Mugg & Bean, Cresta

Monday, April 26, 2004

Service: * * *1/2
Food: * * *1/2
Ambience: * * *
Babe Count: * * * *

I've been watching this blonde two tables away for the last twenty minutes or so. She's having an earnest conversation with an older woman. She fumbles around in her handbag, and pulls out a pen. Scouts around the table, and starts writing stuff down on something.

I'm not certain what she's writing on, but it seems as though it's a paper napkin.

Now I'm here cos I've taken half a day off work cos of yesterday's food poisoning still being in my system, and I've got four Ethiopian educational scripts to get through by tomorrow morning, regardless of what poisons line my stomach. So I've got my notebooks and a pad of writing paper. Tons to spare.

Now the blonde has walked past my table earlier, so I've scoped out her figure. And she's a good looking babe. Nice curves. Very interesting face. Very smiley. With extremely long hair. Below the bottom of her buttocks.

So I reckon it'll be nice and gentlemanly to scoot over to her table and offer her some paper.

Which I do. I simply tear off a couple of sheets, walk over, hand her the pages, and say, "You look like you could use a few of these." I smile. She smiles. Says thanks very enthusiastically. And I go back to checking my scripts. The good deed has been done. And I didn't even slip her my Coffee-Shop Schmuck business card.

And she wasn't writing on a napkin. It was the back of an old slip. Crammed to the brim with tiny tiny handwriting.

My potato gratinee bake arrives, and I start plowing through it. I'm really not very hungry, and the food poisoning really feels like it's ready for a resurgence any minute now. But I do need sustenance, and there's nothing at all in my house except for some soup I cooked two winters ago and froze in Tupperware. I haven't dared look inside the Tupperware. Contrary to popular belief, frozen food DOES go off. It just takes longer to do so. In fact, two winters should just about do the trick.

So while I eat what would ordinarily be a delicious gratinee, I leave the scripts for later and observe the snivelling humanity sitting at the next table.

It's one of those families people flinch to see.

The man. Beak nose. Hair in a crest over one eyebrow. When he was young, he must have been a neat stiff-arm dancer. Unbearable vomit coloured jacket, the colour made up of a sort of blue-ish wool, cross-woven with a light-gray-brown wool. Ugh!!! People spend thousands of rands on this stuff.

The woman. No chin. None. Whatsoever. Just a bottom lip joined by a long sloping piece of pink skin tucked into a black collar with tiny white polka dots. Very wide collar. Visible above a pinky-red cashmere cardigan. A sprinkle of gold drizzled around her necklessness.

Two daughters. The young one around six. Wearing a pink pajama top with flowers embroidered on it. Still young and innocent.

The other around eight or nine. As soon as I see her, I start mouthing a word silently in her direction. "Escape!" I say. "Escape!!!" But it's too late. She's already trapped. This little madam has a blue and white striped polo-neck top in varying shades of blue, with glitter wool. She's wearing knee-high boots over skin-tight black slacks. Her nails have been shaped, and they've got clear pearl varnish on. And she's wearing dark pink lipstick. Not slap dash. Expertly applied.

She stares at me. "Escape!" I say again, exaggerating my mouth shape. She frowns, looks past me, turns away and doesn't look back. Will never look back.

I finish half my meal, and resume script checking. I'm almost through the fourth one when the smiley blonde with the extreme hair comes to my table. It would be reallllllly nice right now to have her hair spread out over my pillow. Or cascading down past her breasts, to stroke my cheek.

She says, "I just want to say thank you so much for your act of kindness earlier. You took the trouble to notice my need. Not many people would do a thing like that. Thank you so very much."

She gives me a dazzling smile. And I WANT to give her my card. But that'll dash the purity of the moment. So I just smile back and say, "Thank you!"

She smiles again, turns, and her hair catches me in its wake, and I watch her walk away from me.

Later, the manageress, Kate, comes and chats to me. I've paid with my Master Card, and Mugg & Bean has a special on at the moment where you get a free coffee voucher every time you use the card. So she's come to give me mine.

I wheedle some info out of her. I find that she's on her last few days at Mugg & Bean, and that the Spur in Balfour Park has just been bought by new owners, and that she's about to move over there and manage that place.

"Sheesh," I tell her. "That's going to be a challenge. I work across the road from it, and there are only three places in Balfour Park to eat at... the Mugg & Bean, which is TERRRRRRIBLE!, the chicken place next door, and the Spur, which is worse than the Mugg & Bean.

"I know," she says. "But the new owners are going to make a huge difference."

"Maybe I'll try it out tomorrow," I say.

"Let me know. I'm sure things can improve there," she says.

We yack a bit more, and it's time for me to go home and sleep off the rest of this food poisoning. I check my jersey for long blonde hairs, but nothing's caught. I'll just have to imagine.