(part 2)

Just quickly, the blowout part.

I'd been left hanging by Hitchcock's restaurant and had all but given up on them ever returning my call, (their voice bank was full the second time I tried to contact them). The night before my birthday I get a call, as causal as you like, informing me they could take our booking. The lady on the other end obviously had no idea how pleased I was at having an element of the unknown injected into my birthday, giving it the air of a bionafied occasion. In hindsight, she was probably nonplused because the place was hardly worth holding out for, as I later discovered.

(Dressed to the nines)

After dressing up to the nines, driving forty minutes in force nine gales and braving a swinging suspension bridge, we arrived in Hull amongst the bar crawls and short skirts. It was a wet and miserable night and we were eager to settle down to our meal quickly so we might make it back home before the weather worsened.

We found the restaurant down a maze of one-way back allies and realized after our third sweep past it that there were no car parks within a 2 mile radius. On the fourth drive-by I hopped out to see if anyone in the restaurant could tip us on some secret spot to drop cars nearby. A pair of hard-core vegetarians, (DIY knitted hats, vegan pleather clogs & bird nest hair), were ahead of me at the door. I asked them if they knew anywhere to park but they just looked embarrassed that was asking such a thing and informed me they'd arrived by bus.

Once I followed the couple and the waitress that had opened the front door up a crooked wooden staircase, I began to suspect that the place liked to maintain an air of mystery for a reason. The decor consisted of cobbled together 1980s hotel conference type chairs and collapsable tables and exposed wooden beams so low that one or two men were stooping into their food. There was a lot of tomato bruschetta being consumed.

The waitress returned from seating the crunchy couple and asked me about my booking. I told her my parents where driving circles in the downpour and that I was trying to find out where Hitchcock customers were meant to park. She replied flatly that she didn't drive. What this has do do with what I was asking remains unknown but I suggested she might do well to ask one of her colleagues on my behalf. By this point other customers were eaves' dropping and were evidently unimpressed that my family owned a car. I grabbed a copy of the buffet sample menu and found that the fourth main dish of the Italian buffet that night was "tomato sauce." Alarm bells rang in my head. The waitress, who'd disappeared for a full five minutes, returned telling me to try looking for a park "down the street". I decided that for all their veggie sensitivities, a dead horse was getting flogged and left with the glare of Hitchcock regulars following me down the stairs and out the door.

I connected the dots as I waited for Dad's Volvo to pull wearily around the corner. The property next door to the restaurant was a youth hostel. Hitchcock's obtuse opening hours, student cookery and utter lack of customer service and business savvy could only be the result of a hostel's half-baked side project to make enough money to cover damaged ikea furniture/keep them afloat. We were a bit too overdressed for that.

(A view from the evening)

What followed was a series of rejections from every conceivable restaurant in Hull. Despite visible empty tables, everywhere was full, or so we where told. Dad managed to get boxed in at the Ask Pizza car park, such was the demand for their mediocre meals. We even got rejected by Ciquitos, the chain restaurant haunt of my childhood.

After an hour of luckless tramping about, we decided to push on despite the awful road conditions to the next biggest town in an attempt to salvage the day. No dice. By this point, our delirious hunger and need of bathroom facilities had us at each other's throats. There was only one answer to such a problem at 9.40 at night - Mcdonalds.

My Irish logic has me convinced that a disappointing birthday makes for a great year and vice versa. Certainly the news from Australia a few days and many of sachets of Alkaseltsa later confirms that prediction. All in all? A great bad birthday meal.