THAT WILL DO FOR ANOTHER YEAR!

Pre-theatre eating is fraught with timing difficulties, as well as where's best to go in an unfamiliar town. We half-heartedly toured the main streets and surveyed what was around by peering at menus, looking through windows, and at the end of it remaining undecided.

Trying to sit quietly and rest from our epicurean search, we found ourselves sipping excellent coffee in an independent coffee house, together with a liquor besotted Scotsman trying to sober up on real coffee. He tried to converse,very loudly. When the chat stuttered to a natural halt with us, we were engrossed in some truly great reading materials, he 'pestered' the shop owner. His slurring words cycled through life and death manipulations, attempts at offensiveness - the guy was too drunk to manage it - to eventually attempting fond farewells at the open shop door, right by us. Although fine and dry, it was pretty cold outside and our coffees did not stand sipping intermittently with that low temperature exposure.

Having been relieved of his disturbing customer, the shopkeeper took a charitable line about him and others in the same position, kind of apologetically, then spent the next 10 minutes sharing his personal love of religion with us.

We paid our dues, and set off for more ambling, this time towards a river side area. So he could speak on the cell phone with reduced noise interference from traffic flow, hubby stood in a doorway. As luck would have it, it was the entrance to a restaurant serving early evening meals at an economic price for two courses. We went in and enjoyed a pre-theatre munch.

Widow Twanky, the pantomime dame. In the interval of the show, which was very entertaining, (nothing to do with pantomimes) I could not link the character with the panto, neither could hubby. S/he ran a laundry in old Peking. But then in came India. I got fed up with the muddled cogitations and gave them a rest. The confusion of modern day productions that seem to put three pantomime stories into one, together with any other odd vignettes which fly around at the time like dust, was reflected in my thinking. Anyway, we are now out of our 'misery'.........Aladdin. That will do for another year!