I was watching Skins on SBS just now - for the first time. I suspect I’ve been missing something I’d have liked, and I’m not sure why I never tuned in before. Anyway, Cass and the crew were having a dinner party and someone (I don’t know all the characters’ names) remarked - “just like adults”.
I can remember when I was at uni in the early 90s, and a sudden dinner party craze hit certain circles I moved in. I don’t think it was that anyone was a stellar cook, and the cooking wasn’t necessarily the point of attraction, but more the sort of enactment of an “adult” ritual. If there was any generation that really did the whole postmodern performative irony thing, it was us Gen X kids. We were caught on the cusp of a transition between fairly fixed social patterns - of our parents’ generation - and complete fluidity and the decay of practices and traditions to the extent where they don’t even have sufficient force for (affectionate) parody to have much meaning. When does “adulthood” begin now, and what marks the transition? Are there bourgeois signifiers like joining service clubs, and dressing for dinner? It’s pretty hard to grasp the force of some of Bunuel’s movies from the sixties which parallel a culture which now seems aeons distant in terms of its purchase on living tradition and lived experience.
Anyway, it was all kinda fun, and I have fond memories of some of these nights, including the notorious naked dinner party on Hawken Drive (which I’ll write about one day, maybe, in pursuing my argument that Gen X was more nekkid than Gen Y). One day, we still have to do the Edwardian dinner party, and indeed the Mrs Beeton’s dinner party. They’ll be about wine and dressing up more than food, I think.
You say this as if it were a good thing. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!)
If I read this comment correctly, you are saying that the fixed social patterns of your parents’ generation were already crumbling before GenX came along.
Like the orchestra on the Titanic, there was not much else for GenX to do but to continue playing as the vessel slipped into thr deep.
Poignant.
Yes, that’s indeed what I’m implying, Katz.
There were a couple of occasions in my tutorials when students called me “Sir”. They probably just forgot what my name was… but I felt in those moments what it meant to grow older.
Its an interestig question Mark - for we Xers, the main adulthood passage was actually leaving home, ie getting a crummy job, and thus affording crummy share house room.
Not so doable for Ys. And frankly, Ys seem to work more paid hours than we did - just to afford whatever it is they need to buy while living at home (well, I guess there’s their education for starters!). Mind you, I didnt have a mobile phone to support - nor a near spiritual relationship with a piece of electronica (Y and mobiles go together like Charlton Heston and guns “….from my cold dead hands!”)
Maybe adulthood is first car for them. That’s reasonably old school. Certainly, kids at my uni live out of their cars in a way I didnt. Probably becuase I had a sharehouse room of my own at 19.
Who knows what marks adulthood these days. First bankruptcy? First homemade p0rno online?
But do you think that this state of affairs is a matter of regret, or did the Titanic of bourgeois values deserve to hit the fatal iceberg of the 1960s?
There is an excluded middle in this formulation: it is regrettable that bourgeois values were so prone to disaster.
Which is your position?
By the by I just thought I’d mention that they’ve been filming scenes for the new season of Skins outside my office building over the last week or so.
My position, Katz?
What I think is a matter for regret is the forgetting - the feeling that there is no enduring past tradition that makes sense in any meaningful way as a reference point - whether one chooses to accept it, reject it, transform it, or whatever. There’s a lack of shared norms and referents which in some ways makes the communication of emotion and feeling - as opposed to raw affect - less possible even as it’s facilitated potentially far beyond our imaginings when we were younger.
Restorationist projects of all sort - conservative, religious, etc. - are in this culture artificial as there’s a blank space in time - where X marks the spot - when no one was socialised into the traditions in question in a real sense. So what’s “old” as huckstered to Gen Y by the Pells, Pearsons and the Devines is actually “new” and reinvented.
A lot of what we live through now is a constant dialectic oscillating between insecurity and opportunity, though the opportunity tends to have a sameness about it because the sense of meaning becomes harder to grasp. Hence there’s no real “sublation” in this particular dialectic and no progression. That’s not to condemn or to praise the “late modern”, just to observe.
But this implies that once upon a time culture was “real” as opposed to factitious. You are positing something akin to a prelapsarian world — a golden age.
I’d argue that this age of “real culture” was in fact an age of coercion, or at least naivete.
Sure, we’ve lost our innocence and we have refused to be compliant.
Hooray!
No, I don’t think so, Katz, because I’m not valorising it as such. I’m talking about the actuality of forgetting and fluidity in the present not the reality of the past. I have no access to that as such. It’s a question of the transmission and continuity of traditions and norms, not of evaluative judgement.
I’m struggling to understand the senses in which the past has a transmissive value which is not normative.
I’m arguing that all cultural “knowledge” is normative. For most of human history that which was not convenient was no “knowledge” and therefore suppressed. The triumph of late modernism was to broaden definitions of “knowledge” beyond the scope that was acceptable to traditional cultural gate-keepers.
What an interesting post!
I’ve been giving and going to dinner parties on and off since the 1970s (completely financially independent since age 18 — but we all lived on nothing, cultural capital was all) — and I’d venture to suggest that it’s as much a matter of class as it is of generation. Dinner parties in Australia in the 1960s and 70s were largely a conservative-aspirational thing. But I’d suggest that for the student/artist/bohemian/intellectual types there was always a self-aware performance dimension to it, of the kind Mark’s post suggests. It was indeed a kind of ‘playing dinner parties’ thing except that I think we were acting out some romanticised social ideal rather than playing at being adults. (We regarded ourseves as adults.) And it was at the same time deadly serious in the pleasure we took in the problem-solving aspects of trying to do it with some style on no money, in a student life.
For me, insofar as there is ‘an enduring past tradition’ (I’d suggest that Australian social history isn’t a fertile breeding ground for such a tradition; Martin Boyd novels are not enough) it comes out of the book I ridiculously taught myself to cook out of: Raymond Oliver’s La Cuisine: Secrets of Modern French Cooking (1967) — as you can see, Mark, the exact contemporary of the Bunuel movies you mention. This takes, quite unironically and unapologetically, whatever constituted the French haute bourgeoisie of the mid-1960s as its social ideal and it begins with ten or so full-page colour plates of the gorgeously set and decorated tables of noted French socialites of the 60s, my favourite being ‘Chez Madame la Baronne Alix de Rothschild’ (all-white napery and china with tiny pastel flowers and bonbons).
Those pics are followed by a Miss Manners-style section on how to write the invitations, what to wear, how to greet the guests, how to seat the guests, how to set the table and manage the service. There’s also a page of advice for guests. It is, in fact, a set of instructions for the aspirational bourgeois, just as Mrs Beeton’s book was.
That book has been in the back of my mind ever since. The only thing about it I reject utterly is the Noah’s Ark aspect of having boy-girl-boy no matter how deadly the group dynamic. This is why my favourite dinner party hosts are one particular gay couple who go to some pains not to do that. Also, the food is better.
Thanks, Dr Cat, I’m glad you liked the post and your perspective’s really fascinating.
Katz, I suspect we’re talking past each other to a degree. I’m not so much talking about knowledges but rather about conventions, dispositions and practices. I’m trying to articulate Big C Culture and lived culture/cultures as they shift over time, and as they’re transmitted, mutated, and fissured. The perspective I’m coming from here is cultural sociology. I’m trying to talk about norms without being normative. It’s doable - sort of!
Hi Mark, just referring to your last comment…”I’m not so much talking about knowledges but rather about conventions, dispositions and practices. I’m trying to articulate Big C Culture and lived culture/cultures as they shift over time, and as they’re transmitted, mutated, and fissured.”
I agree with you…I rarely post but feel compelled…as you know I am an Erving Goffman fan…I say this only because in his 1959 book “The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life” he goes into great detail to explain the ‘dinner party’ in terms of its social and cultural significance, how participants produce social order through these so called ’simplistic’ gatherings. After reading Goffman the dinner party does not seem so innocent… I urge you to take a look….
Thanks so much, Eryn! I haven’t looked at Goffman for ages but because I’m teaching with Barbara this semester and teaching cultural sociology at ACU it’s on my to do list! I’ll definitely check that bit out.
That’s one of my favourite books, too.
The solution to the post-60s dinner party is just to remember that it should be a pleasurable gathering of people who you want to catch up with, some good food and wine and unlimited chatting. That’s all. See the Schuanese Hotpot dinner party post on Zoe’s Progressive Dinner Party blog for how it should be done. F*** the bourgeois invitations and boy-girl-boy stuff, although you can play at formality if it’s going to be fun and not a pain in the ass.
I generally won’t go to dinner parties unless I know who’s coming. The formality of the whole thing is frightening, and not something I’ve done since I fell among small busainess people in a small country town in the mid 70s, where me and the then missus were invited as hippie curiosities.I was almost tempted to get up and walk along the table like that guy did in the Hair movie.And after a few wines I get clumsy and spill things because of my cerebral palsy.Not exactly a paragon of social virtue.
Prefer less formal occasions where you sit round the fire outside with a plate of chicken and salad, and get into intense discussions with likeminded people about art. literature, politics, movies,university, theatre,music, etc.
Interesting post. There seem to be different criteria in different people’s minds about what “makes” a dinner party: enactment of social rituals, stylishness, enjoyment in a structured setting, formality for the fun of “dressing up” etc. All interesting and not mutually contradictory.
FWIW, personally I’ve always had a different key criterion for a “dinner party” as such: the presence/invitation of strangers whom you never would have met otherwise. To me, having over a bunch of friends over for dinner who all know each other already or are part of the same crowd, is fun but not quite the same as a “dinner party,” where you deliberately try to get different and unknown personal/professional circles to intersect and interact. If the style is a little more formal, that’s probably to create a set of common assumptions and predictable conditions, so all the different kinds of people can have a common basis to start from. In this neck of the woods, the best dinner parties are the ones where we get say three people with very different social and professional connections, and get them to invite some folks they like who don’t already know each other.
In some respects, LP is a very good traveling dinner party.
I’m of roughly the same generation as Dr Cat. When I was young, we didn’t much do dinner parties as such, except when invited to parents’ / older relatives’ places. (Like Paul Burns, we were the token hippy curiosity.) The people I knew just tended to get together, maybe eat, and smoke weed or drink to excess, then attempt to play music or solve the problems of the world. All of them.
That said, one of the few things I miss from my time in the Army is the formal Mess dinners. They really are fun - dressed up with a bow tie and everything, formal table settings, elaborate protocols, the works. Pass the port without touching the table, then the Loyal Toast. They’re a blast as long as you don’t take them too seriously.
As Lemony Snicket pointed out in one of his books, the most important rule for a good cocktail party is not good cocktails or good table design, but good people and conversation. (I think it’s in the second-to-last book of his Series of Unfortunate Events). That’s a good rule, and I’m sure it holds for dinner parties as well.
Unfortunately, you can’t get a recipe book for good company and fine conversation, but any publication containing these should help!
“…the most important rule for a good cocktail party is not good cocktails or good table design, but good people and conversation…”
You are mistaken. That is not a good cocktail party; that is the best.
David, a hippie and a soldier? What an interesting life you must have led! As for the bow tie — I know someone in the Army Reserve who while he was in a particular regiment had to front at the formal dinners in red cummerbund and spurs.
I reckon the main rule for a good dinner party is to think about the combination of guests really, really carefully, and then to invite 8-10 of them: small enough so that the conversation can become general easily without anyone having to shout or take the floor by force, and big enough so that if anyone’s being a bore you can break the conversation up into smaller ones quickly.
At the last dinner party I went to my hosts served sorrel soup made from the sorrel growing in the garden outside, lemon sago pud from lemons ditto, and the choice of mains wines was between a wonderful shiraz by a local winemaker who was a friend of theirs, and a bottle of Cotes du Rhone they’d brought back from France themselves. I like that whole close-connection-with-the-nosh thing a lot.
Or you could have one of these.
Captain Barville, you remind me that an analogy can be drawn between a dinner party and a novel. Sometimes the walk-ons get the best lines.
The best cocktail party I went to was a 1950’s revival. We all frocked up in our best retro cocktail garb, and we had to pay attention to detail! I’m talking men in cocktail suits, women with long white gloves and beautiful gowns they had uncovered in the dusty racks of goodwill stores …or that their grandmother had once danced in.
It was the best…the right people…the 50’s swing music and cheese fondue…plus a carmen miranda look alike.
So all I say is THEME it up!
No real rules from me, but a suggestion. add some nutmeg to the pudding, if suitable. it will raise everybodies mood.
nicest black tye dinner that i ever saw, was Tim McCartney Snape and three friends suspended off a a bridge over lake burly griffin just before one of his everest trips.
my fav dinner party, two ducks that we raised, slaughtered and dressed ourselves and then cooked. or perhaps it was a C’berra mafia dinner in melb one night, ten different curries.
Yes, Dr Cat, it’s been an interesting life so far.
I didn’t ever wear spurs (your mate must have been in a cavalry or mounted infantry regiment) but i still have the cummerbund and white mess jacket (kind of a waiter-like bum freezer - very fetching unless you’re as fat as I am).
It’s got to be progressive.
Had an outrageous one in Sandy Point down near Wilson’s Promontory last winter. I think there were 24 of us, aged between 25 and 35, in four separate holiday houses within a couple of blocks in this tiny little town. At least a week of planning for each house’s meal - my place had the second main course (feijoada). So cocktails and canapes, main course 1, main 2, then dessert and more cocktails at the last joint, before devolving into a drug-fuelled all-night dance-off.
Progressive dinner parties - not for the pseudo left.
Yes, I reckon ‘dinner party’ implies combining people who haven’t necessarily met previously and creating a 2-4 course menu.
I started throwing dinner parties like that when I was in my late 20s (early 1980s). I don’t know where I developed my sense of how to give a dinner party as my parents literally never did. I did have friends who had thrown dinners on a particular food theme, eg Indonesian, in the 70s but they’d only invite their gangs of friends, who all knew each other, so it wasn’t strictly a dinner party.
These days I tend to ‘throw’ afternoon teas or brunches [ie for people I don’t know very well and want to know better] as our house isn’t big enough for a formal dinner.
Suz, yes I too usually go the brunch or afternoon tea option and for exactly the same reason. Another opportunity to go wild with tradition, flower arrangements, cake forks and so on.
ANTIQUE BONE HANDLED STIRLING SILVER FISH KNIVES!!!
Pavlov’s wrote “David, a hippie and a soldier? What an interesting life you must have led! As for the bow tie — I know someone in the Army Reserve who while he was in a particular regiment had to front at the formal dinners in red cummerbund and spurs.”
Reminds me of an invitation to a RAAF formal dinner in 1979 in Melbourne. The lads and a few lasses (undergrads being put through Engineering degrees by the RAAF) wore their formal ‘dress’ uniforms. Everyone was genial and polite to us ‘outsiders’ - we wore suits. What struck me most was hearing John Lennon’s track “Imagine” played loudly, early on. Not at all the Colonel Blimp young fogeys ….
You know, its just occured to me: I seemed to have spent 40 years not moving in dinner party circles. My crowd has always gone to retaurants together, yes, but no one can (apparently) be bothered cooking for all.
BBQs are perhaps the closest thing. Just throwing this out there - but maybe its cos I went to a state school, or is it just the social norm for someone born in 68?
I have noticed Im consiered rather crap at recieved table manners by the few private school alumni in my acquaintance. Its like I just never took that course.
Ah, Ambigulous, the RAAF always have been a tad … errr … undisciplined. Army Messes tend to have a small section from the local military band or (shudders) bagpipes. (Not that I dislike bagpipes, but I believe they belong outside.)
My husband and I threw a grand dinner party last year, as a chance for us and some friends to let our collective hair down without our various young children. We farmed our two youngsters out to the in-laws and rearranged the house. We squeezed the lounges into the dining room and put the extended version of the dining table in the lounge room complete with candles, napkins, the ‘best’ crockery and cutlery. I cooked three courses and the wine was flowing and it all went swimmingly, except for one moment.
My husband had set up his computer to play the music he has collected on his hard drive and had our rather large collection of photos scrolling through as a random slide show, when one of myself flashed up on the screen. I was nekkid and holding my just birthed daughter (a rather intimate hospital shot not meant for public viewing). I saw it and my best friend (the only sober person present) heard my gasp of horror and caught my surreptitious glance around to see who else had seen the pic. Most were unaware except for one of the male guests who had very embarrassed look on his face.
David,
It was recorded music all night on that occasion. Several officers, to age 45 (?). Several dozen undergrad RAAF lads and lasses. A dozen guests. My puzzlement was that I had considered John Lennon something of a pacifist and/or leftist sympathiser. Therefore strictly out-of-bounds for the musical program?
Maybe they liked the tune, didn’t listen to the words? Or maybe that young group just reflected the views of young Aussies at that time? Sceptical, irreligious, a bit anti-war…..
You Army chaps much more disciplined and discerning, eh? Have to be, if you’re on ground level under enemy fire, would you say?
Just thought this would help anyone planning a dinner party in the near future.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ny8VXayKEY
[only just fished out of spaminator, timestamp altered so that people see it in the sidebar - moderator]
Great thread topic Mark.
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Over the years I’ve had some doozies - a moonlight supper on St Lucia Bowls Club lawn strikes me as a highlight.
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There was a famous terry-towelling dinner party my friend Jena La Flamme threw at Hoogley St in the 90s - dress theme “anything terry towelling”
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Then I went through a more formal stage with settings for 6 at my parent’s house at Chapel Hill, actually at the dining table, with table cloth no less.
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These days I seem to be putting less and less effort into it. Best one recently was a small soiree with Anna Tweeddale and Sarah-Jane where we sat on the carpet and drank pinot all night (steak and mushroom pie with couscous and roast vegetables and tomato chutney, followed by Sj’s famous dark chocolate pastry puffs)
Rayedish - that’s rather a different take on my nekkid dinner party story!
Mark
A great post along with the comments something as basic as food can engender.
Birth, Sustenance and Death the great trilogy. The first and last unknown and unknowable, the second representing the span between. Dinner parties present an aspect of humanity and eternity which we can all share. Western attitudes to food regard it mostly as just an “input” rather than link to each other.
I remember one of the Monty Python spin-offs had a skit featuring an officer’s corp at supper. They pass the port from the left to right. When one of the officers bursts out that this rule is unecessary and oppressive the others wait him out in silence and then the commandant gives him a nod whereas he goes off to the next room and shoots himself.
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The rest of the company follows suit making complaints about petty etiquette followed by absurd suicide.
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On the one hand we have increasing, ridiculous sets of etiquette which, forgetting that the purpose of manners is make people comfortable, actually sets out to make everyone the opposite - Borges’ short story of the deeds and fate of Kosuke no Suke comes to mind. On the other we get anti-social rebellion that leads to a kind of Dionysian melt-down. The 60s was an example of this.
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Since the 60s the old hierarchies’ve broken down. New hierarchies aren’t really even possible in the free associational relativism of our society. There’s also a comparable tendency not to teach kids manners so much as indulge them. You see the results: people will often think of manners as meaning checking other peoples’ behaviour when it used to mean checking your own. So rituals of civility erode.
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Thing is many humans crave civility. So, in the absence of any received, they simply endeavour to generate new forms. You can see some Gen Y groups doing this. Some of the lads are now wearing suits when going out (as opposed to the standard uniform of sneakers and jeans). I s’pose this at the behest of their girlfriends. Next I hope they’ll be learning why it used to be considered social death to wear tan shoes with dark suits (yuk). Slowly a new etiquette with attendant social rituals will develop as we attempt yet again to aim a little higher than the vulgarity that comes naturally to apes like us.
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And then we’ll go too far and end up in a Byzantine brown-nose contest like the court of Louis IV or some such. A nice middle path between a bewildering set of forks and eating spaghetti from the bowl like a dog is desirable. Unfortunately when we reach the median between the classical and the Romantic we never stay there very long.
Adrien, you’ve nailed it with the Python skit. (Although in the Sergeants’ Mess you didn’t have to shoot yourself - a breach of etiquette, which rarely occurred, would have been regarded _much_ more seriously.) If you don’t take the rituals seriously, but observe them anyway, they do actually set everyone at ease because you know exactly where you stand and what you’re supposed to do. Ritual and well-established protocol enable a civil society.
Ambigulous, I didn’t say the Army was more discerning than the Air Force, just a bit more disciplined. The RAAF get _much_ better food, for a start. (I loved eating in RAAF Messes.) And the closest I ever got to a shooting war was when I was chucking blokes (and all the stuff they needed to do it in style) on aeroplanes to go to (potentially) their deaths in East Timor. One of the highlights of that particular task was when the young Flight Lieutenant I was working for decided we should all go down to the Airmen’s Mess for a few beers (we’d had a few already) - a strict no-no for any Senior NCO or commissioned officer - and we all had to remove various rank ensignia so we could pretend we belonged there.
Ah, good times, good time.
That’s a very astute comment, mediatracker. Maybe the distinction between a dinner party and a cocktail party lies partly in the role of food as a social lubricant (wrong word I know!) as well as teh grog.
I also wonder if choosing to share a meal with someone represents a different sort of commitment - say at the stage when people are dating - than having a drink (or a coffee, but that’s different again).
By the way, since Bunuel has been mentioned, it might be of interest that today is the twenty fifth anniversary of his death:
http://news.deviantart.com/article/54023/
You’re right Kim,
sharing a meal is a closer event, more personal. Huddling round a fire in a stone age cave, sharing the food…. campfires on tent holidays, down the fish ‘n chip shop, at home; family dinner rituals, officer’s mess.
I reckon David’s onto something: “If you don’t take the rituals seriously, but observe them anyway, they do actually set everyone at ease because you know exactly where you stand and what you’re supposed to do. Ritual and well-established protocol enable a civil society.”
Yep, don’t be a manners obsessive about others’ behaviour, just be polite yourself. Even under extreme provocation…. ahem…..
More on food and community in a book that might interest people.
I’m sorry to nitpick but that’s a phenomena of the English speaking world. The Italians, the French the Spanish etc are Western too and they’d strongly disagree that this statement applies to them. If anyone knows ritual it’s the Latin cultures.
Well, in this sense, Adrien, though that’s a valid point, “Western” normally tends to be shorthand for Anglo/German/Benelux/Dutch/Scandinavian (secularised) Protestant culture when push comes to shove, doesn’t it? Rather than Orthodox or (semi-secularised) Catholic Mediterranean culture.
“What are the rules for a good dinner party?”
Well for starters “the discovery that fermentation produces alcohol, and the voluntary ability to inhibit defecation” to quote Robertson Davies slightly out of context.
And speaking of Bunuel, his autobiography My Last Sigh is a must read. He writes better in a second language than most do in their first and provides an all-time great Martini recipe.
He’d be a must for any all star dinner party. I guess some will run with that concept now. But I reckon you nthe absolute maximum for any great dinner party is a dozen.
“Pass the port without touching the table, then the Loyal Toast. They’re a blast as long as you don’t take them too seriously.”
Oh yes. I’ve been for drinkies at some classic Brit Army regimental bars and messes and they do a very nice line in turning on the style with a fair bit of tongue of cheek. Then you look at the stuff on walls that remembers many other dashing, irreverent young men who used to drink there and are now buried a long way from home. It’s an atmosphere that is very charming, slightly ridiculous and quite haunting all at once.
Just out of interest, how do these officers’ mess customs change (if at all) now that there are women officers?
“Western attitudes to food regard it mostly as just an “input” rather than link to each other.”
Was about to say exactly the same , Adrien. Its just Anglo-Celts who treat food as an input. I give you exhibit A: the pie. Look at it. It just somehting to line the stomach, so you can soak up more booze.
Whereas the Latins, only wine with dinner, and other people. No drunken nonsense.
One of the greatest, and yet most shameful nights of my life was in Palermo, when Italy won the world cup.
6000 people in a square celebrating, and only two were drunk: me and my Irish mate. They partied all night with us, and kindly found cabs to pour us in when we were messy. Great people, the Sicilians.
Once a fish out of water like that, you realise how completely dysfunctional the Anglo Irish pisshead culture is.
Not just Anglo-Irish, Lefty E. Like I was saying go drinking with some Germans some time!
“Just out of interest, how do these officers’ mess customs change (if at all) now that there are women officers?”
Not so much the customs, more the language I’d reckon. And from what I’ve seem of female ADF officers, they’re fully aware of the culture they’re going to encounter and are more than capable of not only rising to such traditions but also of giving ‘em a good kick up the arse when needed while also retaining respect for such traditions stand for. At the very least, they’re making their brother officers pay more attention to their deportment.
I was once chatting to an RAAF Captain of the female persuasion about this very issue and she pointed out that once she and a few other women started turning up in the officers’ mess, the CO remarked that many of the bloke officers were looking a lot more shaven, crisply ironed and well barbered.
Ha! Send them to finishing school in Switzerland I say!
Angle means German!
Angles? Angels? Pope Gregory etc?
Otherwise, I’m probs not getting something here. But then it’s almost 2am.
Oh nothing important Kimski. “Anglo” derives from Angle - a place in modern Germany.
Angles, Jutes and Saxons all invaded Romanised Celtic Britian, drinking their beers and eating their pies circa 4th-6th c ad.
[pedantry warning]
Kimmoi,
I’d say “Western” has a huge number of current useages, including several that would definitely include Mediterranean peoples, on the northish coast of that sea - natch. These include:
* Christian
* Anglo/Scandinavian/German/French
* NATO nations
* non-Asian
* Anglosphere + selected allies (hence including Australasia, Canada, Hong Kong, etc
I’ve never thought the Italians or Spanish were excluded.
But Greece seems to me much less “European” and more “Western Asian” in its customs etc, though Athens’ golden age is credited with…..
golly, this gets complicated, eh? We need Ute Man on the job.
The skit’s from Ripping Yarns, not Monty Python proper, but point taken. I don’t think classic western civility and standards have entirely broken down, but perhaps we approach it in a much more freely-associative way than others in previous generations might have.
“The skit’s from Ripping Yarns, not Monty Python”
As noted:
“one of the Monty Python spin-offs”
Roger of the Raj if I’m not mistaken.
“Just out of interest, how do these officers’ mess customs change (if at all) now that there are women officers?”
I can’t speak for the Officers’ Mess, folks, but I doubt if they’re much different to the Sergeants’ Mess. One major change is this: in the past, no-one was permitted to leave the table at a formal dinner until after the toasts, and maybe a few games (which played merry hell with your bladder, as by then you’d had heaps of wine and also quite a lot of port). These days, as a concession to the ladies, there’s a piss-stop between the main and the sweets. (I might add that many of the blokes are relieved as well.) Oh, and the language has been cleaned up. A bit.
Whoops, sorry…!
of course dinner parties were also, in their Ninteenth Century Golden age a way of winnowing out the weak.
From the closing pages of Mansfield Park, Jane Austen.
“and when Dr Grant had brought on apoplexy and death by three great institutional dinners in one week”
the beeb left that bit out of its adaptation.
I thought it was Denmark.
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Ye cannae blame the Anglo-Celts fer their lousy food culture, they have such lousy food. Why didja think the British conquered the world? They were in search of a decent meal and couldna conquer the fookin Frogs. (Or stomach ‘em).
Yeah, but Denmark and Germany are very recent creations. There’s actually lots of dispute - among historians of late antiquity - about where the post Roman withdrawal population of England came from.
Anyway, just by the by, the Germanic language English is closest to is Frisian.
One groovy book I think Mark was alluding to in his Edwardian Dinner Party suggestion was a “cellar book” purchased at the Lifeline book sale last year. It would be really hard to get wines to correspond to the Chateau Lafitte (18)76 etc, but it’s fascinating to read because this dude reproduces the menus from dinner parties he started hosting in the late 1880s and continued doing - with gusto - til 1914. There’s often something like 10 courses. And with a different wine to go with each. If you read the late 19th century fiction, these sorts of parties customarily ended around 4am or 5am.