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- The Guardian, Wednesday 10 June 2009
There are two things about the smug middle classes - that is you, Guardian reader, and me, Guardian writer - that I most despise. One is the dinner party, and the other is the wedding list. They are intimately connected, and equally vicious.
Three weeks I ago I received a wedding list from a friend. Let me be more accurate. She used to be a friend, but as her wedding looms she has been replaced by a shape-shifting, John Lewis-icking monster. She wants ice-crushers and cookbook holders and spoons. Give them to me, she squawks through her John Lewis proxy, because I am in love - and that means I get consumer durables for free! I demand a new kitchen - and you will pay for it!
Wedding lists were designed to help a young married couple build a home, in the days when everyone got married aged 12 and a half, and were totally spoonless. But today, you are not buying your friends a new life. They are 30 years old and rotting. They have wrinkles and Botox and they sag, like dying balloons. You are buying them an upgrade.
They don't want a deep expression of your friendship, which you have chosen. The message is - your input is not required. Kill your imagination. Destroy your sensitivity. Give us the spoons. Or you will not be invited to the wedding and you will not get to eat lukewarm mini-pots of risotto.
It might be less repulsive if it wasn't always kitchenware. There is something so prosaic about a spoon that to request one for any reason is outrageous. I can see where this is going, reader. One day I will browse a wedding list and see the words Elica Concept Key 90 Chimney Cooker Hood (£369!) listed. Then I shall go to the church in my I'm-a-Chicken-in-Mourning outfit, face down the bride in her Look-Mummy-I'm-a-Princess gown and make the Wicked Fairy in Sleeping Beauty look like Shirley Temple, aged three. The bride's head will bounce down the aisle like a football. There will be blood, and no jury in the land will convict me.
Of course the defenders of wedding lists will insist that, without the wedding list, the loving couple will end up with seven Eva Solo Drip Free Dressing Shakers (£24!) when they only need one - or two for when they get divorced because no marriage can live up to their ridiculous expectations. The implication is: your friends and relatives are morons, and are incapable of getting past the insurmountable hurdle of making sure the loving couple do not end up with more than two Eva Solo Drip Free Dressing Shakers (total: £48!)
Aunty Pearl clearly has a degenerative brain disease. She needs a wedding list to - in marketing-speak - "communicate gift preferences to wedding guests". It's for her! It's not for us! We care nothing for the Eva Solo Drip Free Dressing Shakers (£24)! But they do; they really do. They have found transcendental love, but if they can also get a Big Tomato Company "Use Your Loaf" Bread Crock (£70!) out of it, so much the better.
I suggest you just ring up your bride-to-be shape-shifting monster friend and say, "What do you want for your stupid and pointless wedding that you wrongly believe will make up for all the times in your life you have been overlooked or ignored or outclassed?" But it is no solution. They would just look deep into their love-starred souls and say "spoons".
But I will not touch the spoons. I will take my friend out for dinner for her wedding gift. Although I suspect she will probably stick the cutlery in her bag and take it home.
And what are the spoons for? What is their purpose? They are to facilitate the dinner party. To me, one of the most terrifying phrases you can ever hear is: "I'm having a dinner party and I would love it if you came." The loving couple have created a perfect life with your money and then you are invited to go and resent it. The dinner ends up as a showing-off competition. "Look - I have a Robert Welch Radford 60-piece Stainless Steel Cutlery Canteen! (£371!) You only have a John Lewis 24-piece Stainless Steel Classic Cutlery Set! (£29!) You are so worthless!"
My parents, I remember, had a cutlery canteen. As it disintegrated, so did the marriage. Everywhere is metaphor.
I never leave a dinner party without feeling deeply scarred. It is like a night in the cells, but you are being punched in the face not with a knuckle-duster, but with an Emile Henry Tagine (£74!). ("It must be red," I hear a far-off bride-to-be screaming, "not beige!")
Example one: Someone once said to me at a dinner party, "Your writing is very Jewish." What? Does my writing do a funny little dance when it is happy at weddings? Does it abhor pork and shellfish? Is it angry with Philip Roth? Does it fly El Al?
Example two: Someone once said to me at a dinner party, "I love the way you consider yourself to be above fashion." Why didn't she just fold her smile away and say, "You look like shit and you will never be married and you will never, ever get a Cuisinart Rice Cooker and Steamer (£48.50!)"?
I know what you will say, reader. You will say that I am jealous. You will say I want to walk down the aisle in a ridiculous pudding-inspired wedding dress, dreaming of sexual ecstasy and cookware and dinner parties that maim. I do not. I already have a spoon.
• This week Tanya read Terence Conran's How To Live In Small Spaces: "If you followed Terence Conran's advice about how to live in small spaces, you would have to throw away Terence Conran's How To Live In Small Spaces because it takes up too much space."
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