Throup fight at the OK Corral... The horror, the horror... Down, and out for the Goose... Take twenty-seven.

I couldn't decide the right title. It's been that kind of a week. Sunday was the worst Goosing I've ever had. As an experiment, landlord Steve Throup had me down to start work at 2pm, which is - unsurprisingly - the nadir of the shift. It doesn't get any busier at lunchtimes - the Goosing doesn't come any worse. And into which section was I drafted with my Vaseline smile and dazzling customer service skills? The 10s? The 40s? Outside? No. Steve had me pegged for 'Backup'. This is, according to the other waiters, an invention. It means I scope the entire restaurant with the principal duty of hand-washing cutlery. Marek thought this was very funny. He is gigantic, almost Andre the Giant size - 6'8 tall, and top heavy with 21 stone of muscle. He also speaks excellent English, which renders him unique amongst my colleagues. Scottish and Polish, I'll hasten to add. Last week a diner asked for mayonnaise and Emil returned five minutes later with extra menus. We have almost exactly one fork per customer, which leads to terrible shortages as the more experienced staff hoard cutlery for their section in cubbyholes hidden throughout the building. The restaurant has undergone two large extensions in the last nine years, but the kitchen is the same size. The result is chaos when front of house is full and baying for the blood. I imagine this to be a bit like chronic plastic surgery.

Sunday. My Christ, Sunday. The horror. After waiting over an hour for their meals, roughly a quarter of customers walked out. I grew so tired of taking complaints that I gave up even asking the kitchen when the meals might be ready for table 27
6
47
44
91
22
Your lucky numbers: it could be you. Every head in the restaurant turns to the kitchen door when I emerge with my plates in dribs and drabs, and every head sighs, curses, mutters evil things as I drift past their table and take the plates elsewhere. One man pleaded with me. "I ordered fifty minutes ago," he said. "I don't understand. Please-" he caught my arm. He had a thin moustache. "Please. I'm hungry."

I resigned. If I really wanted a job where I was paid minimum wage to be roundly abused while addressing non-stop customer complaints, I'd work in a call centre, and then I'd quit that too.
"Leaving us so soon?" asked Steve. He has eyebrows liked a badger.
I was grim. "Yes," I said. "Hell yes."
"But why?" He seemed genuinely puzzled. I took a deep breath and began listing reasons. I had ticked off six fingers by the time he spoke again.
"You don't want to give it another week?"
"No."
"Just one more week?"
"No! I'm going to London."

And so I am, readying myself to Megabus the country with final destination of the spare room in my brother's East Dulwich apartment. I'll stay with him for a while - Tim reckons he can point me towards some recruitment agencies who will be much better at working out what I want to do than I am. I'm dubious, and I still want to get back on my travels, but I'll give it a go.

It's been a strange few weeks in Inverness. The Goosing has slid by in a flash of loathing and disgrace; I barely noticed my birthday until it actually happened. Twenty seven years old, and hang your head in shame if you didn't spot 'take twenty seven' coming a mile away... now it's almost over. Another three-hundred and sixty-four days to go. A curry with mum and dad, dog-walking, bouldering on plastic, books in the attic, forgotten things. Everything in a compartment! It's hard to feel positive about it all. The girls I kiss and the tears I burst into during ad breaks, the rocks I fall off and the beer I drink, the friends I catch up with and those I won't see or speak with for months at a time, the streets I walk and the films I flick between. Trying to write more than a thousand words at a time, trying to make it all stick together, somehow, anyhow. The things with which I measure happiness, little victories like roaching Noel Edmonds' business card or playing cricket with Banks and Phil. Failures like constant uncertainty, my returns to the Goose. Things inbetween like the girl wearing suspenders at fancy dress but I drink too much wine and go to bed. These things haunt me for months at a time.

It took me two weeks to latch that last sloper at the climbing wall. I'd been stuck for so long, made so many attempts, that I actually started laughing aloud when I realised I was about to finish it - that I'd finally got my balance right, finally found the sequence, the right foothold, matched my hands, reached the top. No-one is around when I drop back to the mat and lie there laughing. The lamps in the ceiling make hot white dots in my eyes when I look away.

London is gigs and carabiners and house parties and eyes that meet and flash green in the Underground where the trains complain with whale song but still turn every corner.

Take twenty seven.

Dumb waiter

I had forgotten the feral mentality of the waiter until my first full shift at the Goose. It is a truly mercenary business. Any attempt to help my colleagues - carrying plates, sharing cutlery, making coffee - is met with hostility, curiosity, aggression. The reason for this is tips. Assisting someone with their section is tantamount to demanding a share of whatever tips from whichever tables you assist with, and splitting tips is taboo. The gratuities are the only reason we work there - nothing else would justify the pressure, which can border on violence. It may sound like I am exaggerating the workings of the restaurant business, but you simply have to understand: the Goose is a machine. Moloch, burning babies, ancient industry. Minimum staff level, maximum customer numbers, a goddamn factory line from Brakes Bros. to the microwave oven to the greasy burning plates to my hands to the table. Three plates stacked along my right arm and one held in my left hand, or two plates and swooping on the pickle tray as I pass the dumb waiter. Computers relay the order to printers stationed throughout the restaurant. The system is perfect - the weakest link is the soles of my feet. Dessert menus, further napkins, another pint, do you have a children's menu no madam we offer half portions.

You can't fight the system. Sometimes the Goosing isn't too bad - other days I'll get a thorough Goosing but the tips will make up for it - and often I'll be horribly Goosed without the sweetner. The tips can be phenomenal. On Saturday I worked from noon until 10pm with a twenty minute break. I am paid minimum wage of £5.35 an hour - totalling £53.50p for my shift. But I also took £97 in tips - taxfree cash - not including the visa card tips on which we are disgracefully levied tax as part of our wages - so I made £152.30p overall, or £15 an hour, which is actually a better hourly rate than most of my employment as a camera assistant. So much is unusual, but I make a minimum of £20 a day, and more often £50. This money goes directly into the bank, though I want to buy a rope and Tiso's are selling last year's Edelrid stock at £85 for 60m...

There is a soundtrack of unoffensive music drifting discreetly throughout the restaurant. You can't hear it in the evenings because the chatter, but on quieter afternoons the horror is unleashed... Enya, The Corrs, James Blunt (best rhyming slang ever?), Rod Stewart raping Cat Stevens. Dire fucking Straits. I can just imagine Knopfler in the studio, perma-tanned and wizened as a walnut, smug in his sweatbands, nodding with pleasure as some hard-up session musician does terrible things to a pawnshop saxophone and weeps silently, thinking only of the rent. Did any instrument ever suffer so much abuse for so little reward? And I'm not sure how, but somehow Richard Cheese covering Nirvana 'Come As You Are' has made it onto the soundtrack. This was probably a mistake but could potentially be a joke by some hateful graduate student with an iPod and spots.

Everyone comes to the Goose. Only three things are certain in life - taxes, eating in the Goose on a Saturday night, and death, which is actually the one I wish for if I am working on Saturday night. Not my death, of course, but the deaths of everyone who comes to eat. Slow death, painful death. We get the nouveau riche Irish eating fillet steak with asparagus, cooked rare, and the old money Scots who come every week for the bangers and mash. We get ned drinkers demanding WKD, which we don't serve, and pensioners in for their halves of IPA. Newlyweds who have already run short of things to say and grandparents still holding hands. Yelling kids, babies wearing mashed potato, German bikers in full leather, surly teenagers with eyeliner and hair dyed black, nuns drinking only water, business lunches who never ever tip on the company credit card, first date dinners, American tourists appalled at the atrocious service.

Last week there a woman wearing sensible boots and an ankle length skirt. She was in her late fifties and she was called Charlotte or Margaret or Victoria or Elizabeth. And she was sad, so sad, looking after her husband and his stroke, or his depression, his haemorrhage. He took over an hour to eat his ploughmans, and I don't think he spoke at all. He sat there with his big red nose and an archipelago of blue and grey on his arms, his rolled-up shirt sleeves, the shoelaces she tied this morning, sat there staring down at cheese, chutney, apple. I think at school they must have called her Charlie or Lottie or Lizzie.

One month and twenty-nine days to go.

Tune in next week... same Goose time, same Goose channel.

The canape weasel strikes back

Chi leaves Nick hanging: I think this might be my favourite photo of all time.



Back to the Goose. For those who don't know, I have a long and chequered history with the Goose. It opened in 1999, not long after I decided not to go back to study in Aberdeen. It was a fairly dismal time, for a number of reasons, and I needed a job. The Snow Goose was recruiting. It was easy money - on good days I would double my wages with tips. I'm not sure where all that money went, but I think it involved Aberdeen, alcohol and a girlfriend.

For forty hours a week I would wait tables. The Goose did - and still does - a roaring trade. Folk would queue in the rain half an hour before opening to guarantee a good seat. It's just solid pub grub at decent prices, the same as every other one of the three hundred Vintage Inns. They have identical decor, too, faux-antique furniture with crafted burns and wax, quirky candlesticks and tarnished brass picture frames with prints of days gone by. A truly hateful arrangement, in other words.

I was the canape weasel, raiding the fridges and bain maries to create small stacks of food, balanced delicately atop the half-roast potatoes used in the salads. Ross and Duncan tolerated this little thievery. They understood my art.

A fat American man was studying the menu, while his fat American family sat around him in check jumpers. He was wearing golf trousers. "Honey, what's a fuckin' Snow Goose? You ever hear of a fuckin' Snow Goose? Naw, me either. I mean, it's on the sign above the door, but I don't see it on the menu. Yeah. Yeah, maybe they're out. Still, what is a fuckin' Snow Goose? Like some kind of mythical animal? It ain't snowing. Hey! Waiter! What the fuck's a Snow Goose?"

I couldn't answer him. I was crying, hysterical with laughter. The place started to fill me with spite. Fight Club came out. I watched it three times in four days. I got in trouble when the landlord heard me dealing with a query.
"Is everything a la carte?" asked the customer - sorry, the guest - "Is everything home-cooked?"
"Absolutely," I replied. "We serve the very pinnacle of microwave cuisine."
"Simon," said Steve, "can I have a word?"

I'm still - genuinely - not sure how I wound up in Lancaster. I don't remember filling in the UCAS form, and I can't recall any particular flash of inspiration that lit the path back to university. During holidays, I usually found myself back in the Goose, my spite both unabated and honed by resentment. The last time I was there, I worked four shifts before someone in London offered me work and I fled immediately on the train. I do not sense any chance of that rescue, this time round. I'm back in the Goose. I'm amongst the oldest waiters by several years. The whole place is synonymous with my personal failure. It's a horrible, poisonous regression. Customers look at me in a puzzled manner and ask politely what I'm studying at university. Because I'm on holidays, right?

Right?

I get up, cycle to the leisure centre, swim a little, cycle home, cycle to work, work, cycle home, beer and bed. On half days I take the dog for a walk where he chases ducks with an optimism that verges on inspirational. I spend a lot of time looking at my map of the world. I've read the entire Rebus canon. I listen to Modest Mouse 'We were dead before the ship even sank'. Every now and then I have a beer with Baker or James or Ruaridh. I helped out at Dad's am-dram group last week doing the lights for the world premiere of The Brahan Seer, first in English then Gaelic. Ewan and I came third in the pub quiz last week thanks largely to his borderline autistic sports knowledge, though Matilda rolled up for long enough to tell us that vodka, cointreau, orange and lime is a Cosmopolitan. I'm leaving in September, though I don't yet know where or why. I've been applying for jobs in some of the Alpine chalets but Europe might be too safe.

And in the meantime, Hammer Time - you know when you've been Goosed. It takes two to Goose. Can I have a dry red, please. Hey, waiter. What the fuck's a Snow Goose. Upsell, upsell.

Two months, four days and counting.


Sunset over the Black Isle


"Dude, rainbows are beautiful arcs of light in the sky!"


This last shot was taken just after midnight.