I had a strange experience last night.
Karen and I were at a stand-up comedy evening, which was excellent! However, the compere did his warm-up by talking to each of the tables of people there and finding things to make fun of. And he did it very well; it was most entertaining. And he did all the tables, not just the ones at the front. Jobs, accents, baldness, where people were from: he managed to tease everyone in a good-natured way without causing offence.
The thing was, when he got to our table, Karen and I were sitting at the side of the table, both facing the stage, so we were not side by side; I was in front of Karen, so we didn't look "together". So he started with me, by saying "How come you're on your own? Did your wife die?"
I boggled. I was doing one of those thought processes that seem to take many seconds, but probably the pause was only half a second: do I tell the truth, which is going to be a bit of a downer, and not exactly lead anywhere funny .... or say something else? If so, what? Evading the question leads to him probing and making more of it... this had already happened about people's jobs and so on. I didn't want him to go in that direction.
Anyway, all I actually needed to say was "this is my girlfriend here", which is what I did say ... second ... after a bit of a pause and saying "yes, my wife died". . . . And I think he assumed the first answer was just me trying (very badly) to be funny. Because later he asked if I had kids, and accused me of leaving them at home with the "ex", and so on. And went on to make fun of calling each other "boy" and "girl" friends at our age. Just his bad luck, really, to ask that first question, which made me seize up for a moment.
I went over to him in the interval and told him that my wife had indeed died last year, and he was a bit gobsmacked...
