Do you love it? Do you loathe it? Do you care?

I'm with you on this John. I also think of the midday meal as dinner and evening one as tea too.
Although my parents were Londoners they brought us up calling them the same as well.

 

It's easy.

Lunch is dinner, dinner is tea, and tea is brew. Some people like to throw a curve ball when you offer them a brew by asking for that coffee stuff.

As we're currently staying right next door to a family friendly pub, yesterday I decided to bamboozle my kids by asking if they fancied necking a jar. Baffled by this I rephrased my question to ask if they fancied going for a couple of swift ones. They just looked at me like I was stupid

 

Actually, as I spent from 1957-1963 in Luton , I knew it as that too. It wasn't till I moved back to The States that I knew of lunch. Meals and times in Portugal are a story on their own here.

 

Ah, so you used to have Yorkshire Tea.

Nick

 

It's similar here, dinner is at mid day or 1 pm but the evening meal is called supper which you had at about 6 pm. Tea time was at about 4 pm and consisted of a snack to keep you going until supper time.
There was no such thing as lunch until the 21st century when people started pretending they're posh.

 

Shiney, what were you doing writing at 6:12 AM? Shouldn't you have been sitting down for a peaceful supper?

 

That would be breakfast but I don't know what it's called these days ...

 

Do make up your mind.

 

Ah! Topical indeed. I kid you not, it happened this very morning (03/08/2022). Lab (*) was on the train to Waterloo (**) and a woman (circa 35) wearing earplugs, sitting opposite, pointing at her ears, asks her: Can you hear anything? Lab says no (she really couln't). Oh good, says the woman, I am glad, I know they can produce a rather unpleasant, tinny sound; if at any point you hear anything let me know and I’ll turn it down.

How nice. This was immediately reported to me with the instruction: Put that on the Forum, it’s very topical!

(*) My wife, LawAndBorder, who isn’t actually registered but is a clandestine reader of this Forum


(**) London, not Belgium

 

I’ve never met Karl Jung BUT I did once see Lucian Freud in the forecourt at the Royal Academy and overheard him say to someone (whom I couldn’t identify) that, if Winsor & Newton stopped producing Naples Yellow as they threatened to do, he would give up painting. Shocked though I was to hear this, I did not approach him to ask if he really meant it; anyway, they didn’t, and neither did he.

 

In "Goliath Undefeated", I told you about my wonderfully eccentric and considerate neighbour (the one on the left) but I haven’t told you about our ex-neighbours (the ones on the right), Mr and Mrs Y.

Mrs Y was a Town Councilor. Her husband was one of Margaret Thatcher’s vegetables(*). At one point, Mrs. T gave him an exceptionally hard time; I don’t know whether or not the heat in the parliamentary kitchen of the day contributed to the ensuing events, but the fact is that one day my wife and I, returning from holiday, opened our front door and, still on our porch, heard a very loud, unusual noise coming from inside the house. Alarmed and puzzled, we explored, trying to locate the source of the disturbance. Eventually, when opening our conservatory door, we realised that the incredibly loud whining was coming from Mr and Mrs Y’s garden. They had placed two massive air-conditioning units (each of 110cm X 90cm X 35cm) against their fence immediately adjacent to our conservatory. It is no exaggeration to say that the noise was deafening; we had, after all, already heard it on our porch which was some seventeen meters away from the units.

We discussed it with Mrs Y and she said that she thought “the units made no more noise than the birds in the trees” (you couldn’t make it up!). I said to my wife “the birds in their trees must be related to Boeing”.

What was comical but not at all funny at the time was that Mrs. Y was in charge of the Town Council’s Department for the Environment (I said you couldn’t make it up!).

We approached her department (on her day off [she seemed to have days off most days]) and, after a couple of weeks, two experts came (without her) in a van full of equipment and, as we opened the front door, one of them, already hearing the howling, said to his colleague, pointing at the equipment, I don’t think we are going to need those!

The matter was resolved and the units had to be annihilated(**). As my wife rejoices in saying whenever she tells the story, after a dinner: “We had her shut down by her own department!”

(*) as Spitting Image used to describe her ministers
(**) Mr and Mrs Y have since moved - not because of any of this, but because they wanted more space in a posh location

 

Seeing the debate on meal times and names; where does brunch fit in?
As for meal times and names it's a bit like metric and imperial units I'm bilingual.