A collection of the everyday: conversations, banter, and arguments had at the dinner table.
I’ve noticed that in the few countries I’ve lived in, despite our vast cultural differences, we all collect something that pays homage to the experiences we’ve had and the incredible people we’ve met. A friend from Malaga once told me that her series of tattoos were individually painted on her arms in each country that she visited outside of Europe. One such tattoo was a surfboard from when she was a surf instructor one summer in Australia. Until now, I hadn’t chosen what it is that I would collect from all the places I’d been and all the people I’d met. That was until I found myself sitting in a small taverna at the far end of a tiny island in Greece. I had been spending a few weeks of the summer there working at a diving centre. One night after work, we all went to dinner and, being the big team that we were, had to have tables pushed together from all corners of the restaurant to seat everyone tightly together at one big table. There I sat with a group of people who were still very much strangers to me, listening to the jumble of voices, clinks of wine glasses, watching as plate after plate of food kept on coming from the kitchen. In different languages – Greek, English, French – stories were shared about diving experiences in places like Egypt’s Red Sea and Bali’s Indian Ocean. We laughed as we translated ridiculous jokes from our native languages and passionately threw our hands in the air in agreement or disagreement to the lively debates being had. I found it incredible that this dinner table and these brief summer encounters were like pieces of the world sewn together momentarily to touch everyone’s own life. It was impossible not to collect the memories shared and remember the stories being told, as they were narrated with such passion and embellished with accents of countries from across the globe.
The Greeks revere a custom called Xenia, a love of strangers and hospitality towards travellers. It is in Greece that I started to think about this custom and how at University we are all essentially a group of travellers who have found ourselves together for one reason or another. The stories we tell and hear from each other in class, at pubs and over dinner are telling of who we are and who we become. I remember the first dinner I had with my new flatmates in our student accommodation when September of first year came to pass, telling stories about our lives and where we came from for the first time in the space we would call home for the next year. Suddenly, second year arrived and there I was, sharing a bowl of pasta with my friends at a new kitchen table in a new flat.
Along the way, I found myself sitting at a dinner table, sometime between Christmas and New Year, with people I met working a part-time job at a restaurant. It was a vividly illustrated catalogue of everything you could possibly do with your 20s. Some of us were in university, some were travelling, some were taking care of family for the first time. Despite our contexts, despite the fact that we all had nothing in common other than this part-time job serving tables, it was another collection of stories and conversations that left an impression on me. As students we meet the most incredible people, people of different opinions than ourselves, people who come from all over the world and people who challenge our thinking and inevitably make us more complex and hospitable individuals.
‘If you could have dinner with anyone, dead or alive, who would it be?’ I’ve been asked this question countless times, but I’ve realised that the interest with this question is less about the answer and more so about the concept of what you would gain from sharing a meal with someone you would defy reality to talk to. Without a doubt, sharing a meal with JFK at Sugo Pasta or Sean Connery at the Bothy would be ridiculously captivating. But sometimes, what holds the most weight is the experience of conversing imperfectly and fortuitously with a perfect stranger, completely unaware that you may leave the table with a more comprehensive understanding of who you are than when you first sat down.
