Six maybe seven evenings ago, at the end of a long day, I was finishing the bowl of sausage stew and mashed potato that I had taken to the sofa, knowingly choosing the cushioned promise of support for legs, back and bottom at the compromised expense of a stomach squashed into my diaphragm and the inevitable poor digestion of that night’s dinner. I had served the food into a bowl rather than a plate, so that it might be easier to sit and eat while slumped and flaccid. I took just a fork with me so that eating could be achieved without a table, using just left and right hand – the former to nurse the bowl, the latter to wield the fork. That fork would act as skewer, as shovel, as knife. Mere minutes later, I clipped the fork underneath the supporting finger at the base of the bowl and, with my right hand now free, ran a hooked finger around the inside of the bowl to mop and then cradle the remaining potato and gravy into my mouth. Seven- or eight-year-old me did the same thing a hundred times, with ice cream, custard, cake mix. My wife had been sat watching at the other end of the sofa. ‘Could you not do that, please?’ Chided, and a pause. Time to consider my posture, my fork, my eating etiquette. My near-complete satiation, alas, was now suspended irrevocably. I observed and mourned the remaining dregs of my dinner, to be left forever uneaten. I traded a little good mash for a few good manners; the peace of a polite hour in my wife’s company for the peas remaining at the base of my ceramic bowl. And then contemplated that had I arrived at the sofa with a spoon, not a fork, there would have been no assumed behavioural transgression – that utensil, as Bee Wilson once explained so very well,1 that is versatile enough to serve, measure, convey, stir, skim, lift, ladle, and scrape and collect.
‘Friday Fragment’ is an additional weekly instalment to my A Thousand Fragments monthly newsletter.
Bee Wilson’s brilliant 2012 book, Consider The Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat
Beautifully written. Been there, done that
Love your line “the peace of a polite hour in my wife’s company for the peas remaining at the base of my ceramic bowl.”