Restaurant customers are one of the most peculiar populations of people.
There are the singletons.
Maybe they're lone tourists; at the sight of these I can't help but feel a wrenching pit of sadness in my stomach. How far away from home are they? What happened to their travelling partners? What does it feel like to pay £40 for lunch without speaking a single word to anyone but your waitress?
It could be the woman taking a working lunch. These gals have fabulous hair and are surgically attached to their Blackberry. Or maybe they've spent years perfecting the 'pretending to text' performance.
There are the families.
They never tip. They're too busy trying to deliver puree into the mouth of their suited, booted, bundle of joy in between sips of Chardonnay. They leave you with a 3 mile radius of napkins, cold chips and bendy straws to clean up afterwards. But, oh boy, are those chubby cheeks a sight for sore eyes.
There are the gaggle of friends. These folks vary with age.
The students who make more noise than sense. The mid-life crisis women who spend 20mins arguing whether it's acceptable to order a side with their meal and subtly bully eachother into smaller portions whilst crying out "Order what YOU want!" to the whole restaurant. The working men whose idea of a night well spent involves asking me for sexual favours in the general spirit of merriment. ("We're paying you - play along, darling")
And the old friends - these are my favourite. They sip their Malbec slowly and think fast. They sit back and spend several weighty hours of a late afternoon sitting at a table of memories, of quips and jokes, of knowing each other too well to discuss trivialities and fuss over ordering. These are the people I want to be friends with when I'm 63.
Don't get me started on the couple. A different species altogether.
The teenage romance - awkward and tender. Who pays? What shall we order? No fuss, just nice to have a posh dinner out.
The young professionals: one of two types. The drunken, laughing couple who don't regard my presence as a burden on their lives; a pleasure and make the evening go quicker. I almost look forward to serving them. And the macho guy with the plastic arm candy. I'm being cruel, of course - but the barbie doll will pipe in with complaints whilst he orders for her. At least one of them will send their steak back. Overhearing their conversations makes me want to drive nails into my eye sockets.
The married couple on date night. It's been a few decades of putting up with someone else's annoying habits, so these guys don't demand a cocktail or steak which requires more than 30secs of explaining. They'll be quiet, polite, a bit sad. Unless they're one of those strange couple who are still blissfully in love - in which case they'll order four rounds of cocktails, he'll move across the table to hold her in his arms and they'll steal kisses when they think no one's looking or because maybe they just don't care anymore.
And the couple whose kids have moved out years ago, who will pay with a voucher, she'll put on make-up for the first time in months, and he will tell me that he'd like to pour the wine himself. They will sit for exactly as long as it takes to eat the food, they will speak little and stare around the restaurant blankly. I imagine them going home and having sex with the same blank, clinical manner of going through the motions. It makes me want to slap them back into living, back into colour and movement and emotion.
Restaurants are fishbowls. Maybe the fish are happy when they're eating mulch and swimming around the same familiar 30cm.
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