Harry Mount has narrated this article for you to listen to.

It’s time to put the dinner party out of its misery. Oh, and the awards dinner, dining with the cruise ship captain and any evening gathering where you sit next to strangers for three hours.

Does anyone actually enjoy dinner parties, apart from raging egomaniacs, who have their victims trapped until 11 p.m. (10.30, if you’re lucky)? Whoever thought a random allocation of two neighbours for hours would work as a system for amusement? Nine times out of ten, it’s complete agony.

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I ask you where you come from and what you do. Unless you’re that raging egomaniac, you ask me the same. And then we scrabble with mounting desperation and boredom to find common ground – to raise the conversation from mind-numbingly dull to ‘entertaining’. Thus the false laughter and manufactured shrieks of delight: we’re trying to convince ourselves we’re having a good time.

Silent diners are worse than the chatty loudmouths: you have to ask them even more questions. And God save me from another........

© The Spectator