For this brief moment I am comfortable

I am due to collect my new car this weekend. But before I get rid of my old car I needed to repair a chip in the windscreen. I took it at lunchtime to RAC AutoWindscreens on an industrial estate off the motorway. “It will take about an hour” the woman said, sounding very off-hand.

I walked out the little office, intending to wander about for an hour. It was a hot sunny day. The traffic was very busy, and although there were pavements I got the impression that people very seldom walked in that area. Going towards the motorway junction, I walked round in a big arc and came to a retail park dominated by a huge Focus store. In a corner of the Focus car-park was a box-like building with music playing. It was a restaurant called Frankie and Bennie’s New York Italian Restaurant (clearly part of a chain, although I’d never heard of it before).

Going inside, I saw that only two or three tables were occupied, with a few people sitting at the bar. I asked the waitress for a table by the window. There were red banquettes instead of chairs, the windows were shaded by wooden Venetian blinds (purely ornamental), there were balloon displays in the Italian national colours of red, white and green. On a wall were small framed pictures of famous American celebrities, the display dishonestly implying that the celebrities actually dined at that restaurant! Over a sound system played various American singers – Frank Sinatra (various songs), Ella Fitzgerald (It’s only a paper moon), Nat King Cole (Mona Lisa). Curiously the songs seemed to jump at times – possibly it was a faulty CD, or possibly the quest for authenticity had been taken to such extremes that the sound of scratched vinyl records had been reproduced. In a corner, stuck on the wall, was what looked like a series of newspaper cuttings, yellow with age, relating to the baseball career of Joe Di Maggio – looking more closely, the “cuttings” were printed on a sort of pasteboard, curved so that they appeared to be curling off the wall.

A pizza, a glass of Chardonnay, a sickly chocolate pudding, a café latte. The waitress was a young eastern European woman, dressed in a white and black uniform, light brown hair tied back, not wearing any make-up (so that at first impression she seemed much younger). She spoke excellent English, constantly smiling as she spoke. Everything I said she repeated back to me. Her set routine seemed to include actually sitting down at the customer’s table whenever she took an order – she seemed a little uncomfortable doing this.

The wine arrived first, and I drank it on an empty stomach so that it went to my head. This was not unpleasant, and I sat back on the red plastic banquette, my arms resting on the plastic faux wood-grain table top, and I thought: this may all be fake, and the experience shallow, but at least for this brief moment I am comfortable.

I got back to work half an hour late (the second time this week).

In the afternoon we said goodbye to Zhu Guang who is going back to Shanghai after two years with the company. In the morning he brought in sweets and cakes for everyone, and later gave presents to those he considered his friends (I received a “Louis Vuitton” credit card holder, in a “Louis Vuitton” box. His sister had bought it for him in China. “I know you like French things” he said to me).