I was at a function the other day and someone complained to me about a staff member taking a plate off the table when others hadn’t finished.
We started talking about manners and table etiquette in bygone times – for example, if you are finished, the knife and fork are crossed on the plate so staff know it can be picked up.
But the conversation quickly went to rules of engagement at the family table when we were growing up.
When I think back to those rules, if they were applied now, it would nearly be barbaric.
In my experience, it was rules such as not being allowed to leave the table until you had eaten everything on your plate – and then only when dad said you could be excused.
I have a theory about this: it is mum and dad’s fault that I am such a fat bastard. I learnt at a young age to eat all the stuff I didn’t like first, leaving the good stuff until last.
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I would always be the first one back on the lounge watching TV or out playing with the dog while my brother was still pushing the green stuff around his plate.
To this day, I always eat what’s on my plate. That’s a huge problem – a bit like the size of my guts.
We then started talking about what we used to get served up.
My absolute worst meal was haddock with onion sauce. As soon as I smelt it boiling on the stove, I started coming up with excuses not to eat it. But unless I had a life-threatening disease, I had to front up to boiled orange fish in creamy onion sauce. Awesome.
The second-worst was liver, cooked in a frypan until it looked like the sole of a shoe. My dad loved it. I learnt to smother it with sauce to help it go down.
Third-worst was tapioca pudding which, after a good feed of orange fish, was pretty hard to get through but, like a good soldier, I always managed to.
Mum was a great cook, don’t get me wrong, but some of the above was left over from our days in the British Empire – so, it was actually the Queen’s fault.
Then there was what the feeding times after breakfast were called: morning tea or smoko about 10am.
Lunch was called dinner in our house at 12.30pm; 3pm was afternoon tea; dinner was called tea, about 6pm; and supper was about 9pm.
It was an eating marathon on a daily basis.
No wonder I am a porker.
Ashley Robinson is chairman of the Sunshine Coast Falcons and Sunshine Coast Thunder Netball, and a lifetime Sunshine Coast resident.
