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Stevenage Leisure Park. It’s where we spend our leisure time. We left the city to live in the countryside, but we spend our nights out in a place that is tarmac and chain restaurants and indoor novelty golf. It is literally Hell on Earth. Literally. Apart from the fact that the people in Stevenage Leisure Park are much more horrific and disgusting that the ones in Hell. Satan would turn them away if they tired to wheedle their way into Hades.
Tonight we went for dinner at the fanciest restaurant in the whole leisure park, Prezzo- even the name is in foreign - and to the cinema to see Pitch Perfect 3. I may be a 50 year old man and not the target audience, but I fancy that I was the only person in the room tonight who had played the phone app Episodes and tried to audition for the Bellas.
Damn, we should have gone to Bella Italia, which is so fancy it has two words in foreign and then we could have had a Bella themed night. And rounded it off with some midnight bell-ringing at a local church.
I have to say it was a struggle to get out. I had been up since 5am (Ernie had got back to sleep, but I hadn’t) and had fallen asleep on the bed as I was putting Ernie down at 7pm. But you can’t let parenthood defeat your desire to eat at a chain restaurant and see a sequel to a sequel of a film for teenage girls which is stretching the idea as far as it will go (and then a little but further). We thought we’d learned our lesson and booked both events, but tonight Stevenage was not so keen to be at its leisure park and we needn’t have bothered.
Prezzo didn’t have a note of our booking anyway and the lady welcoming us asked me if she could see the confirmation. I’m not sure why as the restaurant wasn’t full and I don’t see why anyone would lie their way into Prezzo. But I released I’d left my phone in the car, so had to run back and get it (and would have had to anyway to be fair). When I got back, she saw I wasn’t trying to lie my way into the half full restaurant and led us to our table. Ian Prezzo should get over himself. Their credit card system wasn’t even working. They needed all the customers they could get. Did I look like a man incapable of booking ahead for an Italian meal? Perhaps I did.
It was so amazing to sit and chat to my wife about something that wasn’t to do with baby urine or toddler faeces (we didn’t have to, but we still did). We caught up on how the rest of our lives were going - she’s working on her fifth book. She is a fucking genius, but like so many people in this job, insecure. Which is ridiculous. She’s written five books and they’re all published. She is no idea how great she is. Which is lucky for me or she’d have realised how out of my league she is. Ten years of happiness for me and wrongly accepting that this is the best her life can be for her.
She said to me, “How do you ever know if you’ve made it as a writer? Does everyone just feel like an imposter?"
“The imposters certainly do,†I replied.
