Ways to successfully navigate a social minefield

Press, 8 March 1988, Page 10

Ways to successfully navigate a social minefield

My love affair with dinner parties began when I was judged as civilised enough to eat with the grown-ups. Interesting things happen at dinner parties, especially when you arrive alone when you are supposed to arrive as a couple, as I did one night. This immediately threw out- 1 the careful seating arrangements of the host, who decided to go next door and see who he could drum up to redress the balance. ; His somewhat bemused neighbours thanked him and said they had already eaten, but they did have someone. visiting them who hadn’t. Returning with this stranger.: the host proceeded to seat us. It is difficult to eat a meal when you are under the (false I later found) impression that a man has been brought in because you were . inconsiderate •enough to have misplaced your own. While I was labouring under this false impression I decided to cheer myself up by drawing the stranger into a series of

provocative arguments, which he ! took with remarkably good grace. ■ Nevertheless, I felt a twinge of (conscience the next day : and rang my host for the phone number of the stranger I had so blithely needled the evening before. “I shouldn’t bother," he said, “he has just rung here for yours.” The stranger and I married | shortly afterward, to the astonishment of our host who thought an apology would have sufficed. | While you can never predict the outcome of a dinner party, its planning

is bound by the same rules and conventions as any other social gathering. If you are going to invite people to eat then it helps if you can provide something edible. Since my efforts at cooking were always totally unpredictable : I used to beg, bribe or coerce my sister into producing the goods. i. Under cover of dark-; ness she would sneak through the back door with a complete threecourse meal for eight and disappear again. i This wonderful practice stopped abruptly when she overheard me taking the credit for the food one night. But from the guest's point of view, worse than eating something a little suspect is not eating at all. So if you are in the type of job which requires that you be called away at a moment's notice to deliver, buy, or otherwise attend someone, then jar-

range a stand-in to take over. Arranging a dinner party for a specific reason, as opposed to just having one for the hell of it, is full of pit-falls. One of the most memorable dinner parties I ever had was while I was trying to match-make between my flatmate and a man she worked with. Unfortunately we never even made it to the artfully candle-lit table. As we were standing about making harmless Smalltalk, the unwitting invitee grabbed a bottle of wine and proceeded to open it with much ceremony and a lot of flourish. The flourish outweighed the expertise by 10 to 1, and he’ managed only to bury the corkscrew into his index finger. The man, the wine, and the flatmate spent their evening under the harsh glare of the fluorescent lighting of Christchurch Hospital’s casualty department

In books, such inauspicious starts lead to romance. In real life, my flatmate reported later, they merely lead to the invitee making nervous excuses not to attend any social gatherings for the next year. One dinner party, where I would have given anything to see the look on the hostess's face, was planned with military precision. The guest of honour was an old friend who was returning to New Zealand for a flying visit with his new wife. The dinner was to start with Oysters Kilpatrick, followed by a sizeable amount of pork. It was inevitable that when the hostess went to greet the friend at the airport she would find that the new wife was of the Jewish faith. This type of disaster is on a par with people waiting till they arrive

before they tell you they have gone vegetarian, only eat Greek food which starts with a Y, or have just had an internal operation which they

want to "share” with the .rest of the guests. In situations such as these you can, with complete justification, arrange for a friend to phone you. On receiving the call you yell "What?! You want me to come now?!” and with an apologetic shrug to your guests and a muttered explanation of an emergency, you sail out the door and leave them to it.