Table manners

I don't claim to have the best table manners, but I get by. I get by on what was beaten into me by scary dinnerladies and scary parents when I was a little un.

When I attended primary school, scarier than any teacher was that creature known as "The Dinnerlady". Dinnerladies hunted in packs around the dining room, watching over quivvering children as they tucked into plates of gristle, concrete chips, mashed potato that was covered in baked beans.

Mashed potato and baked beans - keep them well apart on the plate, same as gravy - nothing, absolutely NOTHING must encroach on my mash, or into my beans without my say so. The fact that the dinnerladies used to pour beans over the mash was their first point in the battle of wills against tiny children: they knew that by doing this, they would scar a child's eating habits for life.

Don't put beans on my ma...

Left handed children were forced to eat correctly. None of this "hold the knife and fork however is most comfortable for you" nonsense: knife in the right hand, fork in the left; no arguments. Deviation from this rule would elicit a harsh stare and the evil eye from whichever geriatric terrorist was watching your table that day. Mrs Bray was a kindly-looking soul: her face was wrinkled and it bore many of those little skin tags that you can't keep your eyes off. She was a whizz at giving loose teeth that final pull that allowed the child to eat - NOTHING must get in the way of these children receiving their nutrition! There was a Mrs ("Wiggy") Mann, who had a hair do that looked like a big wig, was lovely away from the confines of the school, but she ran that dining room with a pinny of iron, never a hair out of place.

And so it was that generations of Britain's youngsters learned to eat at the table: knife in the right hand, fork in the left; elbows off the table; sit still with your feet on the floor (if they reach); no talking while eating; no shouting! Any visit to a Pizza Hut will inform the observer that today's schools could do with a few Mrs Brays and Mrs Manns.


Spaghetti combat jungle training
But learning how to eat properly wasn't restricted to the school dining room, I remember being taught how to eat by my parents too. Normal things don't come back to the memory particularly easily, but I'll always remember being taught how to eat spaghetti... it was pure torture. Imagine a three year old with tiny hands being taught how to hold a fork and spoon in the correct manner to allow the efficient winding of noodles onto a fork. How I cried. Oh the shouting from my dad as he despaired that his own flesh and blood couldn't do something as Italian as shouting and arm waving.

He taught me:

• Hold the fork in the right hand so that its length is parallel to the dish and prongs are perpendicular to it;
  
• Hold the spoon in the left hand;
• Pick up a few strands on the bottom two prongs of the fork and ease them away from the tangled noodles in the dish by pulling them in an upwards direction;
• Lower the spaghetti strands onto to spoon and twist the fork in a clockwise direction to wind the pasta around prongs;
• Lift the fork to your moth and deposit the spaghetti into it.
  

I got there eventually, and I'm a whiz at getting just the right amount of pasta onto my fork and I have even changed the technique so that I deposit the wound up noodles onto my spoon before eating them. This prevents slippage from the fork and it also prevents dropping bits of sauce as the spaghetti makes its way to my mouth.

This dirty cow could do with some spaghetti combat training

So, after all the trouble I went through to learn how to eat spaghetti, after all the shouting, all the tears when my dad refused to cut my spaghetti up for me, imagine how completely and utterly fucked off I get with him when he eats the bloody stuff by shovelling it into his gob, half a plate at a time and then proceeds to eat the remainder by slicing it up into one inch strands and then spooning it in like a coal man fuelling a steam engine. Getting all that pasta into one mouth is an almost impossible task and most ends up hanging out of his mouth before being slurped in very slowly, with as much accompanying noise as possible, where it is chewed for an age before finally being swallowed.

If I'd have eaten like that when I was a child, I'd have been severely beaten - and quite rightly so.

Because of my intensive spaghetti combat training, I have grown to dislike having things hanging out of my mouth when I try to eat them. It really annoys me when I lose control of a noodle and it hits my chin, leaving a greasy deposit there. I struggle to retrieve the situation, hoping that nobody has noticed. Some of the worst food for this sort of thing are salad ingredients; things with stalks that protrude from your mouth and deposit oily dressing over your face as you try tongue acrobatics to get it into your mouth. So annoying.

At least you don't get third degree burns from salads though. Have you ever bitten into a pizza and had a clump of super-heated mozzarella drop onto your bottom lip? Hurts like a bastard, I can tell you.


"Hey look, I can do it one-handed!"
My early training at the table has triggered a mental switch that means that I cannot stand the way certain people eat. My particular hate is that thing the Americans do where they eat with only a fork. Why? Why do they do this? Do they think they look like cowboys sat round their wild west camp fires? They try to hack away at things with a fork when there is a knife provided. Fuckwits. I once witnessed a particularly freaky American do this with a pastry base, and I even offered to cut their food up for them because it was winding me up so much. What are they trying to prove? Next time I see somebody do this, I'm going to tie one of their arms behind their back for a laugh, or even cut one of them off with a chainsaw, or the knife that they refuse to use.

I might try to patent a fork with long prongs where the outer ones have serated edges. Or one where's there's just one prong that has a serated edge. Something called a "knife".