It’s been a long time since I lived in a place which had a dining table. Our old apartment literally had no spare room for such a thing, and although we have a huge kitchen now, we don’t have a table in it to eat off. I remember in one of my old flats we squished a dining table and chairs into the area just off by the front door, but I still hardly ever used it.
So generally we eat on the couch, or most of the time, in our room. I don’t like this arrangement, because a) when we eat on the bed, we inevitably splatter something ont the duvet or the sheet. or b) when we eat on the floor by the TV, something always gets on the carpet! The other night, I had had enough when BF got some curry on the carpet – the turmeric seriously digs its heels in and creates an eerie fluorescent glowing stain. So I brought in a huge tea towel to act as a picnic mat for us. Clever, huh? If only I’d thought of that AGES ago…..
It’s a far cry from my parents’ house, where we had a rectangular dining table (it extended out both ends) covered in an easy-clean cover. I hesitate to call it a tablecloth, as it was made of a sort of vinyl type material, waterproof, that just wiped clean every night.
In fact, we do so much differently to how we did things at home. We would never have things like 12 packs of Coke cans. We’d have big, huge 2.25l bottles of fizzy which went flat super fast. We often had ice cream, but only ever ate tiny portions at a time and so a 2l carton lasted forever. We never, EVER had frozen chips, or canned vegetables. But we did often have croissants, raspberry buns or doughnuts for after school snacks, bought from the supermarket. Now the situation is pretty reversed. Tinned tomatoes and corn are cheap, and since discovering freezer chips I’ve never looked back. But bakery goods are way too expensive, and I can’t remember the last time I had a raspbery bun (drool).
And of course, the days of being served up a big plate of rice and then serving ourselves from a couple of different dishes (usually one meat and one veg) throughout the meal are gone. Now we tend to have one dish meals, or if we have dinners with several components, I put together nice little plates with a bit of everything and we can go back for seconds. But I guess that relates back to not having a dining table and being able to spread out dishes.
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