I wouldn’t want anyone to think that bloggers are a particularly bad-tempered group of people. In fact, they are, in my experience, quite the most relaxed, happy, laidback type of person it is possible to know - with the exception of Mr Angry, but that is his USP, so we shall forgive him it. And he’s actually quite amenable in person, though don’t tell him I told you so.
Yes, bloggers can be shy people, and often lacking in confidence, they can be awkward and occasionally oversensitive, but mean-spirited? No, never mean spirited, or hardly ever, and not really a bad-tempered sub-section of society at all.
But if you ask someone what they are thinking the moment after something has annoyed them, they will say ‘I AM ANNOYED!’ and if you put a keyboard in front of a blogger at that point, you may well receive the same answer. Just in writing. And then it will stay there forever.
So I get alarmed when I open my email to find that someone has left a comment on something I wrote in a fit of pique six years ago about god-only-knows-what, and they’re saying “God, you’re such a bitter and twisted person, get over it!” or “You spend so much time and energy obsessing over this? What kind of a sad loser ARE you etc?”
And I think, well, ‘Hello and welcome’, obviously, because that should always be the first thing one thinks, but then I have a mildly disappointed sigh, and I think to myself ‘What ARE you talking about, random google person?’ and I go and have a look, and it’s some advert that mildly distracted me at a moment when I needed to write something for the blog as I hadn’t in a few days, or a passing thought about an artist that I don’t like but, as I don’t particularly like them, don’t spend any time thinking about - only when someone has prompted me into it do I suddenly think ‘oh yes, that thing mildly annoys me, I’ll write that down because it’ll be funny and go back to moonbeams and lollipops and bunny rabbits and beans tomorrow’.
But five minutes after I wrote it, perhaps through the act of writing it, I can pretty much guarantee you that I thought almost nothing at all about that thing. So I always get a bit confused and sad when people leave comments on something after that saying “Get over it!” and I think “What? What do you mean? But I am over it! I was over it the moment I hit ‘publish!” (Unless it was about people eating loudly in public, in which case I wasn’t).
I don’t like people thinking I am bad-tempered.
So it is therefore a good thing that no one put a computer in front of me on the occasion of our meal on the last night in Venice, because I would have sounded like a reet whiny little cow.
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It was a place that had been quite highly recommended in a guide book and a community recommendation site, and another somewhere I saw it mentioned. Actually, that’s not quite true, it was a new branch, a sister restaurant to somewhere that already had two separate branches in Venice.
So anyway, we walked in and a surly young woman threw us onto a table outside the toilet doors and slammed some English menus down in front of us, which was sort of annoying, as I’d been really enjoying working out and ordering from italian menus all weekend. At this point we discussed leaving and going somewhere else, but annoyingly didn’t. The wine arrived at the table, delivered by a wine waitress who didn’t know how to work a bottle opener, which was pretty exciting, as the wine was taken away, uncorked by someone else, and brought back with only tiny weeny piece of cork floating in the glass, but not too much to stop it tasting like piss, which it did a bit.
We got starters, mine of a calabrese salad of rock hard unripe tomatoes that almost made me cry with their crapness. The waitress who had seated us and hated us had, we think, gone on a break, for she was nowhere to be seen if we had wanted something else, like some other drinks, or pepper or whatever.
My pizza arrived - they specialise in pizza, this place, doing about 80 different kinds - and apart from the fact I no longer had a knife and fork to eat it with, it looked lovely. I sat and waited for my beloved’s pizza to arrive, as I don’t like starting before my companion. And 25 minutes later, the pizza still looked lovely, but no longer produced such a lovely smell, as it was stone cold. His food hadn’t arrived. We couldn’t catch someone’s eye, and when we could, they couldn’t offer any help. Half an hour and a second attempt at ordering it - with someone else, for we still had no waitress - it arrived, and we sent mine away to be replaced by a hot one, etc etc.
And so it went on. I was torn between by hatred of being seen as the typical brash British tourist, and the knowledge that if only I’d had ANY handle on the language, or, in fact, been in the UK, I would have been complaining eight ways from Sunday and would not have left without having at least one thing taken off the bill.
However. I was stuck. There was nothing I could do. I didn’t have the language to complain, and I didn’t have the bravery to do it without. I was only stuck with one solution: walking out without paying. For a while it didn’t look as if that was going to be a problem, as we couldn’t get the waitress to show any interest in bringing a bill or taking any money. Eventually we followed her up to the desk and stood there for ten minutes until she felt like taking some payment.
Or My Beloved did. I had walked out the door and was standing outside, fuming and convinced he should just walk out behind me.
But he is too nice and law-abiding, and eventually came out similarly fuming, but clutching a receipt.
And yes, service was compulsorily included in the bill.
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So anyway, if you’d placed a keyboard in front of me right there any then, I would have written you a 4000 word treatise on bad service and all the details - for there were so many more details than that - and I would have ranted and raved and you would have thought that I had therefore had the worst weekend ever in the history of weekends and my entire time had been ruined and I was inconsolably unhappy etc etc. And you would think me miserable and mean-spirited and bad-tempered and all sorts. Just because that was the notable thing, and most dramatic part of my evening, and the thing that made the most comprehensive story, and that is how blogs work. And my would you imagine me miserable.
But but but.
But ten minutes later I had an ice cream in my hand and was laughing at something I can’t even remember as we crossed the bridge back toward our hotel. And ten minutes after that we’d decided not to go back to the hotel and to enjoy the emptiness of night time Venice instead and I was sitting on the outside deck of an empty water bus chugging down the Grand Canal in the very very cold taking a picture for a couple who wanted to tell everyone they saw that they’d just got engaged, and feeling content and happy and relaxed.
But if all I mentioned was the worst service in the history of restaurants, you wouldn’t know, and you’d all say soothing things and sympathies and then someone might come along and say “Gosh you ARE a miserable and angry and biter person, get over it!” because as far as they are aware everything I write on this blog is everything I think, rather than just moments in a whole world of different things. A whole life of different things, with just some notable moments picked out.
And that gets a bit frustrating, sometimes. Sorry, this is a bit of a confusing post, it’s just. You know - it just gets a bit frustrating sometimes.
Sorry, I’m a bit tired.
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Anyway, point is: I still think we’d have been justified in walking out without paying.
We would, right?
Or am I not thinking like a responsible grown up person?
And if I’m not, must I?
Founded in the early seventies, The Happy Eater was a chain of motorway service station restaurants where frazzled bank-holiday weekend parents would take their boiled-sweet-overstimulated children and feed them something yanked out of its hostess trolley grave for the purpose. They would mainly do this, it appears, on bank holiday weekends, when the roads were officially narrowed by the highways agencies to help provide people with proper in-car quality time. 
