Dinner party

‘Oh, why do the middle classes feel they must bring a present?’ Those words were spoken by Lady Charteris when she was the wife of the Provost of Eton and a dinner-party guest arrived clutching a bottle of wine. The scene took place between 1984 and 1992, when Andrew Boggis (who recalled it in a Times obituary addendum) was Master in College. The conventions of dinner-party arrival have changed beyond recognition in the ensuing 40 years. What was seen as a ‘middle-class’, ‘common’ or ‘naff’ act in the late 1980s is now the done thing. To arrive at a friend’s house for lunch or supper without a present for the hostess would seem lazy and mean.

Provence The other Monday I hosted the third annual meeting of the Jeremy Clarke Memoir Club on what would’ve been his 69th birthday. At the far end of the dining table, deep in the bare rock of the cliff, there’s a 27-inch high plaster cast of a bust by my ex of our youngest daughter as a youthful Baucis from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The sculpture is bedecked with necklaces, a small bunch of faux anemones and part of the headdress I wore as a 21-year-old bride. In front of the bust I placed my grandmother’s black basalt Wedgwood urn which contains the remainder of Jeremy’s ashes. André began the meeting with the five-day odyssey his Italian father took alone on foot across the Alps in 1936, to escape conscription into Mussolini’s Blackshirts.