Drinks and dinner often mark the beginning of a relationship. They can be pretty useful for spelling out the end of one too. Ask me about the most important moments in my life, and I will tell you what we ate. Remove cardboard sleeve, pierce film lid, and forget about everything might be the easiest first three steps towards mending a broken heart.
When memories of nights laughed away with best friends in beloved restaurants are sparked, the scent of steak charring on a grill tends to drift through my mind. The first time I went on a date to a posh restaurant was actually by accident. I was 22 and had recently starting going out with someone. One Friday after work we met up at a pub in Notting Hill with the vague intention of finding somewhere cheap for dinner later.
Several drinks in, at around 9pm, we absent-mindedly wandered towards Westbourne Grove, not a place I would recommend for a bargain dinner, and ended up in one of those fancy restaurants masquerading as a pub. Said tables will be set with heavy cutlery and more than one kind of wine glass, and those pork pies will cost you something north of a fiver. Resigned to our fate, and too giddy and drunk to care, we decided eat there anyway and deal with the consequences later.
As we were being seated, I spotted BBC Sport veteran Des Lynam across the dining room, enjoying post-dinner digestifs with a group of respectable-looking friends. This was going to be expensive. We initially approached this revised version of our relationship tentatively, wary of it not working out. I had not long broken up with someone else, and we were both so young β was this the right time to jump into something new?
Walking to the tube station afterwards, I began to feel queasy, as is usually the case if you throw a load of rich food into a stomach full of booze. It took a lot of deep breathing, swallowing, and praying for the nausea to pass, but thankfully, I managed to hold it in. Life felt sweet. When a relationship has simply run its course, rather than ended as a result of an event or betrayal, it can be hard to know where the full stop goes.
