Country life
Careless talk
Leanda de Lisle
My husband is busy sending out shooting invitations, so I must start think- ing about dinner parties again. These tend to be a more complicated enterprise than they are in London. It is only one of several meals that need to be organised for the weekend and there are no little shops where you can pick up a ready-made first course or pudding. A cook would seem to be the answer, but it isn't easy finding any- one around here who has moved beyond making trifle with tinned fruit and jelly.
For a while I had my dinner parties cooked by a schoolboy I spotted on Master Chef, but I foolishly decided that having to pay for his mother to accompany him made him too expensive. The Vietnamese Man- cunian I came up with next cost me half as much, but my parsimony seems to have contributed to him leaving town to flee his creditors. At least my husband can be relied on to produce a good cocktail. There was one unfortunate evening when he served his White Ladies in the wrong glass- es and a guest became so cross-eyed that she ate the main course off her table mat, but they usually just smooth over the diffi- culties of mixing guests from London with those from the country.
We pray no one will talk politics in case the Londoners announce they are going to vote for Tony Blair and our country friends start to mutter about supping with the devil and needing a long spoon. Perhaps unsur- prisingly they regard all journalists as scum, whatever their politics may be. It is only with the greatest trepidation that a country gent would confide in one that he had a problem with green fly ('I do hope your nice friend won't write anything, Leanda. I swore to Clare that the green fly had been eradicated'). Journalists, on the other hand, complain wearily about the 'bufton tuftons' who ask them what the Prime Min- ister is really like.
I suspect only QCs are capable of teach- ing members of this profession anything about self importance, although from the perspective of the shires, lawyers can seem strangely reminiscent of the spottiest swot in the school. Merchant bankers appear too rich by half, advertising executives look like spivs and Lloyd's underwriters are the spawn of Satan. These, in turn, just look on the country landowner as a man with an asset that they could put to better commer- cial use. Thankfully, such people usually
keep their opinions to themselves. If only architectural historians were as tactful. You've hardly had time to press a drink in their hand before they are telling your neighbour his house wasn't designed by Carr of York, but by his less successful younger brother, Carr of Newton Bur- goland — and by the way the panelling in your drawing-room is an Edwardian fake. But what about the caring professions? Our local GP looks like a vet and I think my psychiatrist girlfriends should try the same disguise when they come to stay. To many of the older generation, shrinks are as mysterious and terrifying as Aztec priests. A neighbour recently asked me if I had ever '... seen a psychiatrist?'. I did such a nose-trick that I thought I might drown in my champagne, but he ploughed on. 'I have. London fellow — a friend of Fergie's. Asked me if I like anal sex. Told him I'd never given it much thought. Didn't see him again. Went to see a different chappie up here. Told me I am perfectly sane — just don't like people. Nothing wrong with that'
The only townies who invariably seem entirely at ease at country-house dinner parties are interior decorators. There isn't a family in the provinces who cannot boast at least one useful tradesman. The Duke of Norfolk has framed all the pictures painted by his wife for the Help the Hospices exhi- bition which opens at the Tryon and Swann Gallery next month. Other families have produced gilders, curtain makers and trompe-roeil artists — my mother-in-law is all three. So everyone has plenty to discuss with Tessa Kennedy and her ilk. Of course the truth is that the gentleman farmer and the pinstriped executive often have much more in common that is imme- diately obvious. I just wish guests would always make the effort to find that out for themselves.
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