The Dining Room Conspiracy

Listen to: Live from the Hovel on the hill, No.16

The Dining Room conspiracy
We are on the front lines here at bunker Gray. Down in the trenches with all the mud and blood of constant rebellion. Every day we do battle with convention and tradition, willing ourselves forward in the cause. We wear shorts in the winter. We wear two different colored socks, sometimes on purpose. There is nothing sacred to us.
Today I am looking at the dining room and wondering, what’s it for? Tradition tells us it’s for special occasions, Sunday dinners, and entertaining guests. The nerve of those guests, can’t eat at the kitchen table like the rest of us?
Right now our dining room is filled with keyboards, drums and recording equipment. If we could figure out how to store that giant table somewhere we could really spread out.
This is very like what happened to the living room. My wife was a dogged defender of the living room. She insisted that the living room always be spotless and was reserved for entertaining. Consequently the family never felt comfortable in there. Unfortunately, when guests did come over they always stood around in the kitchen, which left the living room, unlived.
It took a while, but after my wife died, I started to question the wisdom of having one of the largest rooms in the house being the least used. So we changed it. Now it is a game and gathering room. The kids spend most of their down time in there and I can be near them while working in the kitchen. It’s very handy for togetherness and parental mentoring. I am always passing on little tidbits of hard earned wisdom. Things like:
-Turn that down, I’m trying to watch the news here!-
And
-Whose socks are these and what are they doing in the microwave?-
It looks like the dining room is going the same way, racing down the path to usefulness. There is a bigger problem than we had with the living room though. The dining room is chock-a-block full of heirlooms. Big heavy ones.
The table for instance, while it is the perfect place for a train set, it also weighs about 5,000 pounds. It does not come apart. Two men and a mule can push it around but not far enough out of the way to end the menace of breaking your arm during a really expressive “air guitar” session.
Then there are the massive and equally heavy lowboy and highboy. Packed with silver, champagne glasses and special plates that are not allowed in the dish washer. Together they are probably responsible for my house’s nasty heirloom tilt.
I believe that since I was married, those plates have seen the light of day 4 times. The last time, due to a fit of “being in charge”, I decided that it was up to me whether I could actually look at them or not. I drew the shutters, took a quick peek and then put them back immediately, before I got into trouble. It’s probably on my permanent record though.
There is some sense to not using the good glasses and Sunday china willy-nilly, I suppose. Some might even site the example of the time we broke three champagne glasses during an informal High-C soiree.
-Look Dad, I‘m a Viking, Arghhh! Oh sorry! Sorry! Sorry!-
Which just makes me see the sense of drinking out of horns and wooden bowls. If you decide to clop your brother on the head with one, his head may hurt but you still have a working bowl.
This still leaves us with the problem of things we rarely use, taking up more than their fair share of our house. It will not be as easy as the living room. These fine dining things are protected from rebellion by impenetrable force fields of guilt.
Being prisoners of our own paraphernalia, we will have to find a way to coexist. Discover some way to protect and preserve them and still be able to utilize the space for more useful pursuits, like Lego city.
That way when the Queen comes over for a spot of tea, we can say:
-Let’s get out the good things guys! They are over there behind the Star Wars diorama, right next to the Photon torpedoes.-

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