Tobey carvery: director's edit
In the absence of Mat, the house has seemed peaceful, but now Mat’s back. I prepared for his return by lowering the cultural tone and deserting BBC4 for Sky Three’s Ross Kemp On Gangs. You couldn’t help but enjoy its assumption that the (apparently notorious) ‘numbers gangs’ of Cape Town would treat the former Grant Mitchell as an equal. I’d rather expected him to go the whole hog by blacking up and getting himself ‘initiated’ - which is to say, gang-raped - in Cape Town prison, but instead he kept his distance, giving the various gang members his trademark ‘hard stare’ (borrowed, of course, from Paddington Bear).
Mat’s return was swiftly followed by a visit from Rhys and Dave Stacey. Dave - our Dave - immediately fled to Cornwall, as though obeying an unwritten law prohibiting more than one Dave from occupying the same building at the same time. Dave Stacey, another former Aberystwyth student, is a lanky guy, famous for his lack of coordination (physical, not sartorial). Indeed, he hadn’t been in the house half an hour before, simply by reaching for a Stanley Kubrick box set on the shelf next to him, he’d set in motion something that resembled a minor earth tremor in its effects.
It was a situation hardly likely to be improved by an all-day drinking session, which Mat, Dave and Rhys indulged in the next day, but in fact the aftermath of this was not too terrible. I went for a curry with people who warned me gleefully of the carnage that would no doubt await me on my return to the house. When I did get back it was to find Masters Of The Universe (the live action film, not the cartoon) playing on DVD to an audience of two, both of whom were showing their appreciation of its qualities by sleeping soundly.
The next day, Sunday, nobody was in a condition to do anything but stare into space, and anything that happened to intervene in that space, which in the event was Spiderman 3 followed by that board in the Toby carvery where numbers flash up to inform you that your table is ready. Spiderman 3 is not the most perfectly structured movie I’ve seen, but it is a model of concision and good sense compared to the board at the Toby carvery. For a start our number was 185, which certainly bears no relation to the number of tables in the place, large as it undoubtedly is. Then numbers on either side of it were appearing seemingly at random. They might as well have been beamed from the far reaches of space for all they meant to us as we sat there, losing the will to live. Mat looked even more than usually like one of Dracula’s victims; Rhys’ wallet kept dropping from his floppy hands.
Eventually, 185 appeared and we got our carvery, all except Dave who, being a vegetarian, had the vegetarian choice. In a Toby carvery the vegetarian choice is: have what we give you or renounce vegetarianism. If you do renounce vegetarianism, you get a special hat, and the waitresses dance round you wearing stag’s heads and chanting: ‘Meat! Meat! Meat!’ Or so I’ve heard. Quite sensibly, Dave opted for the puff-pastry-and-whatever-it-conceals option.
Mat’s return was swiftly followed by a visit from Rhys and Dave Stacey. Dave - our Dave - immediately fled to Cornwall, as though obeying an unwritten law prohibiting more than one Dave from occupying the same building at the same time. Dave Stacey, another former Aberystwyth student, is a lanky guy, famous for his lack of coordination (physical, not sartorial). Indeed, he hadn’t been in the house half an hour before, simply by reaching for a Stanley Kubrick box set on the shelf next to him, he’d set in motion something that resembled a minor earth tremor in its effects.
It was a situation hardly likely to be improved by an all-day drinking session, which Mat, Dave and Rhys indulged in the next day, but in fact the aftermath of this was not too terrible. I went for a curry with people who warned me gleefully of the carnage that would no doubt await me on my return to the house. When I did get back it was to find Masters Of The Universe (the live action film, not the cartoon) playing on DVD to an audience of two, both of whom were showing their appreciation of its qualities by sleeping soundly.
The next day, Sunday, nobody was in a condition to do anything but stare into space, and anything that happened to intervene in that space, which in the event was Spiderman 3 followed by that board in the Toby carvery where numbers flash up to inform you that your table is ready. Spiderman 3 is not the most perfectly structured movie I’ve seen, but it is a model of concision and good sense compared to the board at the Toby carvery. For a start our number was 185, which certainly bears no relation to the number of tables in the place, large as it undoubtedly is. Then numbers on either side of it were appearing seemingly at random. They might as well have been beamed from the far reaches of space for all they meant to us as we sat there, losing the will to live. Mat looked even more than usually like one of Dracula’s victims; Rhys’ wallet kept dropping from his floppy hands.
Eventually, 185 appeared and we got our carvery, all except Dave who, being a vegetarian, had the vegetarian choice. In a Toby carvery the vegetarian choice is: have what we give you or renounce vegetarianism. If you do renounce vegetarianism, you get a special hat, and the waitresses dance round you wearing stag’s heads and chanting: ‘Meat! Meat! Meat!’ Or so I’ve heard. Quite sensibly, Dave opted for the puff-pastry-and-whatever-it-conceals option.
posted by martin at 4:14 AM
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