Notebook

Without a lover, what appetite is there for dinner at 8?

ON THE evening of the Queen’s funeral, we dined in a restaurant with friends, recently arrived in town from New York. When it came to fixing the time, the wife of the couple confessed that as an American she liked eating early – indeed 5.30pm was not too early for her – but she’d realised this wasn’t normal practice in London.

Personally, I regard eating dinner before a time that includes the number 8 completely uncivilised. As the child of a theatre critic, our evening meal took into account his arrival home after the first-night performance, so our mother could combine both our supper and his.

I realise that this is not most people’s experience, but it has led to my penchant for eating late rather than early.

As it happens, our American friend has come to the city at the right time, as seemingly we’re all beginning to dine earlier. Restaurants are starting to be packed out for the 6.30pm booking and increasingly I find we are asked to dinner at friends’ houses at 7.30pm rather than the 8.30pm it used to be.

Like so much, the pandemic has influenced this change in behaviour.

When everyone was stuck at home, we all got used to eating early since, frankly, what else was there to do of an evening other than eat dinner then glue yourself to the sofa and Netflix?

And there’s another factor. Since more people are working from home, there’s often no longer the commute to factor in before you can turn yourself around to go out.

One of the things that struck me when I gave up an office job to work from home was those hours between 5pm and 7pm (the cinqà-sept the French allegedly allocate to visiting one’s lover) can drag. If you don’t have an illicit lover, they can be dead stock, so waiting to go out to dinner at 8.30pm has less appeal than it used to.

Add to this the current dietary advice for overnight fasting aided by an early evening meal, and in no time at all we might find dinner has vanished altogether and we will be returning to the practice of High Tea.

Want spontaneity? Better book early...

NO MATTER what time you choose to eat, finding restaurant slots is in the same category as GP appointments: a nightmare. Wishing to take someone out for a treat dinner at short notice last week, I found booking a table anywhere I wanted to go impossible. Attempting to get a faceto-face appointment with my GP had an even longer waiting list. So both ends of the social spectrum are packed out long in advance. I don’t remember life being so pre-booked before. What has happened to create a world that has so little space for spontaneous action?

Pallbearers’ poignant age

WHAT proud, stalwart and strong young men those coffin bearers appeared as they accompanied our late Monarch on her final journey.

On each glimpse of them, I kept wondering who they were. Now they have been rightly been named and acclaimed for their performance, but would they, I wonder have attracted such attention if they were middle-aged? Would a phalanx of grey-haired and balding Grenadier Guardsmen have attracted such attention? I suspect not.

It was these boys’ ruddy-cheeked, youthful vigour in contrast to the coffin containing the dead Monarch finally felled by age, that made the sight so striking.

How very odd it is to be an Elizabethan

HOW many of us considered ourselves Elizabethans until the death of the Queen? Pretty few, I imagine, but now the term is being used everywhere. It’s extraordinary how one simple word can suddenly make us sound like instant history.

We have now hurtled into a time capsule joining the Edwardians, Georgians, and Victorians as a distant era.

Rising bills will fuel a fashion comeback

IF FUEL costs are going to make houses even colder than usual, I predict a resurrection of the bed jacket. This lightweight knit or silk item trimmed with ribbon was a staple of all those movies from the Golden Age of Hollywood before the days of widespread central heating, and it’s high time for a comeback.

Then there’s the pretty quilted eiderdowns, wool blankets and bedspreads that many of us ditched for the dead-dull duvet. Time to get them out of storage. They look nicer, keep you warmer, and give you that cosy log-cabin vibe.

Putting on tights seems like a defeat

IT’S that time of year when womenkind divide on the subject of tights. There are those like me who will cling to our bare legs till the first snow and possibly after, while others are absolutely thrilled to get back into their comforting black legwear.

It’s only in the last decade or so that bare legs became a style thing – certainly in the 1980s, I was happy to wear my fishnets and even the ‘natural’ nude colour that I never choose now. It never once occurred to me to go bare-legged once the chill set in.

But now that first day a pair gets dragged out of the drawer seems like one of life’s small defeats.