the bowl of soup i have lived a thousand years

But I loved it then, and in memory, I love it now.

I expect, too, that if I tasted its menu now, I’d pick holes in everything on it (all that iceberg lettuce and bottled thousand island dressing).

Looking back, of course, I realise that it was completely unoriginal even during what I will call its heyday hundreds of places just like it must have sprung up around the country about then, inspired by movies such as Desperately Seeking Susan, St Elmo’s Fire and Cocktail. The building briefly housed a Loch Fyne restaurant the last I heard, it is to be converted into flats. On the other hand, not to order it felt like a crime – or perhaps I mean a punishment. To order this dish was extremely hazardous if I was wearing my best white, sleeveless polo neck. The sweet, sticky softness of those ribs! Every visit meant war for me. And we loved the menu, too, which encompassed modish offerings like club sandwiches and barbecue ribs. Housed in a redbrick Georgian building that had once been a nurses’ home, it was close to the university, which made it cool in our eyes (we were always eyeing the Union up hopefully), and though we inevitably laughed as we ordered A Slow Comfortable Screw Against The Wall – in case you don’t know, this is a long, Galliano-based drink – we hadn’t yet learned to be sniffy about such delights. Of this pair, it was Hanrahan’s that seemed to us like a place worth saving up for, and henceforth it was our chosen venue for the celebration of birthdays and particularly significant events on the boy front I used the money I earned in my Saturday job at Boots. Beyond this – and to us, it was like staring out across an ocean – there were basically only two other options, both more expensive: a wine bar called Mr Kite’s, where quiche was served and Phil Oakey out of the Human League had once been seen, and an American-style restaurant called Hanrahan’s, where men with Buck’s Fizz hairstyles and (I may have imagined this) salmon-pink ties served ridiculous cocktails to footballers (whose wives had not yet been invented), solicitors and dealers of secondhand Jaguars (ten bob millionaires, as they were known then). Pizza Hut was OK in our eyes – the words “deep pan” were new and fresh and slightly thrilling then – but this branch was next door to Tesco in a small shopping precinct, which really crushed the vibe on our Dorothy Perkins earrings and sky-blue eyeliner. On the vaguely affordable side, there was curry and Chinese food, both of which were a bit too familiar to us to be fully glam, or there was Pizza Hut, which had at last opened a branch not far from where we lived. For another, it was the 1980s and we lived in Sheffield. A restaurant? For the longest time, the thought never occurred to us.

The bowl of soup i have lived a thousand years