Although they didn’t know it, they were participating in a social ritual that’s practised right across the continent. In Italian towns they call it the passeggiata, an evening stroll to check out your fellow citizens. In Spain there are special streets, paseos, designed to facilitate people watching. In Limerick it’s too cold to get out of the car.
When I am doing stand-up, my own Saturday night ritual goes something like this: drive along motorway to theatre next to shopping centre. Locate dressing room, perform sound check. At six-ish go for pre-performance meal and prepare for trial by “table for one”. After that, the actual gig is child’s play. Solo dining is a lonely pursuit. But like many solo activities, once you get the technique right it has its own quiet rewards.
As you enter the restaurant your body language is vitally important. Gentlemen may choose to adopt an aloof sideways tilt of the head that says, “I am a fascinating intellectual. Elsewhere are many, many girls I have shooed away with my rolled-up London Review of Books.” Or a slight, apologetically knowing smile meaning, “I’m just too much of a bohemian rogue to cook my own dinner. Take care of me, lovely waitress lady.” Either way, the message is the same.
“Stood up? Who, me?” This body language is unique to men, by the way. Women who eat alone don’t worry about this sort of thing. They are too busy generating an invincible psychic force field that will repel opportunistic creeps.
Time plays tricks on the single diner. The gap between ordering and getting your food stretches into centuries. Ideally, you turn to your well-thumbed (if largely unread) Proust or Kerouac at this point, but more often than not you find your rapt attention focused on a local estate agent’s magazine,
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yesterday’s Metro or even the Currys catalogue — anything to shield your blankly staring eyes from the void of loneliness. But as soon as the food arrives you realise how pitifully few minutes it takes to actually eat a meal, without the distraction of conversation or laughter.
If you want to experience what it’s like to be stared at, don’t go to the extreme of auditioning for Big Brother or walking down the street dressed as a chicken. Simply go to a restaurant on your own. I promise you it’s essentially the same feeling. The waitress smiles at you slightly too brightly and laughs at everything you say.
Other diners eye you suspiciously, or ostentatiously ignore you. Younger children may actually point and laugh.
By now you’re probably thinking that “A funny thing happened to me on the way to the theatre . . .” is one of the great lies of observational comedy since most comics probably go through the same lonely dining ritual that I’ve made sound downright tragic. But there is an upside. Once you get past the self-consciousness you’re in a prime people-watching scenario, and that can be a rich source of jokes.
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I generally amuse myself with a spot of I Spy: the couple who are both married to other people, the wedding anniversary meal most likely to end in divorce, the Asbo child waiting to happen.
And whenever I dine alone I think of Grandpa chewing stoically on a toffee while he cleared the steamy windscreen with his jacket sleeve, hoping a gust of wind would catch young Noeleen’s skirt as she passed on her way to the dance. Very bold, that one. And there’s another story altogether.
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