Dinner parties are dying

I don’t get invited to that many dinner parties. I hope it’s not a problem with me, although I can’t rule it out. Instead, I have a feeling that the era of nibbles, laying the table and stressing about the starters is over. When I asked my friends how many invites they get, there was a reasonably consistent answer: roughly one every few months.

I’m not talking here about spag bol with pals. A dinner party is a sit-down affair, with multiple courses and, ideally, a few people you don’t know for company. In their twenties, my parents were apparently having a dinner party every week. My mum has three smartly bound journals, all with the title ‘Guest & Menu Book’. Inside each is an assortment of table plans and wine notes, entries on roast lamb and claret, as well as occasional thoughts about the conversation: ‘This is the last time I cook for people who claim to be struggling on £100,000.’

One reason for the death of the dinner party is Britain’s mad housing market. It’s not uncommon to visit a friend’s flat and discover nothing more than a bedroom or two, and a galley kitchen. Even in homes that have space for a full kitchen table, you’d be lucky to fit more than six people in.

No one in the 1980s, I’m reliably informed by my mother, would have been seen dead in London at the weekend. Once you’d finished work on a Friday afternoon, you’d hop in the car and drive either to your friends at the Ag College or, if you worked in the City, to your own Oxfordshire cottage. Now even someone on £100,000 a year would struggle to find a decent dinner-party bolthole.