PART EIGHT The Dining Room

      Most houses have what estate agents would call a ‘dining room’, and what you or I would probably call a God-awful mess. The very word ‘dining’ implies an activity long-since abandoned in favour of snacking, grazing, picking and shovelling, and most of this ingesting occurs either in the kitchen, on a sofa or in a supermarket queue when we can’t wait any longer. But with a little luck and some determination, we can revert that lost room full of children’s toys, AA manuals and un-ironed shirts back into something used for dining. In the meantime…

      Feeding time at the Zoo: The importance of family mealtimes

      Once upon a time (a time that is very hard to pinpoint precisely but which occurred somewhere between the invention of tables and chairs and the emergence of the sixty-hour working week) many families in England ate their meals together: breakfast, lunch and dinner. Together.

      And these days? Well, it’s a brow-wrinklingly sad and shocking fact that an estimated twenty per cent of families in this country eat together once a week or less. Once a week? That’s so awful and depressing that it makes you want to bang your head against the microwave before reaching for the frozen peas and feeling like an idiot with a swollen forehead. By looking at the way most people I know live and work, I assume that the other eighty per cent of families, while managing slightly more than the unimpressive ‘once a week’, are probably not eating together more than ten times per week or so, which is still lamentably seldom.

      Of course, we all live insanely busy, stressful lives, and to propose that everyone should be home from work by six o’clock every evening to sit together around a large table, laughing merrily and devouring a delicious pot roast, is as ridiculous as suggesting we all stop worrying about our weight or remember to go to bed before our eyes go dry and we fall asleep in front of Green Wing. It just ain’t gonna happen. What can happen is that we make much more of an effort to sit down as often as possible for meals as a family, and that we try to make it enjoyable. Yes, you were pissed off this morning because somebody put their muddy trainers on top of your new white bag, which is now marked and ruined, but now is not the time to bring it up.

       OK—how exactly is this supposed to happen, when neither of us gets in from work or after-school clubs until 7 p.m., I work shifts and often leave before the kids are even up, and breakfast, if it happens, is whatever anyone can find and make edible during the mad rush to get out of the door to school and work, huh?

      It’s a good point, and probably applies to thousands of families up and down the country, but there are ways of eating more meals together, if you are prepared to make some changes and forgo the odd cappuccino and muffin in Costa in favour of Rice Crispies and chaos at home.

      Bums on Seats: Table manners and other essentials

      I am a huge stickler for manners. This is almost certainly the result of both of my parents carrying the Stickler for Manners gene, which showed itself by them making me say my pleases, and thank yous and, horror of horrors, insisting I make eye contact when greeting guests. The older I get the more of a stickler I am becoming: I am now almost obsessive about instilling some decent manners in my own flock of