Originally published in The Clifton Courier, February 1, 2018

My flat finally has a dining table and I can’t believe how much it has changed my life.

This account really isn’t going to do much in the way of convincing you that I’m living a put-together life, but then again nothing in this column ever really does that. If you could please imagine me wearing a pencil skirt* and carrying a nondescript takeaway coffee cup (that I plan on disposing responsibly) to counteract the scummy way this yarn portrays me, that might really help things.

* Preferably one that I bought from an actual store for women, and not something I paid two bucks for at a garage sale. Maybe pretend I shop at Cue or David Jones and that I go there so often that I have a loyalty card.

For as long as I’ve lived in this place, we have been table-less.

It was pointed out to me during the inspection-phase, with my flatmates explaining the previous tenant took the table. But there was a coffee table and it was big enough to support a spread of rustic bread and an assortment of cheese (as it turns out, I was the only prospective housemate to eat the free bread, which for some reason made me stand out as the successful applicant – so obviously the takeaway lesson there is to always eat bread when it is offered to you), so the table problem didn’t seem like much of an issue.

And it wasn’t, really.

As someone who has about 3.25 mates in Sydney, I wasn’t really in a position to be throwing dinner parties that needed amble dining space. And because I tend to chuck most of my meals in a bowl (my specialty is a “hearty chicken bowl” which roughly translates to “chunks of cooked chicken breast tossed into a family-sized serving of Gravox gravy, eaten out of a novelty-sized mug”*), I don’t really require a full dining set-up. I rarely find myself cooking anything that requires a steak knife to carve into it, so I have been able to get by simply by balancing my plate on my lap while sitting on the couch.

* It will be a key feature of my recipe book/biography, to be released at a later date… probably after being photocopied at the local library. 

Let’s not forget the joys of being table-less means a free pass to eat in front of the television, which allows you to continue distracting yourself with a screen instead of staring your sad reality squarely in the face. The television aspect of this transforms the situation from “pathetic 20something who can’t afford a table” to “young woman living like a queen because she can finally eat in the lounge room”.

And we did have an outdoor setting in case we really needed to sit at a table to eat. The problem with this arrangement, however, was that the plastic chairs collected water and there are always these pale splodges on the table that I’ve made an extremely uneducated guess to be bat wee residue. Sure, the table does the job of being a surface upon which to place food, but you run the risk of getting a wet bum and possibly contracting Hendra.

It was inconvenient at times, but it was liveable.

However, when one of my flatmates became swept up with the inevitable gust of optimistic productivity that comes with the New Year, she found a second-hand table for us. It could fit into her car and it was cheap enough to take from the money left in the joint account by the previous tenant. And sure, the table isn’t particularly large or glamorous, in fact, it had specs of glitter that don’t wipe off and a faint stickiness no amount of spray and wipe seems to remove, but it’s a table.

And holy moly as it changed everything.

Yesterday I ate eggs on toast without having to pick up the bread and eating it like a sad, eggy pizza*. I’m writing this at the table with a cup of tea next o my laptop instead of being in bed, with my tea dangerously perched on a book on my mattress. And yesterday I was as able to offer a visiting friend a seat while she sipped her water. We talked about work and her long-term relationship and savings – all grown-up topics of conversation that would have had a more pathetic tone to it should we have been sitting cross-legged on the aged carpet.

* Another idea for my recipe book. I plan on calling it In The Kitchen with Dannielle, and staging several awkward photoshoots to make it. 

It may be a few pieces of cheap wood, but this feels like a game changer. Before now, things were bleak. Sloppy. Everything had to be strategically bite-sized and in bowl-form. But now the future seems brighter. More sophisticated. With the potential for home-cooked steak.

And look, this whole column wasn’t just a 600-word build up for a crappy pun but it seems like the only way that I can end this: I guess the tables have turned.