Putting On the Ritz

It was Debbie’s birthday last week. Now this is not like your birthday, or mine, or anyone else’s come to that because when Debbie’s special day approaches there’s an all encompassing panic that fills the heads of anyone around her for months before the event. Anticipating the day is a bit like knowing the police and social services are coming to check if you’re a fit parent, or awaiting the arrival of those two women who clean houses on the telly, running their white gloves over your garage floor looking for dust.

The words “birthday” and “Debbie” in the same sentence strike fear in to my heart. In fact I’d rather have triple bypass surgery on that heart, using blunt plastic knives and without anaesthetic, than get the preparations wrong. My wife likes her annual celebrations to be done with Mary Poppins like precision and to be practically perfect in every way.

I made my first mistake on the birthday immediately after we met by assuming she had the same attitude as mine – ignore the years and you can stay twenty one for ever. As we lived four hundred miles apart and hadn’t yet exchanged birth dates I didn’t send a card or get a present, but apparently I should just have known by instinct. My reception when I saw her a few days afterwards was like Margaret Thatcher would have had while attending an unemployed miners’ rally in communist Russia wearing a T shirt with the slogan Down With Vodka. The red flag that I saw flying was actually my hanky after I had tried to stop my nose bleeding following a punch that Wonder Woman would have envied.

Debbie doesn’t just open presents. She feels them, squeezes them, sniffs them, rattles them, and eventually, after a few cups of tea, she opens them. And woe betide you if you haven’t bought the right one as “faking it” is not in her vocabulary. Well, not with presents anyway.

Over the years I’ve had my share of hits and misses with presents I’ve bought for her. I’m still trying to work out why the season ticket for Celtic Park didn’t go down well, although it did get received a bit better than the gleaming, stainless steel wheelbarrow or the blue, metallic tool box I selected with love and care. In my defence we needed them, but that’s not the point of presents in our house. As if by way of making her point, the year after the wheelbarrow, I was given a box of Brillo pads, six toilet rolls and a packet of disposable razors. “Well”, she said emphatically, “we need them”. I kind of got the point.

So, last week, I pulled out all the stops and took her to the Ritz Hotel for dinner – the whole string quartet, palm court bit with waiters removing silver domes over the plates with a “ta dah” flourish as they reveal the food underneath like a magician finding his rabbit. To make these waiters feel good I always put on an act of surprise when they do their choreographed bit, as if I’m in my dotage, have forgotten what I ordered, and have just seen food for the first time. I’m a good audience.

Anyway, I think I got away with the celebrations this year and just about got it right. I wore a suit and so avoided hiring a jacket off the waiter unlike the poor bloke next to us in the bar whose wife was apoplectic as he’d met her from work in a luminous safety anorak. I was also spared the embarrassment of asking for a tie. They are very discreet at The Ritz and bring round a wooden box, like a cigar display case, filled to the brim with kipper ties like those my grandad used to tie up his trousers when he couldn’t find his belt. You hand over a tenner deposit, put the tie on, and everyone assumes you are an Open University teacher or work in recycling.

Through in the restaurant everything went well with great cocktails, superb food and a really special atmosphere until the string quartet started to play selections from the musicals, settling eventually on Carousel and the song You’ll Never Walk Alone. As she slowly recognised the tune, Debbie’s Scouse roots came to the fore and she jumped on the table singing “One Stevie Gerrard, there’s only one Stevie Gerrard”.

You can take the girl out of Liverpool……….