Chapter 1

I hate dinner parties. I used to just dislike them, now I hate them with a vengeance. I could never really see the point of them to be honest. Take the dinner part of the event for a start. The food falls onto two distinct less-than-satisfactory categories.

Firstly, the bought-in stuff which has come from an expensive restaurant. You can’t exactly denigrate it to the level of an average take-away, but it is never quite as good as you could have had if you’d gone to the restaurant to dine out in the first place.

Secondly, home-cooked food. It is often hurriedly made from untried recipes for many more people than the cook caters for generally. It is made to impress guests rather than for their enjoyment.

Either way the food is not perfect, there’s little or no alternative or choice offered, so the event is not really what you would call a good dinner. Mostly people just sit around having conversations, which can be either very varied or stilted, depending on the company, so not much of a party then, either. And sitting at a table for several hours isn’t really all that comfortable.

Why not just meet up in a lounge somewhere for drinks and a chat after everyone’s filled up beforehand with their own individual choice of burger, pizza, fish’n’chips or a slap up meal in a fancy restaurant? Each guest therefore could have dined already to their own particular taste and assembled ready to socialise or simply party.

As I said, I used to just dislike dinner parties. However it was prepared or bought in, the food was generally not to my liking. Me, I prefer plain simple food. If I want fancy sauces I would rather have them on a separate pannikin or gravy boat so I can dip if I want to try them or leave them where they are if not quite to my taste, without spoiling the main ingredient. But no, the food is invariably smothered in some sauce concoction rich in cream and over-used herbs/spices and ends up giving me heartburn.

There’s always wine at these things too, for formal dinners maybe even a different type of wine for each course. By preference I would rather have beer and the same beer for sipping throughout if it’s to my taste; call me a slob if you like, but that’s what I like. I can count the thumbs on one hand the number of dinner parties with beer that I hadn’t brought along myself. Oh right, that was our own dinner party and we already had the beer in.

More often than not there are hidden agendas to these gatherings such as getting certain people together, where the host acts like a marriage counsellor or dating agency. Sometimes it’s to make business introductions or simply to show one set of friends how wide their network of other friends are.

So all of these little gatherings are contrivances for some purpose or other, with a significant proportion of the guests designated as targets or victims, for the collective enjoyment of the rest of the menagerie.

One such dinner party was the last one I swear I will ever volunteer to go to. I was invited to it without much prior notice, in fact just two days before the event, by my estranged wife, Theresa, otherwise known asTerry, the one true love of my life.

After about three months of arguing between us, we had been separated for two months and neither of us had spoken to the other in the meantime. Yes, folks, some times true love does not run smooth (and the splitting of “sometimes” into two words is deliberate).

So it was a total surprise when, completely out of the blue, my wife Terry, the youngest professor in her University college faculty, called me up at my parents’ house and asked me to accompany her to this dinner party hosted by one of her college colleagues.

This turn of events actually threw me. I had been considering getting back in contact with her for a day or two to open a dialogue between us and this looked like a perfect opportunity. I thought perhaps there was yet some hope for our future together.

Our separation was a casual one, although I later found out it was contrived and not by me.

I had stormed out following a serious argument and we were both being intransigent about even speaking to one another. Neither of us had petitioned for legal separation or divorce during that two-month period, however, and I really couldn’t understand why she hadn’t got the ball rolling already. I couldn’t afford the luxury of legal proceedings anyway as I had lost my job as a laboratory assistant five months earlier, hence forcing me back to my parents. Besides, despite being too damn stubborn to speak to my wife through any kind of media open to us, I simply didn’t want a divorce, I still loved the miserable bitch.

At the time of that dinner party Theresa was 27, wife of me, Bobby, aged 32 and we’d been married just over three years. We lived in the famous university city of Oxford, where we both worked.

Academically gifted, I am definitely not, so I didn’t attend any of the colleges as a student, but was able to secure a position setting up experiments and cleaning and clearing stuff away afterwards in one of the research laboratories of an Oxford college that will remain nameless. Terry, on the other hand, is extremely academically gifted, in fact she is a genius and acknowledged expert in her chosen field. She is a history professor specialising in the medieval period, fluent in both written and spoken Anglo-Saxon, Middle English and Norman French and has published a number of manuscript translations and articles which had the world of academia buzzing, well, as excited as those dry old sticks ever get, anyway.

We met — OK, I guess you are miles ahead of me — at a dinner party about five years ago.

The Oxford academic social world seems to exist on dinner parties. I had just saved the arse, literally, of an absent-minded chemistry professor who had set me instructions to assemble a number of chemicals to measure out for a class demonstration that afternoon. I am not a chemical expert, but not a complete ignoramus either and the combination of the basic ingredients set off alarm bells ringing in my head. In the quadrangle outside I mixed 10% of the quantities specified for each individual student and heated them to the required temperature as per instructions and caused an explosion that blew in virtually every window in the block.