A while ago I sent my niece what I thought was one of the most amusing birthday cards I’ve seen in a long time. It was difficult to say whether it had been artificially manipulated, but the picture seemed to be one of those Victorian lithographs of a drawing room with an aspidistra on a table and antimacassars on the armchairs. On another chair, slightly out or place in such a middle class Victorian drawing room, sat a rather working class type of chap with a drooping moustache, dressed in working clothes and hobnail boots but with a small girl in crinolines and paper-curled ringlets, perched on his knee. The caption that caused me to snort with laughter in the middle of W.H. Smiths read; “I’m sorry love, we’re Northern and that’s all there is to it.” You had to see it really, but I knew that this was the right card for The Flying Baby, as my niece was known in her early youth.
However, now, as a responsible employee at the Canary Wharf headquarters of one of the larger banks, I don’t think she would thank me for leaking this snippet of information.
And with no connection whatsoever, this brings me on to etiquette - something we Northerners are supposedly ignorant of, not knowing as we do, the difference between supper and dinner.
I thought I’d stepped a rung up the social ladder when I began calling the evening meal dinner – my sister still calls it tea – but I was reliably informed by a posh friend that this is now called supper - at least amongst those who know. Now, I lived abroad for a good number of years and a lot of things appear to have changed since I left. One of these seems to be the disappearance of dinner. In my Northern past, dinner used to be at what I now call lunchtime, tea was at five o’clock and supper was a glass of milk and a couple of chocolate Hobnobs at bedtime - if you were lucky. As I grew more sophisticated (I thought), dinner seemed to move up a social rung and be eaten at about seven. Tea had apparently followed the Ninth Legion and disappeared somewhere north of York.
The penny finally dropped this morning when I was reading one of Waitrose’s foodie mags and two foodies were discussing the question of dinner parties. One loved dinner parties but the other didn’t – although this didn’t stop the one who didn’t like them from giving them anyway. The one who did like them said ‘I have friends for supper, but I love giving dinner parties…’ It’s a good thing I began reading these magazines, I thought, otherwise I’d have been inviting friends round for a glass of milk and a Hobnob at six o’ clock. Then they got on to etiquette at these dinner parties and the one who didn’t like them confessed to the most awful social gaffe of conversing with the person on their right during the first course, when it suddenly occurred to them that they should have been conversing with the person on their left. This might actually have been the other way round, but it’s so unbelievably trite that I can’t even be bothered get the magazine and check. However, when I mentioned this to my knowledgeable friend, she just looked at me pityingly and said “Well, how would you know, you’ve been abroad”.
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