The Tables Are Turned

With Christmas fast approaching and much talk of how many will be at Christmas dinner, the pivotal importance of the humble dining table has suddenly become paramount if not somewhat urgent.

As I sat down to write I realised that I still own nearly every dining table that has accompanied my adult life. I wasn’t particularly aware that I was hoarding tables but evidently I seem to be unable to part with them - each feeling like an irreplaceable reliquary of memories.

In a recent reorganisation of the warehouse I unearthed the little round French, pear wood table that spent a year in the sun filled front window of a long ago Paris apartment. The table was privy to the elaborate lunches I created from produce gleaned from the market in the street below - the many salades de chèvre chaud and my first attempt at an authentic Provençale daube. There were desserts of fresh lychees - we would pour them straight from the paper bag and they would fall across the table top like coral coloured sea urchins. It was at this table that I would sit to write long letters home while my heart ached for New Zealand and the cacophony of Paris continued below.

In another dark corner of the warehouse lurks the large turned leg table with the nifty, high tech, Victorian device of a table top that flips and transforms into a modest billiards table. It is as heavy as a monolith and has been moved several times over the years by a team of heroic furniture movers, notably into and out of a much larger home with a not insignificant flight of stairs. The table hosted large and festive Christmas dinners, unruly children’s parties with pirate cakes and dinosaur biscuits and provided much late night entertainment in the form of billiards tournaments lasting into the early hours of the morning when tiredness rather than defeat would end the game. Now the table patiently waits for another home spacious enough to accommodate it and represents my persistent belief that we will reside in a larger house some day, meanwhile it quietly guards the memories of those wonderful years.

The dining table from my first home is a table from a French convent. The table has a painted faux grain finish on the top and chipped cream paint is peeling from the legs - there are four drawers along each side and there are pretty French names scrawled in pencil inside several of the drawers. The legs are too short, we never got around to lengthening them and there is a handle missing. The table now lies upside down like a forlorn cast animal with its feet in the air on top of the monumental Victorian table. I still remember the thrill of excitement when we found this wonderful table - the original paint, it’s provenance, the stories it could tell ! Our stories have been added to those it already held and it now waits in limbo for a time when it will gather some more.

A table is not just a table - it is an extraordinary thing. It anchors a home, bears witness to your life and is spectacularly useful on Christmas Day.

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