It is the evening of a holiday.
You are all clustered 'round a table laden with the remains of a feast. Only a few derelict pieces of sponge cake remain; everyone's glass is nearly empty. Conversation flags. The children are somewhere beneath the table--you can feel them, tugging at your feet, and plucking at Great Aunt Meredith's shoes.
What to do?
All new news has long since been exhausted, and your relatives have started in on their favourite subjects--you respond, drearily, the with the same noncommital phrases they have heard time and time again, and still cease to understand. Old tensions rise. Old arguments stir. Sensibilities rankle.
What to say?
There is only another hour or two until you can righteously turn them out--time for a board game (only the rules are missing)--or, should you resort to turning on the television?
How differently things would go, if only you had a book to read aloud!
Reading aloud over a dinner table--an antiquated, funny old notion, from the bygone days when people would cluster around a piano in the tiny parlor, to be entertained. An adventurous notion, requiring relatives to put on their spectacles, crank up their character voices, and fall into the tale.
The children have crawled up from under the table; they wish to be involved. Little Alfred's chapter may take forever, but he feels proud at its end, for having navigated words such as 'pecuniary' and 'Herculean'. If it is a humorous book, all the better--the ice is instantly broken! No-one minds about Aunt Agatha's creaky voice, or Cousin Matthias' inability to differentiate between the female characters and the male.
When the evening is done, you may rest assured, they will come again. And leave their arguments behind.
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