The Silence of the Lambs

Here’s an account of a minor skirmish to illustrate my total lack of a killer instinct. Last night we went to the Grand to see the most excellent ‘Classic Ghosts’. Arriving late at our seats we found them already occupied by two women. Not wishing to embarrass the occupants, nor to make a fuss, we sat next to them. We noted that the two seats directly behind the women were vacant and concluded that they had mistaken the row they should have been in – easily done in the semi-dark. We settled down to watch the first play, ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ by M.R. James and thoroughly enjoyed it, apart from the fact that someone seemed to have forgotten to switch the heating on in the theatre. In common with almost all patrons, we kept our coats on throughout and the spooky atmosphere of the production added to the pervasive chill feeling.

Chatting in the bar during the interval we decided to move into the two vacant seats in the row behind us, on the grounds that it might be a bit warmer in the middle of a row, rather than at the end of it – a tactic that has served us well at various football grounds. We also chatted to the women who had occupied our seats and learned that they were on a short holiday in Blackpool. They were friendly and chatty and we were doubly glad that we hadn’t embarrassed them earlier.

Back for the second half – ‘The Signalman’ by Charles Dickens – we settled into our newly acquired seats. Our peace was rudely, and I do mean rudely, interrupted by a loud voice proclaiming ‘What’s going on here then?’ A bombastic, angry woman and her partner were bearing down on us in the mistaken, but loudly persistent, view that we had taken her seats. She insisted that they had been sitting there during the first half, to mutterings from people around us to the effect that ‘Oh no they hadn’t.’ But this woman had the killer instinct and was not about to let the truth get in the way of her sitting where she wanted to sit. We couldn’t claim they were our seats, as they weren’t, nor did we want to explain the reasons for our being there, as the two women in our seats, by now our friends, had turned round to join in, as had half the stalls audience,  and there wasn’t time to argue the toss before the curtain went up. We threw in the towel, cut our losses and slunk back to our previous seats, leaving Ms Killer Instinct triumphant. Dave and I do not possess the ‘I Know My Rights’ gene. We are, however, afflicted by the ‘After You’ syndrome.

As a final supreme irony, as we sat down, one of the women in our seats said, ‘Ooh, what are you like, going in the wrong seats.’ Ah well……

Thank you for reading,

Sheilagh