Saturday night an early departure from work, have to join the boy at the Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Which, while tamer than the last one we saw, was also better in a few key ways, namely that they used an actual film (not a DVD), it did, however, miss the crowd-urgings of that anti-Michael J Fox, and crowd participation was not what it should be.
That said, the boy had fun and that's all that matters.
Sunday we start in Kensington, Coffee at the Higher Ground where the boy recognizes a couple of his PDA classmates, a couple of cupcakes from Crave, then off to our film.
Anonymous is the pick of the day, not bad, long, an interesting premise - a rather speculative look at the authorship of Shakespeare's plays, three out of five bananas I'd say, upon further research I'm amazed it's by the same director as 10,000 BC - one of most laughably bad movies I've seen in the past 20 years.
After which we go to Notables - a restaurant of which I've heard some fine things, we start with the crab & shrimp bake and steak tartar, then follow it with Grilled Bison Flank and the Spragg Farms Porchetta.
Now the food is good, the restaurant is busy, there are a dozen staff members all on different errands, and for a moment - just a moment, the 2 hours it takes us to eat dinner, it's life as normal. By normal I mean as it was once upon a time, before moving to the NE, before the various economic tragedies, there's that sense of - well, normalcy.
This is all subjective of course, but since moving to the NE, since working at the restaurant, I've become a regular at some of the worst bars on earth, I know this, it's the demands and expectations of my co-workers, and so while dinner is slow - it's good food, after all, we sit and enjoy the atmosphere.
The boy's pleased, he assures me it's the best meal he's had in a while, the fact is (and this is underlined when the bill comes...) that young men between the ages of 14 and 21 should only be fed at all you can eat buffets. That said there is something about the atmosphere that comes with the food, the non-ethnic, European traditions of cooking that warm the soul, and it's worth the price just to get out of my box, if only for an evening.
It's been a great day, great dinner, I take him home afterwards and make it an early night.