4 Bottles and a Dessert!

Forgive this play on words, Dear Friends. Yes, I did watch “Four Weddings and a Funeral” back in the day. There are moments in our lives which are a surprise. The unexpected arrives and leaves us stunned, unable to speak but often with  a glaikit immovable smile stencilled to our faces. Such it was when I heard this story of four rugby coaches trekking off for ‘dinner’ at Milestone’s restaurant here on the West Coast.  Why would one go for dinner when one had already eaten? Well, I guess they were not thinking straight, having just witnessed a result that nobody expected. Hmmm, but then it would seem that there was method in their madness because there was a rather lovely white wine which was on special with 50% off.  When the waiter arrived to take their order the head coach said that he would like a bottle of “Murky Milch” (It’s real name hasn’t escaped me ‘cos I never knew it in the first place)*. One of the others asked what was to be done if he did not finish it. No problem, he would take it home. Waiter took his order,

“I would like a bottle of “Murky Milch” too.”

And so did all order.

“Anything else,” From the disappointed waiter.

A hand went up.

“I would like a dessert”.

And so we have our 4 bottles and a dessert.

This story flashed me back. I was working in Lincolnshire, some three hours North of London. Four of us had been down to London to go to a rugby international at Twickenham. I can’t remember the game, I can remember very little of the apres rugby. I do remember that we were a sorry sight on the Sunday morning.  The drive North out of the city was a quiet one where the main concern was to stay awake. About an hour up the A1, a sort of British Interstate with hedges and roundabouts and bungalows on the hard shoulder, a greasy spoon was spotted at the side of the road. We parked and sought the grease our constitutions needed. We seated ourselves in the café and awaited the arrival of the waitress. She suddenly appeared with a world weary pencil lurking over a scruffy order pad.

“Yes?” Gruff and to the point.

“I would like the Full English, bacon, egg, sausage, beans, fried bread and toast”.

The pencil remained poised, the head was shaking.

“We don’t do that”.

By this time, Geoff had the menu. He saw ‘eggs and toast’, ‘sausage and toast’, ‘beans on toast’, ‘bacon and toast’ but no combination thereof. Keith saw the light and the solution through one surprising glimpse of hangover clarity.

“I will have all four dishes please.”   The waitress didn’t blink. She wrote them down. Inevitably we all ordered the same. So eventually there were 16 dishes for four people and four cups of tea.  Ineluctably we each consolidated our goodies and loaded them all onto the one plate and asked the waitress to remove the extra plates which she did. There is no movie script called “16 dishes and 4 teas”.

Nary a smile, nary a comment, nary an uplifted eye, just a ‘seen-it-all-before’  world weariness.

Greased up and replete the rest of our journey was a more jolly affair.  

Dear Reader, I love reading about people who have the innovative confidence to break the rules and come up with a solution which causes very little angst but may cause a company or individual to rethink their work practices. In support of this I came across this rather amusing unattributable quotation the other day:-

“Can’t stop thinking about the people who first ate mushrooms through trial and error. You know, like, this one tastes like beef. This one killed Kevin and this one allowed  me to speak with god for three weeks.”

I chuckled at this. I guess that Milestones is not a pub therefore the ordering of food is required. This criterion was met through asking for a dessert but we all know that the purchase of an expensive wine inexpensively was the real reason for going.  Surely to goodness, the home of the English breakfast can indeed plate up an English breakfast on one plate, otherwise what do you expect?

I do love people who ponder such things as to whether or not  the ‘s’ or ‘c’ in scent is silent. Or Britain’s political system which allows ‘The Monster Raving Looney Party’ to have such items on its electoral manifesto as that of replacing immigration officers in the UK with doctor’s receptionists on the grounds that they are impossible to get past. Or “The Sun” newspaper in the UK where a journalist had the wit to drop into his local supermarket and buy a lettuce, put a picture of it on the front page betting the world that it would not rot before the new British Prime Minister, Liz Truss, was  out of office. She lasted 49 days, the lettuce was wilting but still there.  To me these are people  with whom one  wants to spend time. Why?  Well, I suppose that it is these people  who are going to be innovative; are going to wander and wonder through life, seizing initiatives all over the place and, no doubt, annoying  everybody with whom they’ve ever worked or shared a beer.  Let’s face it, Dear Reader, there is never a dull moment with such people, they are never boring. Their company can, of course, wear a bit thin at times.  But that is mitigated when they come up with something which makes life easier for the rest of us.   In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson:-

“Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates and Jesus, and Luther, and Galileo, and Copernicus and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”

How many rejections did JK Rowling have before she became this incredible phenomenon?  The truth is that if we all knew what worked every time then we would use it to work every time.  But we don’t and we can’t.

As a youth I would always conform to societal expectations. Subliminally I believed that everybody else knew better than me, I lacked the intelligence and confidence to have my own thoughts. So I relied on others to make decisions, to organise the next adventure. So it has to be said that some of my best experiences in life have been when somebody has done something unexpected. And, of course, we know that there are people who do not fit. They stand out in a crowd and are often labelled as weird, lambasted as non-conformist. As a teacher,  Dear Reader, it was hard to make time for the mischief maker, the pupil who got in the way of what I was trying to do. A better teacher would have stood to one side and facilitated, not enthused about the eight parts of speech and ‘I before e except after c’. And now the pupil who sprawled and flicked and chatted and cloth-eared his way through my spell-binding, audience-held-in-the-palm-of-my-hand lessons, is out there making a good fist of solving the problems of the world. Now that they are adults many have proved innovative, inventive and different. And they have done so much to improve the human condition. So yes I laugh at four bottles and a dessert and the creation of the Full English because so many people would have bowed before the altar of conformity and the world would have been the poorer for it.

Thanks for reading.

*Just discovered today that the real name for this New Zealand sauvignon blanc is “Kim Crawford”.