Certain at the dinner table

Ask anyone in Khobar to list what they were completely sure of about food at fifteen, and the list arrives quickly.

Fish and milk must never meet in one meal. A restaurant with an empty room cannot be any good. Cold water after a heavy lunch is dangerous. The hotter the dish, the more serious the cook. The place the family always went to is the best in the city, and anyone who disagrees has not eaten there properly.

None of these were held lightly. They were stated, defended and handed down to younger cousins. Some of them still are.

What is striking is how most of them ended. Not with an argument. Nobody sat anyone down. One evening the empty restaurant turned out to be wonderful, or a friend ordered fish in a yoghurt sauce and was perfectly fine, and the old rule quietly stopped being repeated. No announcement. No apology to the cousins.

And then, oddly, nothing else moved. Having let one certainty go without noticing, people tend to feel even surer about the ones that remain, as if the old mistakes had belonged to someone else.

That is worth remembering before the next argument over dinner. The things said with the most confidence today are in the same company as the ones that slipped away. Not all of them are wrong. Some of them are.

It is easier to stay open with the old list kept somewhere in view. Not as an embarrassment. As a record of how often being sure has turned out to be temporary.