A Time and a Place

He placed an empty plate in front of me.

"There's a time and a plate," he said, as if this were the best joke in the world.

I laughed politely. Polite laughter is never the same as real laughter. But it was real enough to elicit a small breaking of wind.

He left for the kitchen. I looked at the skin of the hand that sat in my lap awaiting the meal to arrive, next to the other hand. The knife and fork either side of the plate would soon be taken up by each hand, I assumed. That skin was mine. Those hands things I could move. But such thoughts gave no real clue as to whom those hands belonged, other than a sense they were mine and thus part of me. The thoughts themselves were mine, too. How could thoughts be otherwise. Thoughts were more certain of who owned them than the hands were, because hands could not think.

By this time, he had returned from the kitchen pushing a trolley and several platters upon it.

"Roast beef on pancakes," he said.

I looked at the food he had brought and confirmed to myself that his description was not a million miles from the truth.

But did eyes have thoughts, if hands didn't?

I lowered my face to smell the food. My nose was usually more certain about things than any other part of my body. But the aroma was too tenuous. Beef and pancakes had no recognisable strength of identity. Other than perhaps identity by taste? And by texture, and texture in the mouth was more aligned with the sense of touch than with the sense of taste, I thought.

The food had not yet been loaded upon the plate. The restaurant, I knew, had a sign outside it saying: 'The Time and the Plate.' A good name. Why had nobody ever called a restaurant by that name before? It was too good not to have been used before. But this was not the time and the place to explore such avenues of brand management.

And, after it had been served, I tucked into the roast beef and pancakes. A sort of Yorkshire Pudding without walls only a floor. And meat with fibrous blood rather than gravy soaking into it. And fingers. The knife and fork eschewed.