An enjoyable evening, as always, meeting up with Simon Jacobs for a natter and some decent grub.
I chose The Cow this time. I have only eaten there once before, some years ago, with Janie, Charlie and Chris. It turns out that Simon was in the same boat; he’d also been once before and also remembered the place fondly.
I guessed that Simon might have our nation’s crazy politics on his mind and I wanted to avoid the unpleasantness that arose on a previous such evening when Simon abruptly mentioned an especially venal yet useless former leader of the Conservative Party …
…so I asked Simon top provide trigger warnings before he mentioned any former, current or prospective leaders of the Conservatives. This Simon agreed and more or less stuck to throughout the meal.
A very tasty meal it was too. We both went for the smoked mackerel pate starter; then Simon went for the beef and Guinness pie, while I went for the posh seafood pasta dish.
I wanted to quiz Simon hard about the Krokus incident from Keele in 1981…
…but Simon claimed to be behind with his Ogblog reading and deflected my more incisive questions. We agreed that we both recalled that Krokus were not to our taste…to say the least.
Then, just as I finished my main course, Simon said “Mark Francois” without so much as a trigger warning.
Look – I know that, strictly speaking, that gentleman is none of the things I listed (viz Tory leadership) but I do think that the flagrant, unexpected mention of his name was a breach of the spirit if not the letter of my trigger warning request.
It’s Simon’s good fortune that I was able to gather myself without causing a good deal of embarrassment, mess or embarrassing mess in The Cow.
We discussed many interesting things other than politics. We also discussed employment practices, cricket and music. We did not discuss tennis this time, much to Janie’s chagrin afterwards when I described the evening.
I always enjoy these evenings, but I must construct a more exhaustive list of characters who require trigger warnings ahead of being mentioned. We can’t afford any more Iain Duncan Smith or Mark Francois type incidents in public.