Is it cold to tuck into a hot meal before my wife gets to the table?

My wife says that I’m rude for starting to eat dinner before she gets to the table, but I think it’s unfair that I should have to consume a cold meal that I cooked, even though I give her 10-, five-, three- and one-minute warnings that I’m about to serve up. Am I being unreasonable?
D.F., Turramurra, NSW

A: Sounds as if you’re doing most of the meal-making work. You’re planning the meal, cooking the meal, serving the meal, even stage-managing the meal. I can just see you knocking on your wife’s dressing-room door, yelling “Ten-minute call for tonight’s performance of Dinner! TEN minutes, please!” And her yelling back from her light-bulb-mirrored table, “Fabbo, dahhhhhling. I’ll be entering stage-left, so if you could make sure my chair’s pulled out, my tableware’s angled, and my follow-spot’s ready, that would be mahhhhhvellous!”

Preparing a dinner is actually not so different to staging a theatrical show. You need to set-design the plates (“Broccolini to the side of the potatoes … no, underneath the potatoes … no, up on their stalks over the potatoes like a broccolini teepee, YESSSSS!“); you need to rehearse your dramatic, Pinteresque dinner dialogue (“Did you pay the car rego?“/ “I thought I told you” / “Maybe you did” / “Broccolini’s nice” / “It’s a teepee” / “Ahhhh ...” ); and you need to make sure the entire cast is on-stage when the meal is hot and ready.

If your wife insists on being late to curtain every night, you should remind her that preparing a dinner involves hours of gruelling effort – and if she’s going to be unprofessional about it, you may have to recast your leading lady. Or you could just ignore her accusations of rudeness and continue eating your hot meal alone, performing your own tragi-comic, Beckettian, one-man play about the bleak, petty absurdities of modern relationships.

guru@goodweekend.com.au

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