Deipnosophy

I much prefer one conversation at a time over dinner. I may be old fashioned in this regard, many people seem quite happy to have two or more conversations concurrently but I find this off-putting and noisy and, predictably, I'm never in the conversation I want to be. 

It's even worse if the conversations are criss-crossed and I have snatches of interesting conversation about The One Show or Chopin coming at me amidships while I'm struggling to keep up my end of a conversation about James Fucking Bond or The Bleeding Economy.

My parents didn't really have dinner parties, they just had drunken drinks parties but they knew the importance even then of One Singer One Song. Of course, that related to actual singing songs rather than conversation but the principle applies. Now I think of it I can't quite fathom why more than one singer would have been singing more than one song but this was the seventies when they used to dress monkeys as jockeys and parade them down the High Street. At least in my home town anyway. I have a picture somewhere of the young Musters holding a monkey-jockey and I'll hunt it out and post it up here sometime. On a slow news days perhaps.

Deipnosophy is the art of dinner party conversation and one of it's key tenets is that when your hostess says "This is Nigel Slater" they mean "This is a Nigel Slater recipe". It helps no-one to suggest that we are actually eating Nigel Slater himself because cannibalism is rarely a fit topic for the dinner table (or, indeed, any table). No matter how funny you think it is, the idea of eating humans (even that one) is enough to put decent folks off their dinner.