The Long Board

The Table with No End

The Long Board is one table for a whole village: old wood silvered by weather, long enough that everyone sits down together, set out by the hayward since before any one family had a claim on it.

That is the trouble with a table, and the wisdom of it both. A board with a head has a best seat, and a best seat can be quarrelled over until an old friendship goes cold and a feast-day curdles. But the Board answers to its keeper’s craft, not to anyone’s pride. A hayward who knows its weight and its joins can lay it straight, curve it into a horseshoe, or close it into a ring that has no head because it has no end.

A ring says everyone equal, everyone welcome, and sometimes that is the whole answer. Sometimes a village needs the opposite: one honoured seat, in the shade of the old tree, where the whole parish can look at a person and say we see you. The good keeper reads which the day is asking for. The Board will hold either. What it is truly for is never the weight of the supper. It is the people.