Addressing the Table
Quite at home in his current state of lockdown (excuse the pun), resident malcontent, Jake O’Brien Murphy takes a stand against the saccharine, sycophantic and oh-so synthetic fun of communal dining
words by Jake O’BRIEN MURPHY
The editor of Essential Journal, Will, usually leaves me to my own devices where my articles are concerned. In fact, I still think he is being paid by one of my loved ones to scratch my journalistic itch. He’s a hard man to define in words. He’s fifteen-foot tall, speaks three languages fluently and can listen in them all. His hair is as thick as midnight and he’s blessed with a bashful humility that’s as disarming as the dimples that punctuate his smile. Incidentally, you could eat a tiramisu out of those facial apostrophes. To do his physical majesty any real justice I would have to carve his likeness into the side of a biblical mountain and then give it an Instagram handle.
Anyway, we had a catch-up. I asked him what he thought I should write about in the current climate. After a small pause, in which I imagined Will shirtless inside an oyster shell, reading romance novels and eating a peach melba, he told me to keep it light. Usually, if you take the time to read “Addressing the Table”, which if you possess the capacity for free will I can’t imagine you would. You’ll know I write about dinner and why it A) makes me happy or B) makes me mad. All strung together by the thin connective gruel of tenuous links and apocryphal stories. It’s the definition of light. There’s about as much intellectual substance in the paper the words are printed on. It’s a wonder that they don’t just leave it blank. Bloody good bloke that Will.
The one thing we all have on our hands now is spare time. For a serial procrastinator, I’m actually worse off. I have to work harder on avoiding hard work. The narrative motor of my day is propelled by contemplating the peeling stucco of the flats opposite and wondering what I’m going to eat next. In that time I’ve inhaled so many pensive biscuits that my blood sugar levels are now approaching the consistency of fondant. Most interestingly is what other people are choosing to do with their newly cleared schedules. Live-blogging mania has emerged as the chosen medium of self-expression. I’ve never given much thought to the emerging rap career of Daz, a man I met as a teenager on a family holiday to Bodrum. But now I have an open invitation to judge the variety of bongs, soft furnishings and beaded seat covers in his living room, I’d say I am his biggest fan.
I witnessed a chef I used to work with attempting to tuck himself into his own rectal passage in a studio flat in Ballam and calling it yoga. He had the elasticity of a snooker table but I appreciated the effort. It was far more than he had ever expressed in staff food. A thousand people a minute are trying to teach the anonymous internet how to cook a Crepe Suzette on a paraffin lamp. My bartender friends are scrambling to punch together a martini out of some hand sanitizer, old jam, Allen keys and anything else that comes to hand.
I’m quietly hoping that whenever we return to some semblance of normality we can collectively take stock and accept that some things need to be left behind. At the top of my list is communal dining. Proponents of it, all of who work in and/or own restaurants with communal dining tables, parlay my aversion as a symptom of my curmudgeonly personality. That’s absolutely true, but the fact remains that communal dining is nothing more than a stealthy way to manipulate the real-estate of a dining room to maximise profits. Which makes perfect business sense of course but doesn’t factor in my distaste for others.
You see, the friends I choose to dine with I have chosen to dine with because I like them. Because we share a commonality past the fact we both need to convert food into energy. Our being in that restaurant together at that time is contingent on something that precedes the dinner. It’s called a relationship. If I do want to meet new people, I’d rather it wasn’t under the duress of artificial conviviality. Which often makes me look like I’m not playing the game.
Communal dining is nothing more than the emotionally stunted, organised fun of a school disco. But now there’s no respite to be found in skidding in your socks or clamouring across the P.E. equipment while pissing off the priest. You know, because we’re grown-ups with lower back pain and mortgages and such.
Why do we need an extra level of enforced sentimentality? Is a nice dinner with friends not enough? Like there’s something wrong with me that I don’t want to spend fourteen pounds on a salad. I’m encouraged to bus myself to then endure strained small talk with a grinning alien sat so comfortably on my shoulder he can probably taste the vinaigrette. Communal dining is what they’re forced to do in prison. It’s a penitentiary with croutons. As opposed to the trendy, exposed-brick-open-kitchen kind of dinner table. But at least the person sitting next to you in prison always has an interesting story to tell. JOM
