You are all gay though, right?

Dinner in a hotel restaurant here, a group of us, plates cleared, that pleasant stage of the evening where nobody is in a hurry. The waitress comes over, entirely friendly, and says:

You’re all gay though, right?

Well. Yes. Obviously yes. Demonstrably, visibly, audibly yes.

I genuinely cannot remember what any of us said back, which tells you it cannot have been anything clever. What I remember is the delivery. It was not a nudge, or a bit of banter, or a waitress being daring. It had exactly the tone of somebody confirming that the table wanted the bill split.

A British waitress would sooner walk into traffic. She might spend the whole evening being certain, and would take that certainty to her grave rather than say it out loud at the table. The information would be established entirely through inference and never once acknowledged, which we would all agree afterwards had been the polite way to handle it.

Here it was just a thing that was true, said out loud, on the way to the till.

It is not the first time

The all time champion remains the makelaar. This was back when I had moved over and my husband was still in London, and I was going round apartments on my own trying to find us somewhere to live.

So I explain the situation. Married, husband still in the UK for now, looking for a place for both of us. And the estate agent asks, with no edge to it whatsoever, whether we are in an open marriage.

Reader, I laughed. Partly at the question and partly at the total absence of any sense that it might be a question you would not ask a client you had met twenty minutes earlier.

And in fairness to her, from a housing point of view it was not entirely irrelevant. Two names or one, two people living here or one, is a legitimate thing for a makelaar to want settled. She had simply gone at it directly instead of circling for ten minutes hoping I would volunteer it.

I have written before about how long it took me to stop hearing Dutch directness as rudeness. These are the two exchanges I think of whenever it comes up, because neither of them was remotely rude. Both were somebody establishing a fact they wanted, in one sentence, and then moving on with their day.

Nine years in and I still could not do it. But I have stopped flinching, which is progress of a sort.