The tables turned

Dining rooms have been in the doldrums for decades. Even Mary Berry has given up on hers. ‘Most of us, I think, live in the kitchen,’ she said recently.

She’s right. Plenty of us don’t have a dining room to give up on, me included. Plenty more have knocked down what once divided a dining room from a kitchen to create an airy, open-plan ‘living space’ where we do battle with avocados and everything else.

We might be obsessed with what we are and aren’t eating but we don’t stand on ceremony. Nigella Lawson admits she slurps noodles ‘hypnotically’ while watching TV on the sofa. ‘If it can be eaten out of a bowl, I’m very happy to eat while I watch,’ she said.

Dining rooms are all but dead, then, which is a shame because they invite conversation, allow for contemplation and can be just as cosy as a kitchen.

I have happy memories of my grandparents’ house where dishes were passed through a hatch in the wall and a different set of china used for each sitting. Morning coffee came in cottage-ware cups that looked like houses with little windows; a cooked lunch was served on chunky Portmeirion; a light supper on rather vivid green lettuce leaf plates. All of it in the dining room. These days it’s fashionable to eat every meal out of a bowl. That arbiter of middle-class taste, John Lewis, reports we’re losing interest in plates, while sales of bowls are going up.

At home, my sister and I petitioned hard to eat in front of the TV rather than at a table. The dining room was for Sunday lunch alone and its formality was intimidating, inviting mischief. This was a flashpoint for dispute.