Dinner Conversations

Do you ever find yourself at dinner with nothing to say? You see dinner conversations are a completely different species of conversation from normal run of the mill conversations. There’s a decent portion of food which will take about 10 minutes to devour is sitting in front of you. That introduces all kinds of problems. You have to make sure that you eat tidily or else you’ll give off a terrible impression… a tomato sauce stain on a white blouse usually gives off a bit of a serial killer vibe… You have to make sure that your portion is of a similar size to your fellow diner or else one of you will finish first which will lead the other to wish that someone would say something about dessert. The real problem which I face though is that you’re trapped.

As soon as you have that plate of cabonara in front of you then you’ve committed to a 15 minute conversation with the person who’s sitting opposite to you. It’s even worse when there’s no buffer. It’s an immense amount of pressure to have to respond to EVERYTHING that the other person is saying. It often causes me to resort to intense nodding, laughing and hmming although that may be because I don’t understand what they’re talking about so instead of asking for clarification I just pray in my mind that they’ll move into safer waters like movies or TV programmes which are far easier topics to comment on than the British occupation of Malaysia… I must admit that when you’re getting to know someone it’s always safe to have a buffer. Having said that that would mean that I’d have to take a friend out on a first date to be the buffer… 

Anyway usually when a conversation is dying then you just say something like ‘oh my, is that Luke over there? I haven’t seen him in years… Excuse me I’ll talk to you later... (/never ever again)’ or my favourite ‘I really have to be…. Somewhere.’ When you’re having dinner then there’s no excuse to leave. You’ve committed to that meal and so you have to finish your food before you leave. I suppose if the conversation is really struggling then you could just wolf down your food although that would cause indigestion which I really wouldn’t recommend… And if it really is terrible and you’re forced to use the old ‘Grandma’s been admitted into hospital excuse’ then you still have to find somewhere to have dinner. You really are stuck in a rut. Although there is one good thing about dinner conversation… Instead of staring at them and making intense eye contact you can just stare at your food and by conveniently taking large mouthfuls when someone’s just finishing talking then you can buy yourself a little bit of time to form a witty response to whatever question it is that they’ve asked you… Handy isn’t it? 

I’ve decided right now that there’s no way that I’m going out for dinner for a first date. Although I would get free food… Handy…

After Dinner Mint: Another reason why dinner conversations can so rapidly become so very silent is because conversation topics are restricted. You can't talk about murders or maggots because they'll turn people off of their food. I say those people with weak stomachs should just suck it up they're making us miss out on some serious maggot chat.

Oh one more problem with dinner conversation! The quality of the conversation suffers. Everyone knows that multi tasking is impossible... even for women. You can't do both tasks to the best of your ability. If you're food is particularly difficult to eat then you're forced to pay more attention to it than the conversation which means that you really can't be witty. It's impossible to focus fully on the conversation when you've got a plate of spag bol in front of you!

3 Good Things

*Finally finding out the mysterious thing that would make me angry…

*Rain… It meant that it was far cooler in the bee shed.

* My right hand wrist feels better… although now my left one hurts… I think it has put my wrists in equilibrium with one another….