Cheese before bedtime

"Excuse me!" I said over the garden wall. "Excuse me!"

The waiter didn't reappear. I was furious.

In the background, the cats jumped around a pair of chattering magpies that fluttered about in pibald circles on the lawn. I left them to dance and stepped back in through the back door into the crowded kitchen.

"Babe," I said. "That fellow is ripping you off!"

The waiter had peered over the garden wall in his white shirt and black waistcoat and told Herself that there had been too much salt used with the meal. It would cost another €1 on top of the bill.

He had already charged €0.90c for the same reason on our previous bill. If it happened again, I was going to challenge it. And it had.

"Where's the bill?" I asked. Herself handed me a booklet that fell in fan-folds onto the floor as I fumbled with it.

"Look!" I said. "They charge so much already that they can give you a whole waiter's book as a bill!"

I flicked through the white pages and came to a multi-coloured one which listed the menu and the accompanying prices. The menu clearly stated that the prices already included the cost of salt.

"I knew it!"

I pulled a salt cellar from the counter and tried to explain.

"This is our salt cellar," I said. "How are they supposed to know how much salt we've used anyhow? Do they weigh it beforehand? Do they?"

The crowd milled about and I lost sight of Herself. She was somewhere to the front of the house, speaking with someone at the open front door.

I went out the back door and looked fruitlessly over the wall for the waiter. My father's neighbour, Billy D, gazed out over his shoulder through next door's kitchen window at the melee of cats and magpies.

I awoke to Herself sitting on the side of the bed.

"I'm glad we turned that mattress yesterday," she said. "I didn't move the whole night."

I groaned, thinking about the cheese sandwiches I had had before bed. Always a good idea at the time, but always the cause of the strangest dreams. I told Herself about the salt.

"I didn't move either," I said. "I was weighed down by a block of cheese."

The Judge Dredd Mega City 1 version of a cheese triangle

You know those round boxes of processed cheese? The ones with individual cheese wedges wrapped in tinfoil like a presentation counter for 50 years of playing Trivial Pursuit?

Used to love them as a kid.

Calvita cheese had a little blondy young one on the front like someone off the BBC test card, only she was a typical Irish Cailin type from the 1970s and she didn't have a blackboard or a bunch of coloured squares or a slightly scary stuffed toy around her. I see she's gone missing from the brand in recent times. There's a modern blondy young one on the labels now. Don't know why they did away with the first one when all that 70s stuff is getting back into fashion.

Anyhow, the machine that wrapped the cheesy bits in their little silver rounded triangles used to fix the tinfoil tighter than a trumpters arse on a high C note. And at the corners it was battened down so well that I copied the technique for wrapping foreign brown paper parcels for Christmas. Ask any of my family that live abroad and they'll tell you a special samurai from the post office has to be used to open my brown paper packages.

Anyhoo... Herself decided I was looking a bit thin, so she bought a couple of packets of the cheesy goodness for me. I was most disappointed when I went to open the box.

First, the box itself was hermetically sealed with a tear strip around it. Most modern and not a bit nostalgic. I opened it up and took out a couple of the cheesy triangles. Happily, they were still folded at the corners like the nuns were running the hospitals and scaring country girl nurses into the correct way of making the beds. But there was a little red stub sticking out.

"Not another bloody tear strip!" I shouted. "The convenience of it all!"

"What's wrong?" Herself asked from under a pile of washing she'd just carried in from the line, while also ironing a shirt with one foot.

"Oh this is no good! Sure, what's the point if you can't get bits of processed cheese up your fingernails? Lookit!"

I tugged at the red stub and the little silver package opened magically all around its outside like a zipper on my favourite rubber bed wear.

I still ate the cheese. But under protest though.

And I picked a bit off to go under my fingernails.

You have to have some standards.