Much Depends on Dinner

It’s a strange thing to begin a book in one world and finish it in another. This chapter – or the chapter it was going to be – was originally called ‘How to Invite People for Supper Without Hating Them (or Yourself)’. And I am almost winded by the inappropriateness of this title now.

The gap between my finishing this book and its being published means I do not know if, by the time it comes out, inviting people over for supper will still be an empty proposition or whether our tables will be brimming with conviviality (though I suspect something nearer the former). It isn’t simply the absence of guests that renders my initial – only slightly facetious – title obsolete. After all, we shall be inviting friends for supper again, even if we’re not sure when that ‘again’ will be; we shall not be eating in isolation forever. I sense that the period of enforced unsociability can’t help but change the way we’ll feel for a very long time about having people over. It seems such a privilege now, the idea of being able to cook for other people, and not because we have to, but because we want to. How lucky it seems, how nourishing, to have friends in our home, eating, drinking, laughing, and talking, talking, talking.