<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Incident at Sade\u2019s<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cShall we go to Sade\u2019s?\u201d<\/p>\n We always went to Sade\u2019s on a Friday at teatime.\u00a0 And Bob always asked.\u00a0 Tony always groaned.\u00a0 The three of us were from the same department: all always overlooked for promotion; none of us ever quite sure if we minded; never really knowing if we had ambitions.<\/p>\n Only it wasn\u2019t called Sade\u2019s.\u00a0 It had a long name, a silly name: Antony Smart In the Park.\u00a0 It sounded like a kids\u2019 book, but it was always quite popular.\u00a0 Antony had been the original chef, but there were hygiene problems and he was sacked.\u00a0 Then the council sold a strip of land, so the restaurant was outside the park.\u00a0 We called it Sade\u2019s because they played her music all the time.\u00a0 I suspect the woman behind the bar had been a teenager in the 1980s.\u00a0 The first time I went I hadn\u2019t heard Sade in about ten years.\u00a0 Now I heard it every Friday between five and half past six.<\/p>\n On this particular Friday, with Diamond Life<\/em> playing in the background, there was an incident.<\/p>\n This family, carrying an air of 1970s fly-on-the-wall TV documentary, was attracting attention.\u00a0 The kids were kicking off.\u00a0 Two boys, one about eight and the other about twelve, were trying to sing along with Sade, but they didn\u2019t know the words and they didn\u2019t know the tune, and they had little understanding of appropriate volume.<\/p>\n They managed to get through the first course.\u00a0 We moved on to our second bottle earlier than usual.\u00a0 It was delivered with a \u201cYour Syrah, lads.\u201d\u00a0 This was a reference to an argument about Syrah or Shiraz eighteen months ago.\u00a0 I was feeling lordly and raised Tony and Bob\u2019s eyebrows by sending two glasses over to the parents.<\/p>\n The boys started strange seated dance moves when the risotto arrived.\u00a0 The mum called the waiter over, the one we called Smooth Operator.\u00a0 She asked him for a high chair and the dad repeated the request, word for word: Can I have a high chair, please, waiter?<\/p>\n This confused Smooth because people didn\u2019t usually append \u2018waiter\u2019 to the end of their sentences and he wasn\u2019t sure if they wanted one or two chairs, nor why they wanted them.\u00a0 He explained his confusion, there was slightly manic laughter all round, and it was soon sorted.<\/p>\n Smooth brought two over, then the parents lifted the boys and stared at them.\u00a0 The mum \u2013 and I must admit I thought it would be the other way round \u2013 picked up the one who looked about twelve, and the dad picked up the younger one.\u00a0 They shoved them in the high chairs.\u00a0 The brothers didn\u2019t complain, but their legs weren\u2019t very happy: they made cries and creaks of discomfort.\u00a0 Their lower limbs were bending at unnatural angles.\u00a0 There was grazing.\u00a0 There was bleeding.<\/p>\n We continued with our quick and cheap three courses with two bottles of red, as we did every Friday.\u00a0 I was facing the family, but Bob and Tony didn\u2019t turn round.<\/p>\n Other customers started going up and chatting to the parents, saying things like \u201cHow old are they?\u201d\u00a0 \u201cAww, aren\u2019t they sweet?\u201d and patting their heads and doing that thing a bit like tickling under their chins.<\/p>\n We\u2019d recently gathered at Tony\u2019s to watch a Western re-make where the dead guys had silver dollars placed on their eyes.\u00a0 This was on my mind when we got up to leave.<\/p>\n On the way past their table I screwed up two five pound notes, put one into each of their mouths, and whispered \u201cDon\u2019t ever mess with Sade\u201d in their blotchy ears.\u00a0 I smiled at the parents, said \u201cGood Luck\u201d and left.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Rob Walton<\/strong> is from Scunthorpe, and lives on Tyneside.\u00a0 Published by The Emma Press, Butcher\u2019s Dog, Firewords Quarterly, IRON Press, Red Squirrel, Northern Voices, Arachne <\/em>and others.\u00a0<\/em> He collated the New Hartley Memorial Pathway text.\u00a0\u00a0 Oddness at: Welcome to lines of desire art collective!<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Incident at Sade\u2019s \u201cShall we go to Sade\u2019s?\u201d We always went to Sade\u2019s on a Friday at teatime.\u00a0 And Bob always asked.\u00a0 Tony always groaned.\u00a0 The three of us were from the same department: all always overlooked for promotion; none of us ever quite sure if we minded; never really knowing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12692"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12692\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12693,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12692\/revisions\/12693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}