Dinner Parties - The secret horror of the suburbs

Since returning to Ireland, dinner parties have become a staple part of my social diet. I feature as the token slightly eccentric guest. My attendance is generally to prove how socially inclusive the host can be. I have started to baulk at this role and have developed a number of key mechanisms to post-pone social exclusion, until everyone is too drunk to care.

Normally it works, but this weekend I got busted early in the meal. Things started well as no one saw me drive up in the Yaris; lowering the average car price in the area by at least 50k. Hopefully this particular gated community hadn’t started towing cars with an engine size below 2 litres.

Even if I was seen driving the Yaris, I could explain that it was my mother’s car and my normal mode of transport was a fuel efficient, all-terrain that had a very small carbon footprint – hiking boots size 4½ to be exact. Although naturally I avoid mentioning this detail!

Thanks to the hard work of David McWilliams and my own data base of experience I can generally tell the style of dinner party from the driveway, cobble lock and Mercedes mean Avoca recipes served from the entire Stephen Pearse pottery collection, while raked stone and SUV mean Jamie Oliver Asian fusion on indeterminate but expensive monochrome dinner service.

Getting out of the car and approaching the house I could tell it would be cobblelock evening, in more ways than one. Wistfully I remembered when the biggest social faux pas you could make at dinner was mispronouncing your th’s. The social norms are far more complex now. A south side accent no longer indicates wealth and position. After all the once poor country cousin could now be a land millionaire.

So, people have developed a holy trinity of questions to establish your worthiness:

What's your job?
When and where did you purchase your house?
What do you drive?

Naturally these are asked in a very discreet manner, not that it matters as my answers are rarely satisfactory.

I had managed to avoid the car issue, but my precautions were in vain as I made the rookie mistake of sitting between the two bored housewives, instead of their two bored husbands. Due to a strategically low cut top, the men are generally more interested in my biological rather than biographical credentials. Women are not so easily distracted.

‘So, what do you do for a living’ enquired the bored housewife on my left.

“Actually I’m not working at the moment, it’s the one job that I’m really good at.”

Polite laughter circled the table, closely followed by offers of sundried this and dry roasted that. Such activity was generally enough to distract people from the remaining holy trinity of dreaded dinner party questions. But in this instance I was tag-teamed by the other bored house wife.

“Well, not working gives you more time to manage your property portfolio” she added helpfully.

Over pre-dinner drinks in the SSIA funded conservatory, I had dodged the ‘when and where did you buy your house’ conversation, by vaguely declaring that I had a portfolio of property - which was almost true.

Just as I was about to smile and nod at bored housewife number 2 in that smug ‘I’m too rich to talk about money’ manner. I was interrupted by the hostess and old school friend, Helena, as she emerged from the kitchen with yet another bloody Stephen Pearse bowl.

“What property portfolio do you have” she exclaimed
“You’re not still counting that scrap book of house pictures you made in 5th class.” her voice tinkled with laughter. Actually I was.

“Of course not Helena, honestly some times the things you come out with” I replied while rolling my eyes and skillfully knocking one of the bowls off the table as a diversionary tactic. They had so many it’s not liked they’d miss one, poor Stephen was probably locked in their wine cellar, desperate firing pottery.

An uneasy cool formed at the table. Despite all my tactics it had become clear that there was an interloper in the group, someone who refused to jump on the tigers back, a non-conformist. I had only left the country 5 years ago, how on earth had I managed to become such an outsider.

The strangest thing during these interrogations is that no one questions their own life and where the mass march towards economic conformity will eventually end - 2 houses, 3 cars, 4 TV’s and a rare partridge in a Diarmuid Gavin pear tree. Maybe I’ll ask that question next time.


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PS - Check out Homebug and Humble Housewife for different decor and recipe ideas.