Saturday, April 15, 2006
Dinnertimes
17th March 2005
There's nothing more pleasant than sitting at home having a meal with good friends.There's always this sense of warmth, of bonhomie, of belonging that hangs in the air even after the aromas of the meal have disappeared.
The dinner we- me, S and TW- had tonight was just like that. I cooked a dish of lemongrass chicken, which turned out okay aside from the overly liberal hand of cornstarch I tossed into the dish. But culinary failures aside, it was a really pleasant time. It was one of those affairs whereby one feels perfectly at ease sitting in absolute silence. Ironically, when one feels that way at a dinner, there never is even half a moment of silence.
I suppose it's coz this feeling of sitting in affable silence can only be born out of a sense of familiarity. And the moment there is that sense of familiarity, you can be assured that all inhibition and caution will be thrown to the wind. Gone is the cautious weighing of words. Gone too are the painful attempts at being impressively polite. People will just be themselves. And unfortunately for my dinner companions, being myself spelt a boisterous time of insanity.But I don't think I'd be being overly optimistic or deluded to think we all had a good time. You see, with time, I've come to realise that dinners (especially the corporate and professional ones) usually fall into two categories-- those where you spend the entire dinner painfully excavating conversational topics from your brain and those where you feel you need to give out one long loud fart in order to stun your fellow diners into silence so you can have just 15 seconds air time.It starts to become a real rarity to have dinners where you can just be yourself.--boisterous one moment, pensive the next- and still have your fellow diners feeling comfortable.
So from now on, I shall remember to treasure them.
There's nothing more pleasant than sitting at home having a meal with good friends.There's always this sense of warmth, of bonhomie, of belonging that hangs in the air even after the aromas of the meal have disappeared.
The dinner we- me, S and TW- had tonight was just like that. I cooked a dish of lemongrass chicken, which turned out okay aside from the overly liberal hand of cornstarch I tossed into the dish. But culinary failures aside, it was a really pleasant time. It was one of those affairs whereby one feels perfectly at ease sitting in absolute silence. Ironically, when one feels that way at a dinner, there never is even half a moment of silence.
I suppose it's coz this feeling of sitting in affable silence can only be born out of a sense of familiarity. And the moment there is that sense of familiarity, you can be assured that all inhibition and caution will be thrown to the wind. Gone is the cautious weighing of words. Gone too are the painful attempts at being impressively polite. People will just be themselves. And unfortunately for my dinner companions, being myself spelt a boisterous time of insanity.But I don't think I'd be being overly optimistic or deluded to think we all had a good time. You see, with time, I've come to realise that dinners (especially the corporate and professional ones) usually fall into two categories-- those where you spend the entire dinner painfully excavating conversational topics from your brain and those where you feel you need to give out one long loud fart in order to stun your fellow diners into silence so you can have just 15 seconds air time.It starts to become a real rarity to have dinners where you can just be yourself.--boisterous one moment, pensive the next- and still have your fellow diners feeling comfortable.
So from now on, I shall remember to treasure them.
# posted by H : 3:43 AM
