On reimagining the joy of dinner parties
A small handful of events and thoughts came together for me early this week. As a result, I have found myself trawling my memory bank and remembering the pleasure of the dinner party. In no particular order, those events and thoughts were, the publication of obituaries to Jim Haynes; the 2021 Burns Night; reading an excellent article about touch and mental health by Eleanor Morgan and my weekly peer through the metaphorical window to the FT’s fantasy dinner party.
Haynes was an extraordinary man. He made a life in Edinburgh and Paris after arriving with the USAF and founded the Traverse Theatre. He was very involved in folk and drama and organised the two ‘Wet Dream Film Festivals’ in 1970/71, in Amsterdam. The obituaries cover his counter-culture contributions and his peripatetic life. If you do not recognise his name — enjoy the read. He did settle, though, and made Paris his home and earned a fresh reputation — this time as the father and godfather of social networking.
Pre-internet Haynes was convinced of the merits of human connectivity. Talk to a stranger. Whilst teaching Media Studies and Sexual Politics at the University of Paris, he made it his habit to have an open house style dinner party every Sunday. He led the way in connecting strangers, long before we outsourced it all to Silicon Valley.
As a BBC tribute noted “Absolutely anyone was welcome to come for an informal dinner, all you had to do was phone or email and he would add your name to the list. No questions asked. Just put a donation in an envelope when you arrive. There would be a buzz in the air, as people of various nationalities — locals, immigrants, travellers — milled around the small, open-plan space. A pot of hearty food bubbled on the hob and servings would be dished out on to a trestle table, so you could help yourself and continue to mingle.”
In Morgan’s piece about touch and the therapeutic benefit of a hug I was thinking about how my own life as a London singleton, but also that of many of my friends, has been affected by lockdown. Social connectivity is important. It is the antidote to the polarisation that is created and manipulated by unscrupulous social and political leaders. It gets harder to hate someone with whom you have shared ten minutes conversation, heard their story and exchanged a handshake or a hug.
But why did I think particularly, of a dinner party? After all, they tend to be fairly modest in scale and can have a slightly snobbish class tone about them. In Steve McQueen’s recently shown brilliant series of ‘Small Axe’ films, the partying is bigger and embraces the notion of the open door and meeting strangers. Perhaps I should be thinking more about larger gatherings. But the intimacy is part of the joy. At a large party, it is possible to not really get to know anyone. At a dinner party, it is quite difficult to avoid an interaction with anyone. And I think I like that. Maybe it is just that if we are going to have another ‘Roaring Twenties’ decadent party period, I know mine will be of the more subdued style, befitting a man uncomfortably aware how much closer he is to his sixties than to when he turned fifty.
Obviously, it is easy to be wistful now, but dinner parties are special events. Friendships are forged, romances are started, relationships are developed and intimate life events get shared as the alcohol flows. I love the greetings — invariably an embrace, a proper hug. I love the conversation, often quite shallow as the guests decide what is right for the company and then increasingly deeper dives into particular issues or themes. I love how the genders usually split pre-food, perhaps a kind of social confidence-build, but also giving some space to the boy-girl table plan. Loving the food goes without saying, although the best dinner parties are about the company.
The wines are important. I am quite an oenophile and in my pretentious youth I went on tasting courses and built a half-decent cellar. I became focused on wine and food pairing. I am not sure, these days, that it made a difference to the guests’ enjoyment, but I liked making the effort. When I am the guest, though, I am often as impressed by the volume of the wines and the generosity of the host, as I am by the refinement of the vintages and the pairings.
So, as I thought about Haynes, and about social occasions and touch, I was preparing for a Burns Night without company. There are few occasions in my calendar that demand company and hearty food and free flowing alcohol quite like a Burns Night. 2021 was rather different. It did allow me, though to slip back in time to previous years. Whilst my family was growing up I tended to avoid formal Burns Night occasions. As I am a Burns but not a Scot, my wife and I started to host a southerner’s ‘alternative Burns Night’ with our local friends. The Selkirk Grace and Ode to a Haggis were recited and everyone was dressed in tartans. One especially fine year a friend had revealed that he played the bagpipes and so he piped in the haggis in our north Essex home.
I thought about some of the other memorable dinner parties that I have enjoyed. I maintain that the company is what one recalls, more than the food and the wine. I remember being invited to a small west London flat for one evening and being sat next to an attractive blonde woman. She became my eldest’s godmother and has been one of my loveliest and most important friendships over the last thirty-plus years.
When I first started work most of my peers were older than me, as they were graduates and I was an A level school leaver. I was impressed by their alcohol consumption, their smoking, their wit and their yuppie appetite for hard work and success. One, who became my best friend, had spent a year in France as part of his degree. He hosted great parties. His cooking had great panache. I could not conceive how one could cook such tasty food without needing a cookbook to follow. But the French-living inspiration and plenty of garlic meant his was an example I wanted to follow. I later spent a brief period as his lodger. It cost me just an occasional turn as sous-chef and one case of wine. The best value accommodation London has ever given.
Sometimes it is not new people that one gets to know but new foods. I went to a dinner party hosted by the parents of a girl in my eldest’s prep school class. It was a very generous thought to bring some of the parents together. Amongst the vegetables that were served was okra, commonly known as lady’s fingers, in England. New to me. Fortunately, I liked it, but I was totally absorbed by what the right etiquette would be if I did not like it.
I have broad tastes in food, for which I am thankful, but one thing I cannot abide is parsnips — a legacy of being force-fed one school lunchtime, I think. I recall going to one dinner party of newish school parents and being served cream of parsnip soup. Valiantly I finished it. Unfortunately, I did so well my hostess insisted I had a second bowl. I am sure I missed out on an evening of good conversation as I was focusing all my mental energy on making sure I would not throw up.
I had the good fortune, or perhaps it was wisdom, to marry a woman who is a superb cook. We hosted a number of dinners in our homes, but she surprised me on my 40th. I was shepherded off to the golf course by a friend so that children, wife and some friends transformed our home, so that the drawing room could accommodate three rows of tables, whilst she produced an incredible meal for tens of guests. We drank Yquem with the fois gras and with our pudding. I think we had lamb with a red burgundy for the main course, but it is a bit of a blur. What I do recall is the intense pleasure of sharing food and conversation with so many good friends. Of evenings or times that I would like to replicate in my life, that ranks high.
Some dinner parties start uneasily and end up feeling like the relationship has moved from colleague or acquaintance to friendship in just a couple of hours. One of my team at my last employer hosted a dinner party after I had successfully recruited someone to join us. The three couples chatted easily, helped because his wife has a business and a degree in Art History. The man I had recruited to our sales team was a linguist and a deep thinker on all issues political, economic and social. He was also keenly aware of his Jewish heritage and faith came up conversationally, as did lots of witticisms. The evening was to welcome him and for my host to have me, as his boss, in a social environment. It could have been quite stilted, but I recall conversation flowing around the table easily and very much enjoying it, helped by the host’s great generosity with the wine selection.
Another dinner party was hosted by a boss of mine who had recruited me to join his managerial team. Once again it could have been quite a strained occasion as work environment hierarchies are often difficult to drop outside of the office. We got on, but where we had things in common, such as football, we had differences. (I have always found it challenging to converse with a Gooner!). What I recall from this evening was him and his wife being exceptionally generous, but also that he cooked. It was an opportunity to reveal the ‘real him’, the man outside the office suit, and that takes some doing. Opening up one’s home, one’s marriage and oneself is a huge act of trust and a show of a potential vulnerability. I think about that whenever I am being treated to dinner in someone’s home.
We knew one couple when I lived out in the sticks, who had moved even further out to south Suffolk and bought an amazing pile of a property. They were putting it through a remarkable and expensive rebuild and transformation. Let’s call them the ‘D’s’. In their previous home, we had enjoyed great and noisy dinner parties. Being further out meant, I think, their need to entertain, to be surrounded by friends, was sharpened. When I look back at dinner parties that were memorable, I often find myself in their beautifully refurbished dining room, having emerged from a rebuilt and stocked cellar and having the most fabulous evenings.
Another I remember was a New Year’s Eve Murder Mystery dinner party. We were expected to have read up on our characters and to come ‘in role’ and suitably attired to convey the character we were in. I invariably say I don’t like fancy dress or acting, yet I have enjoyed every party that has required some character transformation. This brings me to some closing thoughts as I start to imagine dinner parties I will have in future. The FT publishes a ‘Fantasy Dinner Party’ description and guest list selected by one of its writers each week. I find myself enjoying this imaginary dining as much as I love their long running ‘real’ series of “Lunch with the FT” interviews. It is a classic ‘dinner party game’ really. Just like picking one’s Desert Island Discs — it can provide hours of contentious debate and amused reaction.
I am going to close with a description of my guest list. My aim is noisy conversation and a willingness to engage with what we need to all enjoy our lives better in C21. I like opinionated women to share my food and wine with, and so I want Margaret Thatcher to opine about “no such thing as society” and get her to debate it with James Baldwin, the most eloquent of guests and Martin Luther King, the most resolute. My love is people. What makes them tick? Why do we respond as we do? Psychology and psychoanalysis. Consequently, I want an actor to explain about adopting character and a novelist to explain how one designs it. I admire so many actors, but I choose Kristen Scott Thomas, the subject of a long standing crush.
Designing characters is a toss-up between Tolstoy and Dickens and I have gone home-grown because I want to ask about the east London he knew, compared with the same postcodes today, where I live. To complete I think we need someone who understood that life is multi-streamed, that we have many interests, not just a work role, what he called a ‘hinterland’. He is Dennis Healey, a man whose piano-playing on a Parkinson episode and whose books completely transformed my understanding of a man, when I had seen him as just a ‘failed’ Chancellor supporting ‘failed left wing politics’ and begging the IMF on our country’s behalf. I came to see him as an internationalist, a brilliant musician and of course, quite a war hero. It was a good lesson — we do not have to share opinions with people to be able to admire them. He can play us some music at the end of the conversations. Perhaps I will share the report of the dinner soon.
Old fashioned or new fashioned, dinner parties are a joy and I look forward to hosting some and being invited to others, once we tame the virus.
