Ships passing in the night

Birthdays are a bit of a blessing I think - they hold some currency in people's increasingly crowded social lives and book you a spot to catch up with them properly. Like mine a couple of months ago (has it been that long?) and Lisa's on Friday, people seem to make room in their calendar and awfully nice nights come together. We're stuck on the wrong side of the summer holidays and kind of lost in the work wilderness now; it's starting to feel like December is hurtling towards us faster than we can finish the things we want to do. In what sounds like the plot of a very depressing movie, I'm finding myself heading out to work before Lis is up and coming home as she's leaving. It was nice to have an excuse to get dressed up and go out for a proper meal.

The plastic tablecloths, not so much.

The (very European) festivities started on Friday night, when we went to an Italian restaurant near home. We met a few of Lisa's work friends and peered at a menu that included appetisers, pizza, pasta and "birthday present". The latter turned out to be "more of whatever you want" - a half bottle of champagne, another appetiser or dessert. We chose the caesar salad and a mushroom risotto, which disappointingly weren't wrapped or tied with a bow. Lis did get a proper present though - one of the ladies produced an enormous department store bag, which unwrapped to reveal a very pleasing giant fish hat. Now that the Halloween costume had been taken care of, we got wired into lashings of beer, antipasto, pizza and pasta. The staff brought out a little sparkler with dessert, took a photo of all of us and then immediately developed it, which I thought was quite sweet. I hadn't been to karaoke in far too long so I tried a few notes on my pipe to try and set everyone marching behind me; unfortunately noone seemed interested. Nevertheless, it was a nice night - we finished our coffees, said our goodbyes and wandered off home.

Saturday we slept in till 11, vowed immediately not to sleep in till 11 again and set to work with all the boring things we neglect during the week. Once everything was clean and tidy, we set off to our dinner at the French restaurant - or tried to. Hurrying down the stairs, we heard what Lis insisted was the bus leaving without us ("the woman who was waiting at the stop is gone", she said) and trudged back up. I opened the window once we made our way back inside to discover that not only was the woman still there, but she was leisurely getting on the bus; I got some good practice for my "not impressed" face that evening. Fortunately the next bus went back in time and managed to get us to the restaurant in about half the expected time, so we still made our booking. We needn't have hurried - we were literally the only two people in there. This struck me as a bit weird - it's supposed to be quite a famous restaurant and very rarely do you find an empty place on a weekend, no matter how obscure it is. Lis looked at the beige lino, then at the clear plastic tablecloths, then at me. "What?" I said. "It's good, I promise."

"Hamburg?" Lisa said, hiding her amusement as she looked at the menu. "I thought this was supposed to be French." My wildly impressive romantic evening was not going as intended.
"It is! They've got... er... escargot! Look!" Her expression didn't change. "The food's really nice, trust me." Thankfully, it was. Aside from the we're-on-a-first-date-and-I'm-trying-to-impress-you vibe of sitting in an kind of drab and empty restaurant, the food was magnificent and before long a couple more people came in and dispelled the awkward somewhat. Lisa had a beautifully cooked piece of fish and I had a chicken steak with a big foil drumstick; we sat there sipping our drinks and deciding which sauce to ladle on from our fancy silver gravy boats. Bread! How do I love thee, let me count the ways. Then dessert came out, a lily pad-sized creme brulee, and we started to realise where the chef got his millions of trophies. We chatted to the waiter for a while, then he slipped Lis a bottle of ambrosic salad dressing as a present, to finish off what turned out to be an excellent meal.

Dosed up on butter and cream, we weren't in the mood to go home just yet so I tried my piper's flute again and found a few people willing to follow us into the river of karaoke. We headed into Sannomiya and had a few more drinks while they showed up, realising by that stage that we'd only have an hour before last train. Unperturbed, we booked ourselves in and screeched away for an hour which was nowhere near enough; we hurriedly decided to get a cab home when we were good and ready and have everyone crash at our place. We ended up staying there until 3 and exhausting just about every song I'm physically capable of singing (and a few I probably wasn't). Once we got home, Len crashed to the ground and started going on about how good the smell of tatami was (much to Sifton's amusement) while I frowned at him for being in the way of the beds. We chatted away for a while and introduced everyone to the miracle of Berocca, then finally went to sleep as the sun was coming up. Predictably, we got up at 11 again.

After all that, we capped it off with a visit to the museum, which seemed like a very grown up way to ring in Lisa's "dirty 30s" - sophisticated with a dollop of silly. The dollop in this case was that it was a monster exhibit, so we're now the full bottle on Japanese ghosts, ghouls, goblins and screaming children. The silliness continues this weekend with beer and video games in Tokyo. It seems the contemporary art and cloth tablecloths will have to wait till the "norty forties".