Dinner is Served

Good morning, thrill seekers! I hope it's as lovely a morning wherever you're reading this at is here today, where spring has properly sprung. I'm up early (nothing unusual about that, but today the weather makes such an activity feel less insane) so I can dash up the hill to the local shops to buy the basics for an impromptu dinner party for seven (possibly eight) this evening, after which I'll be dashing down the hill to the Farmers Market for some fancier peripherals. But after you've read the rest of this post (hot off the press from this week's issue of Venue), you'd be forgiven for wondering how I've summoned the nerve to go ahead with such a plan. Enjoy! (ps. I've quit worrying about alexa.com now (see update to previous post). I read their emails, and Ben's Dad was right about them trawling for advertising. Whilst I don't intend to go ahead with such a plan, I've sent them a little email querying how they collect their site traffic stats. Call me bigheaded (I've been called worse), but really - one visitor a day? Crikey - the Disco would be in receivership if business was that sad! Oooh, look at that; triple parenthesis! Let's get on with some pre-edited words ...).

According to ex-popstar turned cheese maker extraordinaire Alex James (isn’t life funny?), the dinner party is making a comeback. “The gentle formality and comfort of an evening spent in someone's home with hot food and warm company”, he wrote, in a recent ‘Foodie Boy’ column for the OFM. “It doesn't get any better”. Crikey – he’s never had supper round at mine, then (actually he has, but that was years ago, and the past is another country). Still, his gorgeously Slater-esque portrait of the dinner party AJ style is about as far removed from the Blease ‘at home’ experience as you can get.

High lowlights of suppers round at mine include: the time I tried to throw my stepfather out of the house following an animated Wurzels vs Beatles ‘debate’ (ugly). The time my flatmate and his paramour turned into an evil version of Stephen Fry and a real life incarnation of Cruella DeVille and spent hours deriding my friends before one of those friends had enough and derided them right back (terrifying). The intimate supper for a high profile nutritionist and a local slow food movement guru, during which nobody either ate or said much, and after which neither ever got in touch again (eek!). Meanwhile, memories from family dinner parties include my dad munching his way through half a pound of halva before declaring the cheese to be ‘wonderful’ (wonder what AJ would make of that?); a guest falling asleep in a basket chair (it was the 1960s) then letting out a fart that, reverberating through the wicker, sounded like a rocket launch; a friend of theirs spewing red vomit all over the living room window.

Gentle formality? Warm company? If only! But if you want high drama, low morals and a badly made Thai curry, my door is always open (advance booking highly recommended).