Now that a personage of such national importance as Tim Martin, the boss of Wetherspoon, says dinner parties are ‘Yawn, yawn’, we should take note.
He said dinner parties are both boring and deadly. They are killing off his Wetherspoons and other pubs as it’s cheaper for punters to trough at home, as F & B (food and beverage) served in hospitality – as opposed to private consumption – is VAT-rated.
I agree with Tim. Most dinner parties are boring, and too long. The format is pretty stale. How do we save the dinner party and the pub from extinction?
Easy. We should ban boring subjects, and boring questions. Do not turn, ever, and ask about the following.
1) Children. My bugbear is strangers thinking it’s nice to ask me, ‘So what are they all up to?’ and ploughing on with their meal while I produce my adult offspring’s CVs. An absolute no-no.
2) Schools. Total bore. Nick Coleridge, the new Provost of Eton, complains, ‘I can have only one conversation now, which is only about someone’s nephew or son or any tenuous connection the person has with the school!’
I couldn’t resist telling him about meeting the Queen at Buckingham Palace, in a clump with a couple of other editors. Geordie Greig, the former Daily Mail editor, and I reminded her of distinguished relatives who had served in courtly roles. She turned to the editor of the Times and remarked, ‘Am I really the only person here with no Royal connections?’
3) Holidays. Who cares? Only a half-wit could ask in February, ‘So, do you have any summer plans?’
4) Anything to do with travel, roads or parking. It may be a minor personal triumph that you wrote to the council about that pothole, but it’s what we used to call in Fleet Street a MEGO (acronym for My Eyes Glaze Over).
5) Food or diets, especially Ozempic. Women love talking about these subjects, but they should be confined to the spa or coffee morning. My husband adds, ‘Why can’t we bring the tradition of ladies going through to powder their noses? It’s time we poor chaps had a break from talking to some tiresome woman about schools or grandchildren.’
6) Health and genealogy. It may be interesting to you that you are seven-per-cent Viking, but not to anyone else, and I’m afraid nobody wants to hear about your colonoscopy over the cauliflower cheese. No organ recital – a list of your ailments. And no posh-ancestor worship, please.
I could go on. The Victorian-era taboo topics – sex, money, politics and religion – are the only interesting ones, even if mentioning Trump and the Middle East can reduce the mildest gathering to a screaming match. When I was editor of The Lady magazine, the matriarch of the publication, the late Julia Budworth, banned me from covering sex, politics or celebrity in the pages of the gentlewomen’s weekly – a diktat I ignored, with explosive results.
Anyway, let’s proceed with a list of boring questions, even though tastemaker Nicky Haslam says, ‘It’s very common to ask questions’ and ‘You should find things out by talking.’ He also says, of my choice of preferred subjects, ‘Money is quite boring, especially in the Cotswolds – they never talk about anything else.’
Most people know it’s a failure of imagination to ask ‘So what do you do?’ (unless you’re ‘sat’ next to someone famous such as Tony Blair, Nigella or Ralph Fiennes, in which case you ask in order to annoy them). But ‘So what’s keeping you busy?’ is far more irritating. Ditto, asking, ‘So how did you two meet?’ or ‘How long have you known X or Y?’ Stupefying. Also ‘What are you watching on telly? I need a new boxset’ is unforgivable at a dinner, as is talking about The Traitors.
If ten people have gone to the trouble of dragging themselves off their sofa to dine off-site, the occasion merits – indeed demands – big talk, not small talk. I encourage gen con (general conversation), gossip, anecdotes and what the greatest conversationalist of all, Christopher Hitchens, called disputation.
Alan Riding, of the New York Times in Paris, says the dinner party is thriving as the intello observes rigorous rules. Cri-cri is banned, he said. Cri-cri stands for crianza and criada – Spanish for parenting and the help. ‘Nobody talks about religion in Paris. We are practically pagan,’ he said.
As for sex, that’s a no-no. ‘Everyone around the table has a secret, and you don’t know who knows what,’ he explained. X may not know that Y is Z’s maîtresse en titre and all are present. What do they talk about then? ‘Books,’ he says, ‘and ideas.’ Yikes!
The editor of this magazine insists, ‘A good conversationalist should not be shocked by anything.’
Which reminds me. I sat next to Andrew Roberts at Nick Coleridge’s 60th-birthday dinner and he opened with ‘Now, Rachel. Do you think size matters?’ and we had the most terrific chat.
It certainly beats someone telling me they’ve done only 8,000 steps today or that their spit test hasn’t come back yet.
Rachel Johnson is author of Notting Hell
