The crab at Chieveley

I’m writing this on a sunny Sunday afternoon with a rather heavy heart as I’ve said goodbye to Jeff and won’t be seeing him for a while as I’m going on holiday for a couple of weeks. We had a lovely weekend together and I think he enjoyed the surprise part of it – he’s actually going to be writing a blog about Sunday, so I’m going to focus on Saturday night.

I arrived at Jeff’s house at about 4:00pm and we watched some more cookery shows on TV and chatted – Jeff was already looking gorgeous in an all black shirt and suit – I had brought my clothes with me to change into – Jeff didn’t know where we were going, all I had said is, ‘Dress smartly!’.

Things didn’t actually get off to a very good start – I started putting my makeup on and Jeff started playing a game connected to the internet. After I changed, I walked into the room hoping to get a reaction from Jeff, but he continued playing the game, he did look around briefly and saw me sitting on his sofa, but I didn’t get any compliments or comments about what I was wearing or how I looked. I can be totally honest I admit I have low self esteem and what Jeff thinks (or whatever man I respect, for that matter) of how I look, does matter to me. Therefore when Jeff didn’t say anything, it did hurt a bit – especially as I tried to make a lot of effort.

We had a chat about it, as I did get quite upset – not just because of the above, but also because of the things that happened in 2009-2010 when we split up. Jeff has always been pretty good about talking about that time and I guess if we’re to have any future together, we need to be able to be open and honest with each other.

For once – I actually managed to keep where we were going a secret (as opposed to usually blurting things out) and as I was driving on Saturday night, I didn’t have anything to drink beforehand – however Jeff had a glass of wine from one of the bottles I had bought a few weeks ago. I have to say, I wasn’t impressed, which was a bit of a bugger considering it wasn’t that cheap - £14 a bottle… Ahh well, live and learn!

We left at 7:00pm as we had a reservation for 8:00pm – where were we going? ‘The Crab’ at Chieveley! http://www.crabatchieveley.com/ A rather nice, quite posh seafood restaurant near Newbury. Considering I’m not overly great at driving at night, I thought I did rather well – we did take a couple of wrong turns and then drove past the restaurant and had to do a U-turn, but hey, we got there for 8:00pm so weren’t late.

The place was gorgeous and the staff were brilliant – the only downside was that we had to wait over 30 minutes to be shown to our table which annoyed me slightly, but Jeff was as laid back as ever – we had all 3 courses, the best one being the deserts as we had the ‘deserts for two’ pudding, which consisted of LOADS of different deserts, some of which were absolutely gorgeous, such as the chocolate ice cream – yummy! Considering we had 3 courses each, a couple of soft drinks each and Jeff had 500 ml of wine, the entire bill only came to £60 each, so it was very reasonable, considering…

We got back by 11:00pm and were in bed by midnight – as the clocks went forward this morning, I wanted to make sure we got enough sleep as had to be up early – why? Well.. I’ll wait until Jeff tells you!
- Molly