The funniest meal

21st January 2026 0 By Allergendad

It’s January 2026. I’ve just turned 41, having a notably better birthday than the previous year. Flash back 12 months and I was in A&E for 8 hours on my 40th birthday having innocuously broken my knee at a kid’s trampoline park! My 41st was low-key but far more enjoyable. I’ve officially reached the age where a coat bought in the online sales that I helped to choose is a genuinely exciting present. So much so that I actually went for a walk the other night after I’d put the kids to bed just to try it out! There’s a pun there about how how far I am from being cool in a very warm coat but perhaps I don’t need the self deprecation. It’s a very nice coat!

It’s been a little while so let me give you a whistle-stop tour of what life is like currently:

We (the 5 of us) live in West Oxfordshire in a village so small and rural that I very much doubt my childhood self would ever believe that I’m happy here (I am). My oldest two are in the lovely little village primary school down the road and my youngest is lapping up every single second of finally having his mum’s attention all day before he starts pre-school when he turns three. The littlest one, Griffin, is growing into quite the character. He’s a cheeky, sassy little tyrant whose interests appear to be jigsaws and medieval knights and ideally jigsaws of medieval knights. He’s musical taste is eclectic but very much focuses around orchestral scores of children’s stories by Russian composers. We went through a phase where every night it had to be Peter and the Wolf or Swan Lake or the Nutcracker and he genuinely knows the music inside out. More recently, his interest as switched to the CBeebies pantomime of Robin Hood which I’m fairly certain he could now perform to perfection as a one-man (boy) show.

The older two ride the high-wire-balancing act of school energy levels. They both seem to love being at school but you can see their batteries running down as the term goes on and the emotions come out as inversely correlated to the state of charge. I find it hard to believe that the oldest, Piglet, will start secondary school in roughly 18 months time, but then the youngest will start primary school at the same time!

Our house is still a melting pot of audiobooks, lists, role playing characters from books/films and (just slightly too often) being called a “poopy-pants”. There’s a lot of love in this house. A lot of kindness but also the occasional act of aggression or meanness lightly dusted with a sprinkling of absolute lunacy.

My wife’s business is really starting to take off which is both exciting and a big relief. There is a weekly cycle of paying clients for sessions and it seems quite clear scope to grow the business into something bigger once there is the bandwidth (all kids in pre-school/school).

Going back to my broken knee, I made the mistake of not only going to a major child choir event at the NEC that my son was involved in but deciding to walk to and from the car park this time last year when my knee was still in a very bad way and I was completely reliant on crutches. I undoubtedly put my recovery back several stages by being too stubborn to wait for a shuttle bus that was deliberately put on to take people to and from the venue from the car parks. As such, it was very nice this year – when it came back around again – to be able to go to the event in full health. It’s strange but the walk didn’t seem anywhere near as far this year as it did last year!

Unlike last year where my wife and I tried to rush there after I’d finished work and arrive late and stressed, I booked the afternoon off work and made a bit of an event of it this year. We left Griffin with his grandparents (very happily so, I might add – it was a bit of a surprise considering how often it has to be mummy rather than daddy doing any conceivable task with him in the evenings) and took Dragon with us to see Piglet singing with thousands of other school children in this big arena. 5036 children to be exact if I’ve remembered correctly.

On the way there we took Dragon for a very early dinner at Pizza Express in Warwick. We went there last year too as it’s largely on the way and Pizza Express is usually our go-to for reliable allergen-friendly food. I should point out that we very, very rarely eat out any more. Hence why I don’t really have a catalogue of dining experiences to write about on this blog any more. It’s a combination of multiple things: Griffin’s range of allergies means that it’s pretty difficult for him to eat anywhere but we’ve also invested in home life and so the mortgage gives us less financial freedom for restaurant dining but we’re also much happier just being at home which means we’re looking for less excuses to escape the house.

Despite hoping to dine at 4pm and therefore competing with literally nobody for a table at that time, I’d pre-booked the table and naturally hoped we wouldn’t have lost it when we arrived a bit behind our booking time. What we turned up to was a restaurant that looked like it might not be fully open yet. We walked in and there were a few people working in the kitchen and one customer apparently waiting to collect a takeaway but the restaurant was largely dark and there was a distinct absence of any customer-facing staff at first. After just long enough to wonder if something was wrong, somebody did come downstairs and, quite flustered, apologised and explained that they’d just been inspecting the lights. The comment flew over my head at the time but it was to be the beginning of a quite absurd sequence of events…

Such was the unnecessariness of booking a table, we were instantly assumed to be ‘the booking’ and shown to our table. However, not before getting us some menus, or trying at least. The menus were in the top drawer of a sort of sideboard that had decided to lock itself shut. After two people had rattled, tugged, shaken and just outright pulled on the drawer – nearly bringing the precariously stacked box of empty takeaway pizza boxes down on their heads – we were handed a set of menus with yet more flustered apologising.

On being shown to our table, it quickly became apparent why the lights would have needed inspecting. Clearly some lights were working but the room itself was generally in darkness with just the spotlights above one side of the room’s tables partially lit. It was quite atmospheric and would have almost been romantic given the medieval building setting if it wasn’t a family outing. Cue more flustered apologising but it was nothing worse than just a bit amusing.

As I’ve said many times before, Pizza Express is very good (in my multiple experiences) with our allergies and it’s fairly easy to get meals that each of us can eat. Generally this involves just choosing a pizza of choice and substituting for vegan cheese (or no cheese in my wife’s case to avoid the coconut). For those of you new to the party, my wife isn’t allergic to coconut (or any food come to that) but because Griffin breastfeeds, she needs to avoid foods he will react to. It later transpired that our waitress was fairly new and, while very helpful and sympathetic to our requirements, struggled to process the order in a way that handled those substitutions. Given that milk and egg were on our allergens to avoid, there seem to be an assumption that we’d be ordering vegan food but actually in most cases that wasn’t what we wanted. There was a fairly uncomfortable few minutes while the flustered level rose a few notches higher while our waitress desperately searched for the meat feast (granted with a posher Italian name) on the vegan menu options and, surprise surprise, found it missing. I was a little nervous whether the order had been processed correctly but we had managed to order the meals with the substitutions we’d expected and in typical Pizza Express fashion this was all processed perfectly by the kitchen.

Next was the drinks – after a few minutes rummaging around in a drinks cabinet in the dark at the far end of the restaurant it turned out that they’d run out of a key ingredient for the soft drink (some lime fizz thing) I’d ordered. The order was quickly changed to another soft drink but by this point the combination of the menus, the darkness, the lack of vegan meat feast pizzas and the absence of their main promoted soft drink meant that the apologies were starting to taking a hint of hysteria.

The food arrived exactly as hoped (and very very tasty I must say, having not eaten out for quite a while!) but I had to suppress laughing out loud when my meat feast pizza came out with a big vegan sticker on the plate. I’ve said before that I understand that logic of labelling food with substitutions as it comes out of the kitchen but it undermines the entire confidence of the process when the labelling is so clearly wrong. Nduja, pancetta, pepperoni and Calabrese sausage with vegan cheese doth not a vegan pizza make.

At this point the meal took the full-on leap from slightly humorous to outright absurd. While very much enjoying the pizzas and marvelling at our schedule planning that meant that we should arrive at the venue far more punctually than we’d managed the previous year, the few functioning lights blinkered off for just a fraction of a second. There was a moment’s pause and silence as the three of us looked around and at each other, trying not to laugh at the jeopardy of the lighting failing completely. After a few seconds of the lights staying on it seemed clear it was a one-off and we carried on eating in our low – but importantly not no – light setting.

Then it happened again. And again shortly afterwards. In fact it quickly became clear that being pitched from low lighting to momentary periods of no lighting was going to be a feature of the rest of the meal. There was a gasp of ‘oh my’ as our now almost hyperventilating waitress walked back into the room at a moment of darkness, driving a short burst of now largely unintelligible apologies and checking we were ok. We were. But shortly later we find ourselves dining by self-supplied mobile phone torch light to tide through the regular second-long periods of blackout.

Our first fellow customers arrive at this point during a period of sustained low light getting the now well rehearsed apology for the lack of lighting and the explanation that it had just suddenly gone wrong earlier that day. They, like us, said it was fine but they must have started to wonder why were sat by torch light by the time the lights first fully went out for them. This led to an instantaneous ‘nope’ moment from them as they made their excuses and walked straight back out. I’m quite openly giggling by this point.

The rest of the meal saw no additional Fawlty Towers-esque moments and we eventually paid and left. I will say that while our waitress was clearly embarrassed and overwhelmed by the circumstances, she was nonetheless never anything short of being kind and I may have exaggerated the extent to which it sounded like she ended up sat in the corner breathing into a paper bag. But the circumstances were absurd and we joked at the time that it felt more like a Victoria Wood sketch than anything else. Hopefully by now the lighting is fully fixed and the waitress is having a materially easier time of it!

The rest of the evening ran smoothly, certainly by comparison. We made it to the venue in plenty of time. Dragon enjoyed the relatively rare treat of both her parents undivided attention for a few hours and we could even (with binoculars) make out Piglet on the other side of the arena amongst the thousands of identical white T-shirt wearing school children. I think it would be a stretch to suggest we could hear himself specifically but he no doubt enjoyed having the three of us there to support him and the structure of the Young Voices concerts mean that you get just the right balance of professional entertainment and sweet child chorus to make it work.