One for the Road: Table manners

Recently, while unavoidably overhearing a conversation between two dandified gentlemen in Belfast, I was surprised to learn that it is a well-observed rule by those who regularly frequent high-society dinner-parties that a person should never regale their fellow diners with detailed accounts of their dreams.

One’s nighttime visions, apparently, almost always being an object of far more fascination to oneself than to anybody else.

This was news to me, a serial dream-sharer.

“Sigmund Freud did people a double disservice when he published ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’,” said one old chap to the other, the resounding aplomb in his voice carrying his words 20 feet across the busy bus station and unto my ears.

“First, he erroneously convinced them that their inconsequential hallucinations provide a window to their souls. And worse still, he then fooled them into thinking that other people might want to have a look!”

As the old chap, hands in pockets and rocking from his heels to his toes, continued his supercilious deconstruction of the idea that dreams provide us with clues about our unconscious, his chum indulged him with a generous helping of jolly good back-slapping and scoffing laughter.

Meanwhile, l sat stunned.

See, up until that moment, I, probably due to some combination of my social class, non-magnetic personality and fondness of foul language, had lived my whole life ignorant to the fact that dream-talk is considered such a tedious conversational cul-de-sac that it practically constitutes a social offence if broached at the kind of beau monde parties where these two tweed-wearing, pipe-smoking, duck-blasting gentlemen spend their weekends.

Truth be told, a typical morning for me usually goes something like this: Wake up – simultaneously stretch, curse and yawn – massage my eyeballs with my index knuckles, then start blethering about whatever weird visions visited me over the previous eight hours.

Give me a few drinks and a captive audience and I’d have no bother holding a whole dinner table hostage with a long-winded tale about how the previous night I had to use my noodle arms to fight off my old primary school teacher who was dressed like a bishop and trying to take my head off with their staff.

But no more.

See, thanks to these two marvellous upper-middle-class chaps and their superhuman vocal projection, I now reckon that, if ever I win the EuroMillions and am invited as a nouveau riche guest of honour to some swanky soirées, I could comfortably mingle, chitchat and hobnob my way to dessert, without fear of humiliating myself by recounting some half-remember vista from years before.

But could I still remember the rules of refinement three hours and a bottle-and-a-half of champagne later?

Imagine this scenario: I’ve come into money, been invited to the grandest of gatherings, and am doing my best impression of someone who belongs.

It’s two in the morning and the lord of the manor is only after heading to bed, leaving me sitting between some neo-aristocrat and his 19-year-old Russian wife.

I’m drinking my champagne, speaking as plummy as possible and trying to ignore the old man in the corner curting the severed head of a common farmyard animal, when, for one reason or another, the conversation dries up.

There is an awkward silence, so I reach into my trove of anecdotes and accidentally pull out a dream I had when I was about eight.

I panic and begin to talk.

Everybody, bar one, looks at me.

“So there I was, standing on St Conor’s Primary School football pitch, facing the goals behind which lies the townland of Ballygowan.

“Just me, my family and some big Yank.”

The pig’s head rolls slowly across the floor. Now everyone is looking at me.

“The Yank was chatting away, then a big mushroom cloud starts to rise into the sky in the distance and a barrel of flames rushes towards us.

“I begin to cry and ask what’s happening and the American turns around and says, ‘Either our world is about to end or else Peter Canavan is kicking a winning point for Tyrone’.”

At this point two bouncers walk in.

One quietly puts my arm behind my back and starts marching me to the door, while the other lifts the pork from the floor and hands it back to the guy who dropped it.

“I’m sorry, sir,” he apologises, handing it back. “He should never have been let in.

“Some people just don’t know how to behave at a dinner party.”