I’ll joyfully dig its grave. What baffles me is that Sussex University felt a study and a press release was required to tell us something more obvious than a kick in the crotch with a surgical boot. “Dinner parties are no longer something we associate with the aspirational middle classes or Jerry and Margo from The Good Life,” it reveals. No! And there was me getting a demi-wave and dusting off my husband’s smoking jacket whenever friends invited us for pasta.
Formal dinner parties were, of course, never about dinner or partying, both those words implying some sort of pleasure. They were orgies of one-upmanship in which guests dutifully complimented the tossed salad and Lakeland sugar tongs while the hosts pretended their lives were just so “just so” and that they always kept 12 different cheeses in the fridge. The hostess, in truth, needed four Valium simply to emerge from the kitchen without crying.
You only need watch the freakish competitiveness, fake bonhomie and homicidal loathing on Come Dine with Me to see that the deranged dance couldn’t continue. Competitive cooking unleashes the inner Beelzebub. Better to do it the modern way, where each guest brings a course, and cares more about drinking the barolo they brought rather than the E&J Gallo from some mingebag.
In the old days people had dinner parties because restaurants were so god-awful. Now that you can get excellent two-course meals for £15, they are merely useful arrangements whereby parents can get s***-faced while their children run wild without waiters tut-tutting at them.
I believe it’s called progress.