Starter: A good dosage of Grace; “For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly grateful” to which people either mumble a half-hearted Amen, or else in my case say “May the Lord make us eternally smothered in fruit-flavoured animal bi-product. The only providence I’m going to be receiving tonight is a pot noodle.” At which point the trolleys come out, carrying with them pasta or some kind of jacket potato covered with cheese and bacon… or some lamb burgers (yes, lamb) or for the most part some kind of digestible substance. After so many years, you learn not to try and work out what it is in the dishes they give you; either they taste nice, or they don’t. Luckily, the majority of the food in my house is rather good, the only real disadvantage is the repetitiveness of the menu.
“What was for dinner yesterday?”
“Coronation chicken.”
“Hmm OK. What about tonight.”
“Oh umm… the coronation chicken that wasn’t eaten yesterday… and some Pillow rice.”
Main Course: It is during the actual process of eating the food when the real action starts. Spoons scrape trays of broccoli, forks flail everywhere, not really being directed at anything in particular, but rather in some kind of display of vain courageousness, stabbing at everything in order to try and grab anything possible; including sauce, which inevitably just spills straight through the slots. As cutlery goes flying and missing, people just take their neighbour’s knife, licking it and thus claiming it as their own. Jugs get poured, and spilt, and then thrown at the younger years down the end of the table in a manner that they automatically pick up on meaning “FILL UP THE JUICE GODDAMIT!!”. It is at this point the first culinary item gets hurled. A potato, or a sad looking lamb burger gets denied its purpose of being consumed, and instead gets propelled at 50mph and by the laws of physics and gravity, lands in the face of somebody midway to putting a spoonful of coronation chicken in their mouth.
The table becomes the stage for some kind of Darwinian experiment to publicly display the laws of natural selection at its best. The best adapted with fast snatching capabilities and quick reactions are the ones who survive, and those who passively wait their turn and are too slow remain at the shallow end of the dream pool. Thankfully, I am gifted with the ‘must get food at any cost’ drive and so start shovelling spoonfuls of chicken onto my plate, along with the rice and broccoli and any other food available.
Pudding: After having stuffed my face and finished eating in the space of about 10 minutes (another trick you pick up; wolfing down your food), I try to distract myself by conversing a bit, and pick up the fag ends of the conversation going on beside me.
“Yeh, Darren is soooo annoying.”
“I can’t believe he did that to Tracy! I mean, what did she ever do to him!”
“I know… god, I hope they get back together”.
I try and work out which couple in the school is made up of said ‘Darren and Stacy’. Or was it Tracy… well anyway, as I ponder this it suddenly occurs to me that the people who they are talking about are in fact, characters in some soap opera about materialistic, angsty teenagers who don’t actually exist. I think; gossiping about Gossip Girl… now that’s ironic. I listen for a while and quietly laugh to myself, and eventually move to the person opposite me and strike up a quick, pointless conversation about… oh I don’t know, use your imagination. Meanwhile, the re-enactment of the Battle of the Somme really is in full throttle, with tangerine and tomatoes being added to the artillery. I sit cross-legged in my chair munching on my 4th pineapple muffin, hoping the yogurt isn’t going to decide to take out its revenge on me. As the last trolley is wheeled out (and after various quick reactions and matrix style moves), a momentary wave of relief passes over me, until suddenly SPLAT. An entire pot of yogurt hits me square in the face.
For a moment I am stunned, and then I feel a frown begin to form over my face. I wipe the yogurt off from my eyes and glare down the table, only to be met by the red, hysterical faces of ten other girls, similarly covered in food, and I begin to feel a strong sense of wistfulness. The frown soon turns into a smile, and I cannot help but giggle and laugh along.
‘May the Lord make us truly grateful’. I suppose, at the end of the day, I couldn’t have said it any better.
Today I went back to songs that were sitting at the back of my collection but are none the less unforgettable. ‘Dice’ by Finley Quaye and ‘Send Me On My Way’ by Rusted Root. Pancakes anyone?
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