Home life
Pig's breakfast
Alice Thomas Ellis
Ibreakfasted this morning on a segment of orange, a broken bit of melba toast and pâté, a Belgian chocolate, half a glass of lukewarm Soave and some potato salad that had stuck to the spoon. When pigs are bored, we are told, they eat the walls of their sties, their neighbours' tails, and their young. I think when their eating habits get that erratic their young had probably had a party the night before. The mother pig wakes up, looks around at the debris and
starts chewing out of a sort of listless despair. Yesterday was the occasion of the daughter's 15th birthday party and I am told it went off well. I wasn't there, of course. Someone and I were banished on the grounds that we were embarrassing, so I went off to bed with a bottle and a murder story and Someone sat in his study and read something more improving. Parents are permitted at their childrens' parties until the children reach the age of about 12. Then they have to wait until their offspring are about 21, by which time the aforesaid children may have accepted that the aforesaid parents are actually part of the human race. I'm not complaining about this. Admittedly I had spent the whole day slaving over the salmon trout and the salads and embellishing the dinner table in a fashion I would not aspire to were it merely my friends who were coming, but I'd rather do that than organise Pass the Parcel, Musical Chairs, Postman's Knock and the other nightmare entertainments that are considered appropriate for little kiddies; and I shall never make another blancmange, fairy cake or jam-and-banana sandwich, blow up another balloon or conceal packets of Smarties in unlikely places for the Treasure Hunt. I have given parties for 200 adult people and then gone for a walk in the park, but parties for infants have always left me like a wrung- out dish-rag. Teenage parties, as we all know, can get so alarmingly out of control. The invited guests cannot be relied upon to stay sober, but gatecrashers arrive deter- mined to get utterly paralytic at no expense to themselves. And they all throw up.
I may have mentioned this before, but once a teenage guest was sick in the telephone. I make no apology for repeat- ing this horrid tale. It has left an indelible mark on my mind. A friend was once particularly annoyed to discover that not only had her children's guests been sick on the bathroom floor but they had used her toothbrush in an injudicious and unsuc- cessful attempt to remedy the situation. They all mean well; they just can't hold their liquor.
In view of this I was relieved that the daughter chose to give a formal dinner party, since people of all ages get less drunk if they have to spend a significant part of the evening gnashing their way through several courses. Not only does solid food line the stomach: eating it leaves less time for drinking. I supplied a bottle of champagne and some white wine, since I have never made the common mistake of imagining that cider is a suitable drink for the young. Cider makes everybody drunk quickly and relatively cheaply — as the winos in the market are well aware — and the idea that the apple is more innocent than the grape is misplaced.
When Janet and I were mulling over the menu I suggested that no pudding was necessary. Cheese, fruit and birthday cake, I said, would suffice. 'Just get some grap- ples and apes,' I advised. Janet said my unconscious had supplied that one: gift- wrapped, straight from the shelf. She said it summed up the teenage party ambience with uncanny accuracy and my conscious mind could never have done it.
Happily, in this case my unconscious got it wrong. The girls were all at their loveliest in silks and taffetas, and the boys were even lovelier in evening dress and cuff links, and none of them were disposed to ruffle their fine feathers by being sick on them or getting into a scrap. The whole house this morning was certainly in some disarray, smelling like the taproom in the Dog and Duck, but the worst had not happened.
The only problem with the small, exclu- sive dinner party is that it does exclude. Some of the daughter's closest friends were not invited and I remonstrated with her. She explained, I suppose quite reasonably, that they knew her too well and would not behave sufficiently respectably. 'Anyway, Mum,' she said, with a philosophical res- ignation beyond her years, 'Don't worry about it. They'll think up some way of getting even with me.' I do hope the method they choose is to not invite her to their parties. Then I won't need to worry.
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