Singular life
Belles and bores
Petronella Wyatt
Acording to an article in the latest edition of Tatler, the dinner party is dead. Also in the same edition of Tatler was a picture of me and Lady Thatcher at a party with a caption asking which one was 'the belle of the book launch?' Well, I would have thought that was pretty clear. Lady Thatcher.
For some reason this annoyed me. I refer to the piece about dinner parties. The arti- cle said that they were boring, out-dated and detested by everyone. The dinner party is a thing of the past. The new mode is to do it all in a shiny West London eaterie, preferably decorated by Damon Hill, I mean Damien Hirst. (Which reminds me, an Australian friend of mine once met Damien Hirst at a party and said, 'No won- der you split cows in half, mate, the way you drive.') Okay. It is true that dinner parties aren't what they used to be. But then they haven't been what they used to be since 1914, for heaven's sake, when liveried butlers brought in seven courses and stood behind everyone's chairs like cuckoos in Swiss clocks. And bemoaning that is like com- plaining that hoi polloi are now let into the Royal. Enclosure at Ascot or that Chatsworth no longer has any scullery maids with whom to have an after-dinner drink.
In any case, for every gallopingly-gratify- ing, colossally-convivial dinner party there was always a dire one. In Courtesans and Fishcakes, a great little book on sex and shopping in Ancient Greece, there are numerous contemporary whinges about the length and dullness of various bashes. Talk about Greeks bearing indigestion. What, not those fish entrails in smelly green sauce again? Not those dreadful dancing girls from Crete who don't shave under their armpits?
But that is the point of the dinner party, is it not? The sheer scale for disharmony is so much greater at home than where the fish-faced waiter is watching your every bowl movement. One of the most memo- rable dinner parties I attended was a bawl from start to finish. The host insulted the hostess all the way through dinner. He began by saying to his neighbour in a stage whisper, 'God, she's so stupid.' Then he said more loudly so the whole table could hear, 'Look at her, have you ever seen any- one as disgustingly fat?' Eventually he screeched, 'How could I have lived with that appalling slut for 20 years? Well, what do you think?'
This would never happen in a restaurant. You can't hear the insults because every- one else is making such an inconsiderate amount of noise. No restaurant has that waspish ambience of a private house. And home is where the smart are. Everyone knows that restaurant chairs unaccountably develop hard spikes during the evening. Everyone knows that there have been fewer more depressing inventions than `plated' food.
And what would become of the dinner party bore? You never thought of that, did you? The more I ponder the more I believe that Tatler has been infiltrated by the New Labour conspiracy to do away with all tra- ditional aspects of British life. They started with fox-hunting and hereditaries and now they are pouring cold water on bores. Well, you can lead a bore to water but you can't make him sink.
Bores are essential to society. In the past no one seemed to mind them but now everyone fusses, 'Oh, I don't want to talk to so and so, they're so bloody boring.' Yes, but they are better than people who believe themselves to be interesting. A man once said to me, 'My name is Brian and I am very dull.' He then proceeded to prove it. But as he did so I fell head over heels in love. Honesty is so rare these days. The sensible person uses the bore as one uses a dry run or a clay-pigeon shoot. Bores are practice for the real thing. Besides you can talk back to one and be sure they won't return with a crushing piece of repartee. It is very ill-mannered to try to shine too much in front of one's peers. I like to be surrounded by at least two or three bores. They make me appear so scintillating. If Vanity Blair thinks he can destabilise the dinner party he is mistaken. Political parties yes. The Tories weren't much trou- ble to despatch. But the dinner party is made of sterner stuff. It is the party of the future, the people's party, the party of the millennium, the One Nation party, the party of the third part, Etc., Etc., as Yul Brynner used to say in The King and I.
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