Long Awaited Meal

Drove down to Manchester to celebrate the first day of my Dad’s 91^st year with a family gathering and a meal at the Barton Arms in Worsley, a pleasant enough pub restaurant, built since my youth when I used to ride my bike down this way on along the adjacent Bridgewater Canal towpath; the food was pretty good and the prices very reasonable but the service was not so much slow as desultory as twice we had to send a delegation to search out the waiting on staff, remind them of our very existence and ask them first to remove used crockery and then offer some dessert (while some additional drinks never arrived at all), but we stayed cheerful throughout and filled the long gaps between courses catching up on family gossip, it being particularly good to see my far flung sister for the first time in over a year.