Many years ago, long before the invention of Twitter and avocado on sourdough, a man had the temerity to break up with me. At the time, the reason he gave for this outrage was that he no longer found me attractive. Later, though, rumours reached me that among several other factors involved was my supposed fondness for dinner parties: events, I now discovered, that he considered not only incredibly tedious, but repulsively bourgeois to boot.
Naturally, I laughed my head off at this. I don’t remember him ever turning down the Nigella Lawson chicken thing that was then my star dish, and if he’d truly wanted to spend his evening alone reading Eric Hobsbawm and listening to Billy Bragg, he’d only to say. But I was also struck by his terminology. I mean, who uses the phrase “dinner party” these days? Not me, for one. Don’t most people just invite a few friends over for food, wine and slightly tipsy conversations about (delete as applicable) books, their lunatic boss, or what X said to Y when he found out that she was having an affair with Z?
It was weirdly quaint that he’d deployed it, as if we were still in a world of Elizabeth Shaw mints, Party Susans, and Margo Leadbetter-style evening gowns; in my mind’s eye I saw him in a beret, looking just like Wolfie, the character played by Robert Lindsay in the 70s sitcom Citizen Smith (Wolfie, you’ll recall, was the hopeless leader of a miniature revolutionary movement known as the Tooting Popular Front).
Then again, perhaps he knew his audience. The words “dinner party” work like a reverse trigger warning for a certain kind of person: whisper them in the right ear (by which I mean, I suppose, the left ear), and the response is Pavlovian. You picture a few pals gently drinking rosé and eating moderately fancy pasta. They see executed birds, napkins as vast as sails, and snobbish mass pretension. As has already been noted ad infinitum, this is why, when the actor Eddie Marsan remarked on Twitter that he preferred dinner parties to the pub, he was suddenly a class traitor – and sod the fact that he surely only used the expression in the first place for reasons of concision.
Still, whatever you choose to call them, people are quite peculiar about such gatherings: even those people who don’t believe that conviviality and pesto are not for the comrades. Some maintain a deep fear of being invited, whether because they lazily prefer box sets to human beings, or because they once had to sit next to someone who talked for two hours non-stop about (again, delete as applicable) their children’s education/their builder/their holiday. Others, the majority, fear hosting. They get nervous. What if the chicken thing is pink? What if the red cabbage thing is blue? What if X gets pissed and starts going on about Brexit? There’s no need, I think, for any of this. Don’t invite X if you truly fear the Saturday night sauvignon blanc effect. And don’t worry about the food either. People come to your house to see you, and other people they like – or might like to get to like – not for your cooking. They’ll be perfectly content with sausages and mash.
People who know me think I like to cook. But that’s not it, really. I take trouble over it only because I like to eat, and I like to see people around my kitchen table. In the hour before old friends (or new ones) arrive for supper, I feel a rising sense of happiness, one not even the prospect of hours of washing up can crimp. It’s lovely if, later, people tell me something I’ve made is delicious. I won’t deny that I feel mildly triumphant when people ask for seconds. What matters to me much more, though, is that there is talking, laughter and, possibly, drinking. Does this sound saccharine? Well, I hardly care if it does. My kind of comrades know that life, which can sometimes be a struggle, is there to be enjoyed whenever possible. They eat with unashamed gusto, aware that there is nothing more futile, or more boring in all the world, than the kind of class war that insists crab linguine is for other people.
rachel.cooke@observer.co.uk
