Girls just want to have lunch
Sep. 3rd, 2008 02:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ventaI'm working from home today, and I've just been overcome by a fit of nostalgia.
Slightly after one I was sitting in the kitchen with a plate of bread, cheese and dates on the table, and a paperback in my hand. And suddenly I was back at home, with my mum, eating little-dinner.
The usual mealtime-model when I was growing up was to have a main meal (dinner) in the middle of the day and a sandwich-based tea in the evening. I got dinner at school, and my Dad was usually working somewhere with a canteen or, at the worst, a pub. Did the mother cook a main meal for herself on the days she wasn't at work ? I have to admit that I'm not sure.
However, sometimes during school holidays, perhaps when Dad was working in a particularly obscure area in the Dales, we'd agree to eat our main meal in the evening. This meant that the mother and I would have little-dinner in the middle of the day - to be followed, of course, by dinner-for-tea in the evening. I remember bread, cheese and dates being a staple of little-dinner; it's still one of my favourite snack-meals, and I've no idea why I don't eat it more often.
I don't know where the name little-dinner came from; lunch was a word which would not enter my vocabulary until I went to secondary school, where we had a lunch hour at 12:45 instead of dinnertime at 12. Maybe it was me, with a toddler's limited word-count, guessing at a name. Maybe it was the mother mucking about and mistranslating petit-déjuner. It's a phrase I've not heard in a long time. Now that I don't live with my parents I don't know if they still have the conversation about whether it would be more convenient to have dinner-for-tea on a particular day.
For some reason I always remember little-dinner as a quiet affair, with not even the radio on. As a family, we are all uncivilised enough to read at mealtimes, so meals often passed in companionable silence. Even when Ladybirds were all I could manage, I remember reading while eating; many of my childhood books have jam-stains on the pages. I was always taught that - like one holds one's knife in one's right hand - bread and so on should be picked up in the left. Even now I instinctively hold a book in my right hand to leave the left free.
So I sat in the quiet kitchen by myself, with my whodunnit and my dates, and had my little-dinner. It's a very civilised way to spend an hour in the middle of the day.
Slightly after one I was sitting in the kitchen with a plate of bread, cheese and dates on the table, and a paperback in my hand. And suddenly I was back at home, with my mum, eating little-dinner.
The usual mealtime-model when I was growing up was to have a main meal (dinner) in the middle of the day and a sandwich-based tea in the evening. I got dinner at school, and my Dad was usually working somewhere with a canteen or, at the worst, a pub. Did the mother cook a main meal for herself on the days she wasn't at work ? I have to admit that I'm not sure.
However, sometimes during school holidays, perhaps when Dad was working in a particularly obscure area in the Dales, we'd agree to eat our main meal in the evening. This meant that the mother and I would have little-dinner in the middle of the day - to be followed, of course, by dinner-for-tea in the evening. I remember bread, cheese and dates being a staple of little-dinner; it's still one of my favourite snack-meals, and I've no idea why I don't eat it more often.
I don't know where the name little-dinner came from; lunch was a word which would not enter my vocabulary until I went to secondary school, where we had a lunch hour at 12:45 instead of dinnertime at 12. Maybe it was me, with a toddler's limited word-count, guessing at a name. Maybe it was the mother mucking about and mistranslating petit-déjuner. It's a phrase I've not heard in a long time. Now that I don't live with my parents I don't know if they still have the conversation about whether it would be more convenient to have dinner-for-tea on a particular day.
For some reason I always remember little-dinner as a quiet affair, with not even the radio on. As a family, we are all uncivilised enough to read at mealtimes, so meals often passed in companionable silence. Even when Ladybirds were all I could manage, I remember reading while eating; many of my childhood books have jam-stains on the pages. I was always taught that - like one holds one's knife in one's right hand - bread and so on should be picked up in the left. Even now I instinctively hold a book in my right hand to leave the left free.
So I sat in the quiet kitchen by myself, with my whodunnit and my dates, and had my little-dinner. It's a very civilised way to spend an hour in the middle of the day.
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no subject
Date: 2008-09-03 02:33 pm (UTC)We had this little-dinner type of thing quite a lot, and usually read over it too, but we always had Radio 4 or Radio Oxford [which was quite cool in the period I'm thinking of] on as well. Dates were never part of it though - apples, usually straight from our trees (or the stored ones from the previous summer if none of them were in season) accompanied our bread and cheese. Maybe tomatoes from the garden too.