Last updated 17:58, Friday, 08 August 2008

THIS week I have been invited out to supper.

I was quite surprised really, because I thought supper was a southern affectation which hadn’t yet percolated this far north, but apparently it has.

As Stuart Maconie says in his enjoyable book Pies and Prejudice, supper to Northerners is a snack best eaten in your dressing gown; a cream cracker with some cheese and an Ovaltine, or a couple of digestive biscuits and a mug of Horlicks perhaps.

Supper was certainly never a full-scale evening meal - that’s what we call dinner these days. Even more confusingly, dinner was what we used to eat mid-day, before it bec-ame lunch, and what you ate when you got in from school or work was your tea.

Nowadays, meal times are, fortunately, more flexible. I tend to be sitting down to my evening meal just as the news programme is showing a picture of the plaque outside Jedburgh Sheriff’s Court or telling the story of a skateboarding swan or some such amusing animal.

My mother, when she was living on her own, had to eat her dinner at 12noon, her tea at 4pm and her supper at 8pm, otherwise civilisation would totter and fall.

Many’s the time I have been dragged out of Marks and Spencer almost as soon as we had got there because we had to get back by 11am so that she could prepare her meal ready for sitting down to it at 12noon. Any suggestion that she could perhaps eat at 1pm, or that we could go out for the afternoon and come back to eat at six, was vigorously resisted - she had to eat at 12noon, 4pm and 8pm because that’s what she had always done, and her parents before her. If you wanted to do anything different, you were undoubtedly bound for hell fire.

I had an insight into this southern supper thing many years ago when we were living near London.

We were invited to supper by an acquaintance who, after welcoming us with a glass of wine, whispered to me in a conspiratorial tone: “We’re having pork chops - is that all right? Do you have pork chops in the North?”

I had to fight down an urge to tell her that ferret fricassee or whippet goulash would have been better, but I had to go and touch up my woad.