I learnt the lesson on what goes where in a formal dinner setting the hard way – by screwing up.

It was some time in the mid-1990s and the foreign publication I was working for was due to host a dinner for then-deputy premier Anwar Ibrahim. I’d been busy ferrying the boss from Hong Kong around Kuala Lumpur for most of the day and was properly starved by the time dinner rolled around. 

I was seated next to the country’s then-Attorney General, the imperturbable Abu Talib Othman.

Metaphorically speaking, however, I was between a rock and a hard place.  The rock was starving while the hard place couldn’t remember which of the side-plates of bread rolls belonged to me. 

I waited an anguished couple of minutes hoping someone would initiate proceedings, but no one did. It was a 50:50 thing so the odds were reasonable that I wouldn’t make a hash of it. 

But I did. As the tortuous minutes went by, I resorted to the old eeny-meeny-miny-mo trick and devoured the roll on my right. 

After I came to, I noticed that everyone was buttering, or eating, their rolls except the good Tan Sri on my right. Upon my questioning look, he indicated, with the merest tilt of his head, the roll sitting forlornly on my plate’s left. 

An aghast understanding dawned, and I swiftly transferred said roll to the right. He picked it up and calmly began buttering it while initiating conversation on the perils of journalism in the region. Such was his aplomb that no one at the table noticed and my blushes were spared. 

That’s class for you, the courtesy of a true gentleman, or as Twain observed, “the noise you don’t make while eating your soup.” 

It takes an experience like that to drive the lesson home for life, and I’ve never forgotten the BMW rule for formal dining ever since. It stands for “Bread, Meal Water” which is how said dinner items should be positioned before you, going from left to right. 

Even so, the polished, good manners displayed by bygone generations seem to be going the way of the dodo. Standing up for a woman or holding the door for one can sometimes be viewed negatively because of New Age sensibilities brought about by feminism and gender equality. 

But there are those who’d argue that politeness is half good manners and half good lying, like the guy who disguises his boredom by learning to yawn with his mouth closed.

Of course, all this refers to the Western norm of good breeding. It is wholly different in other cultures which may be one reason why the writer Paul Theroux had occasion to remark: “The Japanese have perfected good manners and have made them indistinguishable from rudeness.” 

The observation may have stemmed from his first visit to any ramen joint in 

Tokyo: all that slurping is blatantly at odds with the “noise you don’t make while eating soup.” 

But it’s de rigueur in Japanese culture where the sedentary slurper slurps and having slurped, moves on to slurp some more.  

Omar Khayyam might think it bad form, but the poor sod hadn’t supped nor slurped ramen. 

Even so, even Omar might have disapproved of Homer Simpson; “Look Marge, you know it’s rude to talk when my mouth’s full.” 

ENDS