Tim Dowling: Googled out but still in credit

The oldest one is watching TV when my wife and I get home. "Guess which person was at the thing I was just at," I say to him. "Which famous person, who made a speech, and I was there, too." "James May," he says. "More famous." "Nick Clegg," he says. I pause to consider whether Nick Clegg is actually more famous than James May. There can't be much in it. "More famous still," I say. "Gordon Brown," he says. "Oh… yes." I had meant for the game to last slightly longer than that. "I'm hungry," my wife says. "And there's no wine." I stop taking my coat off. "Did you talk to him?" my son says. "No," I say. "Loser." At the Thai restaurant, the English waiter takes my takeaway order. I open my wallet to find my bank card is missing – my wife must have taken it. I don't have enough cash. I am reluctant to use my credit card as I sometimes forget the pin under pressure, but I have no choice. "Do you work at Google, sir?" the waiter asks. "No," I say, in a tone of such pea-brained bewilderment that it sounds as if I don't know where I work. I realise he's looking at the badge on my lapel. "No, it's just this party I went to. It wasn't a Google party, but it was in the Google building." I peel it off and crumple it up. At the off-licence, I repeat my surprise at the missing bank card, but it matters less because the cash machine is broken. I pay with my credit card, buying two bottles of wine to ensure I am over their minimum charge. Back in the restaurant, I try to remember if I've paid for the food. There is a Thai woman behind the counter now. "Sorry," I say, "but have I paid already?" She stares at me. "Yes," she says, "you paid." "OK," I say. "I thought so. It's just that I went to the shop, and I used my card there, so I didn't know if..." She shouts to the English waiter in Thai. He answers back in Thai. Then he looks at me. "You paid," he says. "Just before." "OK, good," I say, looking at the floor. He says something to the woman in Thai, with one English word in the middle: "party". The woman laughs. I decide he must have said something like, "He's probably drunk from the party he went to, and so cannot remember performing simple tasks." I want to protest, but I cannot object to a slight I didn't actually understand. As I sit down to wait, my two wine bottles clink together in the bag. "So," the waiter says, "good party, was it?" "Yes," I say. "The prime minister was there." I then realise my mistake: in the context of the waiter's assumptions, this sounds like a lie. "It was interesting," he says, "all that business with Google in China." I find my myself unable to gauge his intent – is he sporting with me because he thinks I'm drunk, or just making polite conversation? There is no time to think about this; I need to formulate a coherent answer. "Yes," I say, "it's possible the Chinese government overplayed its hand." At this point a man who is dining alone at a nearby table turns round to look at me as if I have just said the stupidest thing he's ever heard. Is everybody in the restaurant an expert on internet censorship? Didn't I make it clear that I don't work at Google? "Huh," the waiter says. "So what do you think will happen in the end?" There follows a long silence, which I pray will be interrupted by the woman telling me my Singapore fried noodles are ready.