mostly david ephgrave

Tonight I went out for a meal with my wife as a treat, using a gift card that had been given to us a while a go by a friend for cat-sitting while she went on holiday (something we’re actually doing at the moment too). It was nice to do something that was just for us, particularly as things have been stressful of late. We went to the local restaurant Hermitage Road, which is always lovely and didn’t disappoint tonight. It was a pleasant evening after a day that had left me pretty uptight with all the things I have to do at the moment and how behind on them I feel. I’d been trying to work today, which proved difficult; even writing this is a challenge as I’m so tired; these two paragraphs have taken far longer than they should. I guess the trick is not push it at times like this as it only makes it more frustrating, Ultimately, I’m beginning to pull material together so I’m not in a bad position, it just feels like it as I’m always working to a tight...

It was while I was out for a birthday meal at Hermitage Road in Hitchin last night that I realised I’d also spent my seventeenth birthday in the same building, competing in the final of a Battle of the Bands competition – and that the gig had taken place exactly half my lifetime ago. It’s strange to think that something I remember so clearly, which happened on the cusp of adulthood, could be such a large fraction of my life ago. I know I’m hardly decrepit, but it was still a wake-up call. I would never have guessed that I'd be there seventeen years later, having dinner with my wife; partly because in 1998 it was a dank, dingy club, and not the sort of place you’d want to eat in. The phrase ‘wake-up call’ makes this realisation sound negative, when it was actually pleasing to note. When you’re seventeen, you don’t think that far in the future. You’ve no idea how things will turn out. I’d only just left school and started college, which was wh...