’d been naughty and no doubt incredibly irritating, but for goodness sake we were hammered. We had no intention of leaving without paying and could see clearly that the dishes we were placing in the belt were being taken promptly off and put in ‘the noisy rude ladies pile’.

And that’s when it all went wrong. The manager told us that if we’d tried to get away without paying it would have had a direct effect on our waiter’s salary. We said we’d never intended to leave without paying in full. He told us we were ‘a disgrace’ and he would ‘never be seen dead out with such a group of old trollopes’ (I think he also said we were ‘over made up’ but it’s all a blur). In a matter of minutes it had gone from a ticking off to a personal slanging match and for a period of time we were dumbfounded. It wasn’t long until Sarah found her legendary tongue and said, ‘Listen Frankie Dettori, none of us would ever touch you with a bargepole’ (he was quite little) and then Katie picked up the coins in the tip jar and said, putting one between her teeth, ‘Are these chocolate?’. And then we left, never to return again.

The next morning we were lying in bed feeling very worse for wear when there was a little early morning knock at the door and Jack came in to find Aunty Katie and Aunty Ali lying in a very boozy-smelling stale aired room feeling very sorry for themselves. As Katie said, the sight of his two wayward aunties looking so bloodshot, and downright terrifying has probably scarred him for life. Daddy Chris put him on our make shift double bed and I pretended to be Murray the cuddly bear but used a gravelly hungover voice which made Murray sound as if he’d been possessed by the devil and Jack scampered away. I was then sick.

Sarah told him to come back in and talk to Aunty Ali and Aunty Katie, and he said, ‘Aunty Katie and Aunty ‘who?’’ as he had no idea who I was. This stuck and for the rest of the weekend I was ‘Aunty who’, abbreviated to ‘where’s Aunty ooo?’ or just, ‘Where’s ooo?’ By the time I’d put in an hour or so of hard labour in the sand pit with the diggers and played catch the insect, ‘ooo’ was firmly re-instated as one of the fave fake aunties. I’m clearly going to have to put in some serious leg work to get to ‘Aunty Ali’ status. This is one little boy who is not easily fobbed off. He’s also a little boy with immaculate taste in ladies shoes; Katie’s in particular which he wore in the car whilst looking like the cat that got the cream. He then asked if he could put my boots on, and when we got home, he ran upstairs and came down wearing his boots, claiming he loved his ‘little boots’ and weren’t they ‘lovely’. I feel we’ve got enough in common to form a really decent bond. In the meanwhile, I’m content with being ‘Aunty ooo?’