Dinner Party hell

[dinnerpartyhell]

Please tell me what I am doing wrong.

It is customary where we live for friends to have lots of dinner parties, these range from silver service formal dinners all the way through to a relaxed buffet style supper.

I absolutely detest them, I hate hosting them with the two days of cleaning, cooking and preparing. The nerves that it will all go wrong (I am no Nigella) the endless inane conversations with people I barely know or care about. I try to talk to more interesting people, but after a few hours I have had enough even with the most sparkling character.

I don't even like going to other people's houses where it is the same in reverse. I like seeing my closer friends, but this all adds a layer stress/formality that is not normally present when we see each other day to day.

Please tell me why you enjoy them? (if you do) and what I can do to enjoy them more. I would have no friends if I opted out, as everyone has them. I wish I could enjoy them more, but I really don't. I dread them now, and it has got worse as time has gone on, not better. Everyone seems to go out every single weekend, and we are knackered from working long hours and caring for dc. How do you have energy to do this? After another weekend, I am exhausted today and really ready to throw in the towel and move to a desert island.

Safari suppers in my village are definitely not swinging sessions, just braying Brexiteer retirees on a sort of domestic pub crawl between courses.

How come people get to question the validity of this thread but when doing so on the miner's daughter from Wales moving in with a rich Jewish guide mine got deleted ?

'cos this one's fun and neither OP nor anyone else is going to be upset by a few people making comparisons to Jilly Cooper.

I do find it rather puzzling as to why on earth my thread is considered 'fiction'? I am genuinely most puzzled. I am rather pleased with the posts, because it seems I am not alone in this frazzled version of hell.

I am most definitely real (the last time I checked, although I have been considering a little burst of botox) and although I would not dream of reporting posts that consider my thread to be a 'wind up' I can safely assure everyone else that I have been very, very truthful.

Now going back to safari suppers, can this be done with African food and in themed dress complete with random animals? If my dinners were like this, and now I am feel very excited at the prospect, then they would certainly no longer be dull!! So maybe accidentally we have struck a very real solution, my dinner parties need to be far more exotic!

Can someone please tell me who the Mitfords are?

Do you not have google? That's what I do when someone mentions someone/something I haven't heard of on here, or anywhere else.

Oh OP. Google Nancy Mitford and you'll happily lose an hour of your life to a world in which dogs and horses were very important, probably more so than children.

What a good idea, Barbara

a world in which dogs and horses were very important, probably more so than children.

Way more than children. Caring about one's children too much would have been rather lower-middle-class.

I must hold to my line that The Pursuit of Love is a better novel than Love in a Cold Climate.

I should imagine the parties at the Mitfords are a polished affair with a careful guest list, and not my unfortunate offerings with a ragtag of friends that sometimes roll up, and sometimes don't. I can usually accommodating with exchange students, homesick au pairs and other people's dogs and children with five minutes notice or less.

I think I may be experiencing actual hair loss with the stress of it every weekend.
We are now on Thursday and I am wondering if a severe case of D&V will get me off the hook for just one weekend.

I also haven't seen my husband this week yet. Maybe he has finally left me.

"Lady B asks me how the children are, and adds, to the table at large, that I am 'A Perfect Mother'. Am naturally avoided, conversationally, after this, by everybody at the teatable.” Best Delafield line

I have been called a perfect mother, it is shorthand for you have no life.

Diary of a Provincial Lady - very good, I recommend very dry

The Mitfords had servants do not forget.

Re: safari suppers/round robins. yes of course you can theme. You will need to work with other hosts to pull it all together. The menu needs to be looked at otherwise you will have a carbo high fat mess rather than a balanced meal. Lobster bisque followed by beef wellington followed by chocolate torte, followed by a cheese board, would be a hellish combination. The plus of this is that guests walking from house to house can as one guest did puke in a neighbours hedge rather than your hand towel

Oh and the food must not be time sensitive, one night the guests could not be pried from the main course home, the pudding hostess was steaming that her pudding was ruined.

Now going back to safari suppers, can this be done with African food and in themed dress complete with random animals?

Yes, I recommend some of you black up and play Native Bearers, while your friends wear solar topis and blast away at a cardboard elephant propped up behind the topiary of number twenty-five. Or, you know, not.

Norwegian - I think that has been done in the movie "To catch a thief"

Elton John may also have done it. The American Housewife did something similar with Nathan Fillon (be still my beating heart)

@NorwegianButter
Yes, I recommend some of you black up and play Native Bearers, while your friends wear solar topis and blast away at a cardboard elephant propped up behind the topiary of number twenty-five. Or, you know, not.

Omg

Of course, we all know that any safari supper, fictional or otherwise, will not work where the guests are totally plastered from the off. Plus I’m guessing...countryside...big houses...not quite walking distance between them, let alone how to transport the elephant...need more attention to detail OP

There is a driving time of approximately half an hour between houses, so the horse box complete with said elephant would have to trundle the country lanes for most of the evening thus sparing me the evening of halitosis and god awful boredom. This is quite by far the very best idea yet!!
We can always get lost mid course!

OP please just cook up a giant platter of wings and ribs, smothered a-plenty with bbq and hot sauce, add a stack of butter-drenched corn cobs, a crate of beer and supply your guests with plastic bibs.

I guarantee no-one will ever accept your invites again!

Have you thought about serving them tinned tomato soup? There is an excellent classics thread I believe on the subject!

I can't decide If the OP is for real or the whole dinner party thing is just a wind up. I too, have everything you could possibly need for a dinner party, ice machine, ice buckets and stands, Crystal glasses, fine china, linen napkins, canteen of cutlery, cheese knives, individual gravy/ sauce jugs, butter knives, little glass butter dishes with glass domed lids. It is all too exhausting - oh the cleaning and prepping .
OP try inviting everyone round at the weekend for breakfast. Either a full English breakfast or just do platters of sausage and bacon and rolls and let everyone self assembly. Time to catch up and then the6 all disappear at lunchtime. Far less stressful.

Pombears

Are you friends with Hyacinth Bucket Bouqet?

It's definitely not for real. I'm sure there are people that do live like this but they probably realise that their lives are far from average.

The op doesn't understand why people think that this might be a wind up and yet she talks of silver service dinner parties, drawing rooms and boot rooms and yet she claimed to have a working class background 🤔.