Every Thursday, Mrs Digital Ed and I host family dinner.
Actually, it’s not dinner for the whole family. The flat isn’t big enough to hold everyone!
There’s just seven folk altogether — my parents; my brother, sister-in-law and nephew; and us.
That can definitely feel like more than enough from time to time, when we’re rushing home from work to give the place a quick hoover, or when we’ve left it too late to decide what’s going in the oven.
But it’s definitely a tradition worth keeping up.
Getting together
I watched an old interview with Stephen Fry recently, where he talked about how people no longer get together and talk as much as they once did.
No one really sits at the dinner table anymore (we don’t, most of the week!).
Instead, people sit in front of the television, meals on laps. There’s not much room for conversation during the ad breaks.
That’s why we think family dinner is important.
We no longer live terribly close to one another. Our day-to-day experiences are quite different. Priorities are bound to shift with time.
But if everyone can take an evening, just once a week, to sit at the dinner table together and chat, then it’s much easier to stay connected with one another.
It’ll be all the easier to fall back on the experiences of our elders then, or just to listen to stories about their lives.
We’ll be able to lend a hand, if needed — or to rely on one.
And most important of all, we’ll have plenty of memories with the family to enjoy.
Even if those memories are sometimes of a takeaway!
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Iain McDonald I am the Digital Content Editor at the “Friend”, making me responsible for managing the flow of interesting and entertaining content on the magazine’s website and social media channels.
