My dream dinner party
Long spoons in hell
I don’t have the confidence to choose my ideal dead dinner guests. I know they don’t have to be dead but you’ve got to narrow it down somehow.
I’m worried that my dramatis personae won’t be obscure enough. Don’t get me wrong: no one’s asked me. I just started thinking about it and the choice of absolutely anyone of note from all of time and history made my wrists weak.
There should be at least one person other people haven’t heard of, indicating my hidden depths. You’d have to ask, “Who is that?” like I was a character in Line of Duty who wasn’t explaining their acronyms.
I’d need someone with a serious intellectual bent to show that I don’t just marinate in gossip. And someone from a reality show to demonstrate my ability to switch between high and low culture.
Why do we ask each other about dinner parties? Imagine having to spread your interior picnic out like that. Stop looking at my sandwiches. My sandwiches are private.
I care too much about what people think about me. But then I have moments of not caring at all and it frightens me. If I catch myself in one of those moments, I think everyone can see my dirty, sticky thoughts, covered in lint and they’ll remember them every time they meet me.
I started getting tattoos at 38 which surprised even me. The first was a Blue Peter ship on the back of my left shoulder. I brought in an A4 sheet covered in different versions of Tony Hart’s original design, some with rigging, some without. I showed them to my artist.
The tattoo guy was angry at his boss for giving him such a basic copying job. He didn’t say he was but I could tell from the way he was banging about.
He and his boss didn’t seem to get on. Don’t get tattooed by an angry man. It wasn’t that it hurt, I just didn’t enjoy it like I thought I would. All my other tattoos were done by someone else and I really enjoyed those.
But that little blue ship was a bit of “indoors me” coming out into the open. Not very me. But now the little bouquets of flowers and small symbols are me. If you had to choose a tattoo, do you know what you’d get? It might be nothing because you don’t like tattoos.
I used to tell people in a loud, confident voice that tattoos were like scribbling something on your school pencil case that you could never, ever rub off. I didn’t understand the impulse.
You’re going to read right to the bottom of a piece called My Dream Dinner Party and not get a single name out of me. OK, Douglas Adams. I think he’d be fun and a bit boozy. Now I’ve told you something about myself and I regret it.
Years ago, I’d have insisted “just people who drink” because I was unwittingly seeking oblivion and the abstemious would make me feel weird about how much I put away.
I still love the soft edges after a couple of martinis, but I drink far less than I used to. My body doesn’t like it as much and several friends have opted out all together.
I love the company of my non-drinking friends but find myself wondering if they’re really digging a table full of people three wines in, lips shining, enjoying the sound of themselves.
Since mid-2020, I’ve marked the days I don’t drink on an app on my phone. A little trumpet toots a fanfare when I hit my weekly target. I like the game-ifying of things, like a pigeon hitting the right button for grain.
The thing about dinner parties is the people you think you want there would probably be awful. Maybe that’s why I’m limiting myself to dead ones because I know there’s no chance of them showing up.
Dream dinner parties are usually full of famous people, often chosen by someone who has never met a famous person, beyond a quick autograph at the stage door.
For example, I cannot imagine enjoying a meal sat next to Madonna.
She filmed that teaser for her new tour and I watched it over and over. A variety of famous people she clearly admires/knows, at varying stages of their careers, are sat around a large table, giving her context.
Amy Schumer plays up to Madonna’s smutty Truth or Dare request to lick an onion ring (it could be calamari) like it’s her husband’s butt hole. Amy calls her “bitch” and everyone laughs in the way that you would if you were at a table with a one-name famous person. It’s not convivial, but performed and required. Obviously. There are cameras.
My favourite guest is Megan Stalter, a young American comedian who makes me laugh so hard with her commitment to a bit. In an Instagram video her girlfriend filmed while they were waiting around on set, Megan stands to one side next to Kate Berlant (another genius) playing with her hair and dancing awkwardly.
She captions it: “Yes I’m in Madonna’s video announcing her world tour. No I don’t know why.” I think I saw her in another post somewhere say she was watching herself “dissociating”.
It’s why Madonna asked her: because she’d be both awed to be asked and curious enough to accept but also not so grateful that she wouldn’t laugh at it all.
That kind of famous person sometimes likes to “collect” people. I was collected once, by a famous writer and of course I went out of curiosity and because I was flattered.
But it was weird and like going to leave an offering at a temple. There were rules that the other people there already knew and I didn’t. I didn’t reply to the writer’s next email saying we should get to know each other better “on drugs”.
I don’t know how to behave with famous people. It’s been years now and they still have a curious effect on me that I don’t like.
I call myself a journalist but I hardly ever do interviews because I find them excruciating. Not the people, the situation. You’re there to extract something and they sit there, mouth shut, leaking things carefully from the tight gap between their teeth.
I want them to like me, so I balk at the hard questions. Brilliant interviewers are often odd people with no boundaries who don’t embarrass easily. I envy them.
Someone’s dream dinner party might be Madonna and Amy Schumer eating fried food, but the one with the cameras looked the opposite of fun. I can imagine them all, even Jack Black, finally unclenching in the car home.
Or maybe I’m wrong and they all had a good time and it’s my clenching that’s the problem.
Anyway, my dream for a dinner party is to be able to cook really amazing food without turning into my mother at the point of dishing up.
She would always start bashing and banging around the kitchen as we filed in to eat, somehow angry that we were all there, usually because a strangled “Dinner” had cut through the house like a fire alarm. She used to lay the breakfast things out the night before too.
Maybe that’s why the tattoo guy ruffled my feathers. It was like Pam and her heated plates, charging between oven and table, incredulous that there wasn’t more urgency when the plates looked like cooling before we could get the food on them.
I never heat my plates for dinner. I just eat quickly.
I don’t have a point, but I won’t be inviting my heroes to dinner because they might not like me.