When I was a child, it seemed everyone my mother’s age and older had a set of bone china plates and cups to be used on special occasions. Now that I am that same age that my mother was when I was a kid I can’t help but notice that I haven’t seen a single person my age with a set of china. I feel that is a sign of social progress.
If there is one thing I know about plates and cups is that they get chipped and break all the time. It must be a horrible feeling to invest in a set of expensive tea cups and watch a clumsy dinner party guest knock one off the table and smash on the floor. People who owned such expensive sets must have found dinner parties unspeakably stressful. People my age drink a lot, but they don’t drink anywhere near as much as my parents’ generation.
The problem with bone china sets is that they are often used for tea, coffee, and deserts, which are typically served when dinner party guests are at their drunkest. If you are going to invest in bone china, you should only buy salad plates and soup bowls. When you factor in that people from the baby boomer and older generations were much more prone to waving their hands when speaking, there must have been a shocking number of beautiful cups and plates destroyed over the years.
It makes absolutely no sense to invest in something so delicate that is so frequently handed over to drunk house guests. If you want to invest your money in something nice for your dining room, why not spend your money on high end knives? They are far more practical and if a drunk dinner party guest who happens to hit one while talking with his hands he will do far more damage to himself than he will to the knife.
Most people these days are accustomed to drinking their tea and coffee out of a Tim Horton’s cup, so anything that has a handle and doesn’t rot or melt now looks sophisticated. Who among us has a social group that could be trusted with something that would smash into a hundred pieces if dropped on the floor? If you want to invest in something nice for your kitchen, invest in steel knives or cast iron cookware.