Dhanteras shopping list

My lights have still to be put up. My curtains still have to be changed. My raddi still to be given to the raddi wallah. My Diwali clothes still to be bought. I know, I know. I am the queen of lists and planning. And the chambermaid of execution.

Yes, yes, it is so not feeling like Diwali this year. It is Dhanteras tomorrow. The day one usually sashayed to the goldsmith and picked up some random bauble for shagun. You know. You HAD to buy gold or utensils on Dhanteras. This year I think I’m buying a spoon set. I need spoons. Really do. Cross my heart. I have spoons of such odd sizes and shapes that when company comes across I need to pray that I find tableware of matching design and proportions in quantities appropriate to the company numbers. Or put out illmatched spoons and forks and pray they mate in happily eccentric fashion and create babies who do. It is a mystery, as to where pairs of flatware disappear. Probably to the same land single socks in a spin cycle get teleported to. Somewhere in the ethers is a land made of forks separated from the spoons they were meant to comport with, and dinner knives which never knew the joys of cutting into edible items being used as they were for more urgent pressing tasks like prising lids of jam tins off, and then being pushed into dark recesses of drawers never to be found again when required for table setting purposes. Therefore I will buy cutlery. Spoons and forks and table knives. And soup spoons. Though, frankly, we never use them. We just guzzle our soup from huge soup mugs that give the casual onlooker the impression of a family sitting down to a convival downing of beer before a quick bite.

I am to be blamed for this state of the cutlery drawer. I am not one to go chasing around folks demanding they replace the good forks and spoons and use the regular ones on a daily basis. I donot even look at the formal stuff, except when guests are expected which is when I begin mentally counting heads and then deciding on a casual buffet system because no way I can pull off the sit down placed dinner with sets of cutlery with key items gone to the land of single socks.

Therefore the Dhanteras shopping list. A 32 piece set of table flatware, with appropriate design that is neither too avant garde nor too fuddy duddy. And I’m getting a lock fitted into the cutlery sideboard. Anyone who touches and subsequently loses said flatware will do so on pain of finding the exact same piece and replace it if said piece goes missing. And that includes dinner guests.