Silent Supper

 Recently I found myself at dinner with m'learned colleague Giles Coren... we were dining at one of London's fanciest new restaurants. Each dish was pristine, caviar-ridden. Nobody was escaping for less than £250 a head.

And yet something felt off. I couldn't put my finger on it. Then Giles leant across the table. "Have you noticed everyone here is on their phones?"

He was right. Entirely right. Next to us, two businessmen hadn't looked up from their emails once. Next to them, a family with two teenagers in baseball caps, ignoring their food and instead gorging lasciviously on TikTok slop. Most tragically, on the other side of the restaurant, but drawing our eyes like a traffic accident or a marital shouting match in a supermarket, a young couple on a date, both looking lovingly into their phones...

Midday Meal
Johannes Weiland (1856-1909)
Photo Credit: Bury Art Museum [CC  BY-NC-ND]

The whole thing left me feeling utterly miserable... Is this what humanity's crowning achievement has come to? Our mastery of the fire and the fork - the thing that separates us from the beasts - reduced to staring at our stupid little screens?

Yes, it seems. The Week Junior, a news magazine, published some hideous statistics last week about the way we eat now. A quarter of families say they no longer talk at dinner, and 77 per cent of parents have their phones at the table.

That's the ones that can be bothered to dine together at all. Only one in three families actually sit down to eat dinner together each day, and 66 per cent of children said they would rather eat in front of a TV or computer than with their parents.

Who can blame them? TV certainly sounds like more fun than watching your mum and dad gawp aimlessly at their Instagram feeds. Poor kids. And 42 per cent of parents said they struggled to come up with a conversation to have with their children. Are you kidding me? How utterly miserable. How scrambled by algorithms are these people's brains?...

(Charlotte Ivers, The Sunday Times, 2025)

There has been a great deal of talk recently in the UK about whether children should be allowed their mobile phones in school. Most schools, it seems, do have some regulations concerning their use. What did not come up in that debate was how addictive these phones can be - not just for children - but also for their parents, the adults. If the statistics used in the piece above are indicative of the state of families social cohesion then we are, truly, in a miserable place.