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Last night, dinner with the ladies. And it was literally just the ladies this time since Sparky was bedded up, ill. So, I wandered down to VNU to meet Kathryn and Ems in reception and bumped into enough familiar faces to stand gossiping for a quarter hour before we decamped to the Alphabet Bar. It’s quickly becoming a habitual haunt. I felt absolutely worn out. Too many mornings of working before work have started to rack up now, and I could do with a good few days of sleeping. Working through the weekend didn’t help either.

Anyhow, we quickly mellowed out with a bottle of the lowest teen-priced wine on a deep and scuffed settee and talked about holidays and every kind of rubbish.

Kathryn was just back from her first trip to America - Miami upgraded to San Francisco on account of the storms - and Ems quickly got me very jealous with tales of an impending trip to Ljubljana, Vienna and Budapest, the top three cities on my ‘need to visit next’ list. It was very useful, actually. I’d been wondering how easy it would be to fly to Venice, then take the train to Ljubljana, and from there to Budapest before railing it up to Vienna, but apparently it’s much better to do it the other way around: Ljubljana - Vienna - Budapest. You cut off about ten hours of travelling, and can switch from train to a hydrofoil down the Danube for the last leg if it takes your fancy (and it very much does).

I think we could all have stayed there all night if it had a reputation for good food, but we left - eventually - and wandered along Wardour Street past all the film companies, looking at the menus in the restaurant windows, and eventually - after a bit of a dog leg - ended up in Kettners, which has changed its menu yet again, and still hadn’t reinstated the vegetarian burger. That would be enough to rule out a repeat trip if the pizzas weren’t so good.

Oh, and they put us right beside the piano so we had entertainment, too.

Kettners had only been a semi-thought-of place to eat, but it’s kind of appropriate, really. Hunting it down on the web I see that it was famous as a place where Oscar Wilde used to take rent boys, and I’ve almost finished reading The Portrait of Dorian Grey. It’s the biggest pile of crappy trash I’ve read in ages. It’s like three ill-suited stories stuck together with a big blob of irrelevance in the middle, and all the way through you can see that Wilde is trying desperately to live up to his reputation as a wit who is good at thinking up smart sayings. It’s absolutely littered with little snatches of conversation where he’s trying to be clever and failing miserably, and he comes out of it looking like a tedious, pretentious cretin.

I’m sure the waitress thought I was taking them both out to dinner, which couldn’t have been further from the truth, but nonetheless she talked to me about the wine (big mistake), asked me to try it when it eventually arrived (I deferred to one of the others) and then tried to get me to sign the credit slip, in spite of the name on the card so obviously being preceded by a ‘Miss’.

Even in Soho, people cling to well-worn cliches.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 29th, 2004 at 9:37 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.