5 October: the perfect dinner party

I am on the phone to the imaginary agent of Stephen Fry. The agent is sorry, but the imaginary Stephen is booked solid for several months. As a popular person to invite to imaginary perfect dinner parties, I need to understand it is hard for him to make time to come.

I try the imaginary Emily Dickinson, but she is staying at home and washing her hair. I think that’s what she said. She spoke in verse, too, just like I imagined she might. But trying to get a noted recluse to come to your imaginary dinner party turns out to be difficult too.

I consider a few other options. The imaginary Marco Polo is involved in a press junket, promoting his book AND his new line in pasta. It may take a while to catch on, I think, but the press lap it up – as will the public in the future.

The imaginary JK Rowling might just come. I think I sold it to her on the basis of our children’s book collection. And I promised not to talk HP. Plus it’s Edinburgh – she’ll only need a taxi home at the end of the night.

The thing with imaginary dinner parties is that I’m finding it hard to get behind them. It’s not to say I wouldn’t like to meet any of these people – and countless more. I’m sure I could encourage Sylvia Plath to whip up some muffins for afters, and see if Debussy would mind picking some background music for while we’re eating.

But the perfect dinner parties are really about the people that we love to be with, that we’re not with enough. The perfect dinner parties are the ones in our memories, as well as in our imaginations.

And it turns out, it’s not even about a dinner party. It’s probably about a pot luck, or a meal we’ve prepared together. It’s one where we’ve chopped ingredients side by side, over chats and jokes, and foregone the best china but made sure there is plenty to eat.

The perfect dinner parties are ones where the dirty plates are not only forgotten about, but go off and clean themselves, and put the kettle on for coffee. (I think I might need to be in Beauty and the Beast for that one.)

They are all about being relaxed, not having to hurry. Ideally, no one has to go home, and we stay up late, put the world to rights, and accept a second glass of something.

The perfect dinner party includes children that go to sleep on time, and that lie in the next morning so that you don’t have to worry about having stayed up so late.

And it includes its own interludes: the ones where you pick a book off a shelf and get drawn in; the ones where you go off into twos and threes for in-depth conversations, and come back together again when everyone needs a little extra something to nibble.

I imagine that even Emily Dickinson might cope with some of that.