[m i a o w] the cat

I have, for the most part, disengaged from the clutch of Blackie. Last night, I took M on a Date. The Date that I tried to take him on this time last week, but he was too ill. These are the things we can do now that we have reconsolidated. So I drove us to the restaurant.
“Oh,” squeaked M, “This Thai restaurant. I thought we were going to the other one.”
“No,” I said, grabbing him as his pace slowed, “we’ve never been here and your mother said it was supposed to be good.”
Both of us, in unsion, stopped walking. I had just said that like it was a good thing. We looked at each other. My look said ‘Don’t even start to wreck my Date plans’ and his look said ‘At times I can be wise, and I will do nothing but give a minimalist shake of my head’.
And we continued on.
Holy crap. It was horrifying. The ceiling was yellow, there was a blue wall, a pink wall, and an aquamarine wall. There were old-time op-shop hits on the stereo. The place was full and there was one waitress. We stayed there for a full hour, in which we got our entrees - a tiny bowl of tom yum soup, and several suspect vegetarian spring rolls. We had drunk two beers apiece and our mains hadn’t arrived. So we left. They didn’t make us pay, either.

I drove us, trying to ignore the cruel destruction of my Date plans, to the proper Thai restaurant, where we ordered our mains and got them within about ten minutes. Naturally, in keeping with sods law, M got something divine and I tried to live vicariously through his choice by spooning his sauce on to my rice. By the time we were full and round there was still time to get to Date Part B. The movies! Oh. My. God. I hadn’t been to the cinema up here for one year and five weeks. It still smelt like dampy mustiness. We waited for 15 minutes in the cinema for our movie to start, and then, in my guise of Date-Fixer, I went and asked the useless people that work there whether they would consider showing the movie that everybody was waiting to see. Then we saw Ocean’s 12 and drove home. Completely knackered.