Who’ll tell millennials to get their elbows off the table?

THERE were four of us around the table – a nuclear family member for each side of it – and everybody knew the rules. Elbows off the table. Don’t stretch. If you would like the butter to be passed, ask the person nearest to it. But wait. Don’t interrupt while they are speaking.

One does not start one’s meal until the hostess starts hers. Nor does one blow on one’s soup to cool it down or, heaven forfend, slurp it. We are not degenerates.

Tilt the soup bowl away from you to get at the last spoonfuls of broth. But what are you doing with that plate of custard? It’s towards you for desserts.

If either of the infants at the table ever entertained ideas of slipping away to spend time with their Action Men between courses, they were certainly disabused of them by primary school age. ‘Please may I leave the table?’ was the form of words expected of polite youngsters and permission was given only when all diners present had finished their meals.

It was a lot to remember but I have never forgotten it. Nor have I forgotten how to lay a table. Side plates on the left, glasses on the right; cutlery for the starter laid on the outside of cutlery for the main.

One more tip from my nuclear family days: never, under any circumstances, put a milk bottle on the table. It’s just not done.

All of this will stand you in good stead if you have a time machine and are planning to go anywhere near a dining table in a middle-class household in the 1970s. If you have no such plans, then not to worry. Almost no one bothers with any of this stuff now, anyway – least of all, I regret to say, me.

Traditional

Figures from a new international survey suggest the era of the traditional family dinner is nearing an end and Scotland basks in the dubious distinction of ushering it out more quickly than anywhere else.

Fewer than seven in ten of Scots who have children regularly eat with them, compared with an average of 83 per cent for the other countries surveyed.

Meanwhile, another survey suggests almost half of British families no longer sit down together for an evening meal and the vast majority have long since dispensed with the traditional Sunday roast.

The reasons are many and obvious. Working parents struggle to find the time to cook meals from scratch. If dinner is coming from the freezer or the microwave, then it can be different dishes for different family members.

If we are all having something different, then I don’t suppose we all have to eat at the same time. Mind if I watch TV while you are having yours?

My own and many other Scots’ jobs are not nine to five. Schoolchildren cannot be expected to sit down for their evening meals at 8pm even if their parents can. And so the slide into degeneration gains momentum.

Lay the table? That’s a laugh. More often than not I dine on the sofa where a premium view of the giant telly screen five feet away is afforded. A single fork does the trick. Side plates, salt cellars, butter dishes, napkin rings? Don’t be ridiculous.

And please try to avoid speaking to me while I am eating. This is the final episode. Look, now I’ve missed what he was saying.

Dining at home reached its nadir for me a few years back when my vegetarian cohabitee at the time banished me from the room whenever she was eating. ‘This is my alone time!’ she would shriek if I darkened the doorway and I would be chased away in a hail of haloumi and breadsticks.

Naturally, I responded by designating my own carnivorous shovelling sessions as my alone time.

We had it all wrong. Eating should be together time.

Back at our 1970s dinner table, the family exchanged meandering news bulletins about each other’s days.

Reasonable

It was here, for example, that I gained a reasonable understanding of what my father did for a living and he got to hear about his sons’ adventures in long division.

It was in this ritual assembly around a table that, at larger family gatherings, grandparents and grandchildren bonded – for, away from the table, they were in their own worlds. Here, we learned my grandpa’s trick for indicating that a drop more wine might go down quite nicely. He would hold his glass upside down over his dinner plate until someone noticed. Not that we boys should ever dream of such effrontery.

It was here, too, that we learned something of the art of conversation. Who better to try it out on than our parents?

And here, immersed in an ocean of table dos and don’ts which soon became second nature, we were schooled in the polite way to conduct ourselves at meals. I still use these important teachings at restaurants, if not, perhaps, on a nightly basis while I am munching pizza in front of the plasma screen.

But manners, really, were a side dish at the table – and sparkling discourse merely the seasoning.

The main event was the nightly glue that the dinner table provided, the stuff that kept family members close where they belonged.

Elbows on or off, it’s up to you. But if you ever want to feel closer to the children, I suggest eating with them.