Debbienho !

In a land of meals, and a time of edicts, the possibility-of-life in the funereal-parlour-called-a-dining-area lies on the table of weird people. Their name? The X-Men! Yes la. These people were definitely in my dining hall! Our table was called C13, but I’m too much on a roll to go back and clean that. I wonder why that intro sounds familiar… Yes, C13, the Anne Shirley to Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, the Annie to the uptight Will Stacks, the Oh among the Boov. (In retrospect, we were not the weirdest lot in the school. There were those we called the Maca Witches. There was a table assigned to them—or a table was supposed to have been assigned to them—and every once in awhile there would be a spontaneous burst of coquettish laughter from where they sat—or were supposed to be sitting. The whole hall, the Republic of Ghana, and the city of Anfield, would look up from half-heartedly chasing kidney beans on our plates to see what had the ladies in titters. Excep

Dining time in boarding school was an exercise in nervousness. For those who went to dbee boarding schools, and those who were too dbee to even go to boarding school, the dining area looked something like this. There were columns of tables, “table” being two long, sturdy, unattractive worktops smacked together to make a longer table. On the long side of each individual table (yes, that’s a lot of tables) sat a bench. Sixteen of us would sit at each dining table (to think that I’ve only just started), on those backless benches (oh, the horror). Oh, it was NOTHING like this. Necessity is the mother of invention, though, so some of us improvised by leaning on the backs of those who sat behind us. It wasn’t entirely comforting but it was better than…okay, truth be told, it wasn’t better than anything. And we’d be there, sitting, drinking tea, or porridge, or eating yam, staring—or not—at the person opposite us, or at the table, or around the dining hall, or at our idle h