out to dinner!

Ray was not - emphatically not - a man who enjoyed going out to dinner, in his later decades.  I think he believed it to be a profound waste of money - sitting in a noisy environment eating ... well, why?  (To be fair, or at least honest, I don't think - as he himself would admit - had anything resembling a decent sense of taste - eighty-five years of smoking rather deadened his palate - so he didn't enjoy that rather essential part of a meal, and one could have a drink in a pub).  Indeed, the last time I went out to dinner with him was in 2003, for his 80th birthday, and that was a pretty dire occasion, with him arguing with the poor wait staff and insisting that the (quiet) music was turned off.  So we never went to The Lighthouse, the restaurant that's been at the top of the road since 1999 (no, he didn't want to go there in 2003 ...).  For Alice and me to go there this evening felt, at least to me, like a major transgression, a defiant gesture of grown-up-ness - and we had an excellent, non-pretentious, and, er, non-noisy meal, and an excellent bottle of Chablis.