If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all customers doubt you
But make no allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, but deal in bigger lies,
Or being hated, and give way to hating,
And yet look good, and talk so wise:
Yours is the restaurant and everything that is in it,
And, which is more, you’ll be a waiter, my son!

Rudyard Kipling/Manuel T. Waiter

There was very little poetic about my demeanour come 1 am on Sunday morning. I was flat out on top of my bed soaked in my own sweat with all my extremities throbbing sore from the endeavours of the previous few days. It was good to be horizontal. Vertical is fine when you are engaged in the delivery of fine food stuffs and beverages, both hot and cold, but when the musics over baby it’s better to be horizontal and have someone turn out the lights.

I lay there for a while wondering how to get undressed without having to move. I could flick one shoe off, that was easy, but getting the other off was proving much more of a challenge than I really wanted at this most ungodly of hours. So there I lay, with one shoe on and my shirt unbuttoned revealing my hairy moobs and comedy tum tum. Obviously I had undone my belt and flies before I even got into the house. Obviously. And there I lay, prone, dead to the world with only the throbbing pian in my legs and the smell from my one exposed, shoeless, foot for company. This is the other side of waitering, the ugly sweaty pain ridden side that the hospitality associations don’t want you to see. They keep these dark secrets out of the brochures you know.

As I lay there, the sweat from my back seeping into my bed clothes, I began to wonder how much longer I can keep on waitering. It’s tough out there on the floor you know. It’s taking longer to get over busy weekends and the injuries are taking longer to heal. For Gordon’s sake I’m still wearing a Mr Bump Plaster (we are out of proper blue plasters) from the nasty paper cut I got whilst shuffling menus on Saturday! I love a good menu shuffle it has to be said. This bout of reflection and self contemplation wasn’t just brought on by the collapsed and rigid position I found myself in but by the fact that I had to give a table away that evening to one of my waiter chums as I was simply under too much pressure to take another table. This was both new and frightening. I’m a taker not a giver!

Waiting is a youngling’s game and I am no youngling. And I’m not French either, mores the pity. If I was old and French I could pull off the fat maître ‘d roll with sublime confidence and untold pleasure. Walking about the place like I was lord of the manner and you, the customers, were nothing more than fleshy dirty people beneath my handmade Italian shoes is something I would be very happy to do. I would also be very very good at it. I can out snooty a Frenchman with ease. Why just the other evening I had a chap gently whisper into my ear a request for ,”a little tub of brown sauce.” He whispered so that the rest of his chums wouldn’t know how uncouth he was. I repeated the request back, loudly and with more snoot and sarcasm than you could shake a pointy Frenchman’s nose at. “Your sauce Anglais sir”, I announced as I, literally, dropped the ramekin of brown goo on his table. See, that was both snooty and rude and totally uncalled for. I’d be a perfect maître ‘d.

But alas whilst I have the gait of a comedic French maître ‘d I am in fact from Belfast and not gay Paris. Which is disappointing. You see having waited tables for so long I am fit for nothing else. I am institutionalised now, no escape, no nine to five for me. Just a long slow sweaty death with occasional moments of joyful snootiness. I got over my self-doubt and hopes for a better tomorrow about ten minutes later and was soon changed and ready for bed. I ate my usual post work meal of curry followed by mini twister lollies (x2) and as I watched Friday night’s Peep Show I counted my hard earned tips from the weekend. Not too shabby it has to be said. I went to sleep with a smile on my face, safe in the knowledge that it’s a waiter’s life, and quite probably death, for me.

“….. Yours is the restaurant and everything that is in it,
And, which is more, you’ll be a waiter, my son!”

Whether you like it or not.