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  TO NOSE OR NOT TO NOSE

  While you’re in there, you can of course amuse yourself by looking through the medicine cupboards, because nothing is as entertaining as learning one of your friends has topical eczema. Ah, what’s this…someone needs to change their razor head! Should I tell him, or should I let him continue to shave himself pink and raw every morning? I think I shall…not tell him. Ooh, a single slightly wet condom packet. Latex-free? Wonder who has the allergy. Guess I’ll never know. Guess I’ll never, ever know.

  WHAT TO WEAR: A GENERAL RULE

  Guarantee you that if you turn up in the same “T-shirt, jeans, fucked-up Classics” combination you cycle everywhere in, then one half of the couple (it is a couple that has invited you to their house for a dinner party: this is the rule) (it is always a couple; imagine a single male inviting a few of you for dinner—“All right? I’m making spaghetti al forno for a few pals. It’s not a murder thing! Come over!”—no), then one half of the couple will silently-but-also-not-very-silently sob behind the kitchen door and whisper-but-actually-very-loudly-say, “I canNOT beLIEVE they showed up looking like that! This is WHY I hate your FRIENDS!” and the whole resulting atmosphere will be a write-off. Wear a shirt or a dress, mate. It’s not that much to ask.

  WHAT TO BRING

  I have had this text conversation roughly one hundred thousand times now:

  ME: Hey! What shall I bring? Wine?

  FRIEND: Great!

  ME: What color? Of wine?

  FRIEND: Well, we’re having chicken for our main!

  ME: I don’t know what that means!

  Here’s what you bring: one bottle of $12 wine—it doesn’t really matter which one because every $12 wine tastes like it costs $12; two (two.) bags of shareable crisps (you will have been told to turn up at 7:30 p.m. [“Sharp!”] for dinner: it will not be served until 9:15 p.m. at the earliest, and you will want the crisps); and, if you really want, a box of Ferrero Rocher or something that makes you look like you go to these things a lot. All in, you can get this done for under $20, which for a full home-cooked dinner (with wine) in return is a pretty good deal. I mean you’re not going to cook yourself, are you? You were going to do noodles with butter on them and eat them in bed.

  AH, SHIT, A WINE GUY

  Ah, shit. Shit. There’s a wine guy here, being a dick about wine. Shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbow, buttons to the top of his chest. Deep tan from a tasting tour of the South of France. That sort of thing. He’s insisting on there being a decanter. “No decanter?” he’s shrieking, folding his shirtsleeves up an extra inch. “Right: we need a clean, dry vase, or I can use that big mason jar you use for your muesli. It needs to aerate!” Is he…crying? “This is a 2014, Michael! We need to get some air in here!”

  Wine guys are often the worst of all the guys because they very often talk about wine so much it actively makes drinking wine unpleasant, saying, “Look at the legs on that one” and making you circle your glass up in front of a naked lightbulb so you can see the residue in it. I know a girl who likes wine and I told her my wine-buying technique—I go to the shop and buy the one that is closest to $12 with the biggest punt in the bottom of it—and she nodded and looked sad for a second, then said: “Well, I mean, it’s dumb, but it’s not the worst way of buying wine.” And that’s why I don’t really try when I’m buying wine for a dinner party now: the only person who cares enough is a wine guy who keeps saying “deep berry” and making you drink it in that weird wine-taster way where you run it over your tongue but you just get confused and accidentally spit it out a little bit, and I don’t want to ever buy anything that would make him happy. Basically everything just tastes like dark red juice (red wine) or light white juice (white wine) if you’re two drinks down and you’ve got a decent salad starter in front of you. Fuck it off.

  COMPLIMENT THE COOKING, BUT DON’T GO TOO OVERBOARD

  I am convinced that cooking for someone is the greatest act of love you can ever perform—and yes, I am including butt stuff on that list! and mouth!—because it nourishes, it warms, it soothes, it very literally keeps you alive. When someone makes you a thick tomato-y sauce—enriched with fat pancetta, finished with just a dab of cream, served on soft yolky pasta—they are basically saying, “I want you to live, and I want you to live marvelously.” Anyone who spends forty minutes chopping things to make something you consume in less than 180 seconds is basically sacrificing their time and care for a brief moment of your enjoyment. So when someone cooks you something you say, “Thank you, thank you, a thousand times thank you,” and also: “Mmm! Yeah, this is—What have you put in there? Salt?” and point to it with your fork.

  Stop there, though. Don’t be like, “Can I have seconds? Thirds?” Do not lick the plate. The thing if you overcompliment cooking is that someone will get up halfway through the meal and start making you a packed lunch for work tomorrow, and that is a nightmare. You cannot do that to someone. That sweet person who slaved so long and hard over your dinner making you a lunch, too. “It’s…this is one of our good Tupperwares, I would like it back”—oh no. “I’ve done a little pita bread wrapped up in tin foil here, too—just unwrap it and pop it in the toaster or microwave at work”—oh, this is too much, too much. “Shall I do you a little pot with some olive oil in, do a little drizzle of olive oil?”—obviously yes. And a slice of cake for pudding, too. But that’s it. That’s all I’m letting you pack me.

  THE BIT WHERE SOMEONE GETS AN ADULT BOARD GAME OUT AND GOES, “NO, DON’T GR— IT’S REALLY WELL REVIEWED!”

  At some point someone is going to get an adult board game out, because that is what we do now, and that is fine, of course, but also very terrible. Am I a big enough man to admit I have played—and enjoyed!—Settlers of Catan? I am. Am I big enough to say I like Resistance, both the version set in space and the version set in olden times? Yes, I am. Do I still get a horrible clunk of dread when someone gets Cards Against Humanity out? Yes, I do. What I am saying is I know and like adult board games. That is who I am. That is the kind of man I am. Here’s a thing I have said before: “Ooh, Istanbul? I love that one! Let’s! Do! Trading!” That’s me. I’ll admit that.

  The thing, though, about breaking an adult board game out at a dinner party is it only goes one way, which is: someone has to read the instructions in full for twenty minutes before a single hand is played, the first game takes an hour and you’re never quite sure who it is who won, and then the second game—the actual game—gets so bizarrely competitive that someone sprints to the toilet to angry-cry when they lose the Sha’harn Wastelands to a coordinated power coup. When someone brings a heavy box and shakes it in that fun board game way, just know that you’re not getting out of here without someone flipping a game board and saying “FUCK!” in a way that is a little bit too loud and emotional and makes everyone there go quiet and embarrassed and decide to have an early bedtime.

  THE CHEESE COURSE

  There is never enough cheese on the cheese course. Bring your own bit of Brie if you have to. Put an entire Stilton in your handbag. If someone palms you off with two types of cheddar and an old jar of Branston Pickle, then riot. Riot. Set fire to their apartment.

  THE GREAT “OFFER TO WASH UP” CONUNDRUM

  The thing with offering to wash up is there is a very real danger that someone will take you up on your offer to wash up, and then you’ll be left having to wash up. And obviously this cannot be allowed to happen.

  But then, if you just sit there and drink wine like an unhelpful dickhead—especially if someone else very loudly and actively does the washing up—then you lose the game, too. There is an unspoken transaction at play during a dinner party: I, the dinner party haver, will make and prepare you a delicious dinner; in return, you, the dinner party doer, will do the washing up. But you don’t want to do the washing up, do you? Because I’ve burnt a load of pork to the bottom of one pan and somehow used three different grill t
rays. So what to do. What to do?

  Novices, at this hurdle—and I am including you in this—novices ask if they can “help at all” with the washing up. Then they get to do the washing up, in full, and get absolutely no kudos for it. Me (the expert, the great guy), I know how to play this game, so I win. In that post-pudding lull, you suddenly leap up from the table and say, “RIGHT: WASHING UP!” then take some plates and start washing up.

  It unfolds two ways from here and you always win:

  WAY ONE: You do the washing up, entirely. At first this sounds bad—you had to wash a cheese grater, man! you can’t get your hand down the inside of that!—but also you get props for doing the washing up. “Oh, thank you,” your host says, “thank you, thank you. You did the washing up.” At the next dinner party—there will always be another one—they will point to you and say, “And you are so good for doing the washing up—always washing up, at parties! The party washer upper!” This is your legend now. This is your name. With one act of washing up you are assured kudos for it forever.

  WAY TWO: They go, “Oh, don’t worry about the washing up. I’ll do the washing up tomorrow.” And then you don’t have to do the washing up, but you still get points for attempting to do the washing up.

  DID I JUST HACK DINNER PARTIES?????­?????­? I THINK I FUCKING DID, YEAH!!!!!!!!!

  THE RIGAMAROLE OF TIDYING EVERYTHING AWAY TO MAKE A BIG TABLE

  Ah, shit, you’ve made the mistake of having a dinner party at your own flat, the least-equipped place for this sort of thing on earth. Do you have a tablecloth? Come on, mate. No. Of course you don’t. Did you email all your flatmates to say this would be happening and to keep the kitchen clear? You did, but Rob forgot, but he’ll mainly be in his room Skyping his Canadian girlfriend. Do you…even know how to make rice? Why have you done this? Why have you invited this hell down upon yourself?

  THE WEIRD BIT WHERE YOU DON’T KNOW WHETHER THIS…DO WE…MAKE THE CALL?

  Every other time you have been in this house, it’s been 1 a.m. at the earliest at the headachy bit of a night out where you’re all kind of pumped and the blood is going faster and the sweat sticks your T-shirt to your chest and you all get a little blue bag of tins and maybe some share-sized bags of crisps and then Make the Call and stay up until 7 a.m. minimum listening to nü rave on YouTube and doing frankly appalling quantities of gak. Only…I dunno, man. I’ve had a really large amount of gravy. Should we—? Only, I’m kind of watching my money this month. I dunno. Should we—? I dunno. I dunno: I’ll leave it up to you. I’ll leave the decision up to you. Yeah. No, I’m not—I’ll leave the decision up to you. And then you end up doing loads of gear and washing it down with port, don’t you? You filthy little dog.

  REALIZE THAT THIS IS THE REST OF YOUR LIFE NOW

  Your friends who have dinner parties are doing this because they are nesting ahead of something else, and what I mean by that is in three years’ time—when you’ve gone through four entire doomed boom-and-bust Tinder-shag-and-Instagram-a-lot relationships—they will have conceived, had, and raised a child up to the age of a toddler, and next time you go round their house there will be a dog there and an actual tiny human who can talk. And that’s weird, because the more your life stays static and developmentally arrested, the more your friends seem to thrive, and the happier they are, and the more things they learn how to do with lentils, and it’s important you don’t have a wobble about it, or anything—don’t completely lose touch with the central gyroscope inside of you, the magnetic north that tells you what to do—but also, looking around here, at this nice house with these nice things and all this normality (“We got sick of buying blankets so I learned how to knit them! I made that soft thing you’re sitting on!”), do you think: Would it not be easier if I stopped fucking about and just grew up, a bit? Would it not be better if I made apple pie and had a job in the city? What if I just started acting like an adult? What if I knew what balsamic vinegar was? How do they make it balsamic like that? But no. No. You’re never going to do it.

  THAT BIT WHERE YOU HAVE TO PUT A SCARF ON AND KISS EVERYONE GOOD NIGHT FOR SOME REASON AND PRETEND YOU ARE EVER GOING TO DO THIS AGAIN

  Civilized nights end with civilized good-byes, which is why your friend’s girlfriend who you’ve known for four years and never had more than a twenty-second conversation with before suddenly wants to give you a full-on actual hug and kiss good-bye, then really sincerely turns away from you and says both to the room and no one in particular, “We should do this again some time.” Should we? You’re battered on wine and you’ve got a see-thru bag full of foil-wrapped pork with you, but did you have a nice time? I suppose you did, in a way. I mean, it’s no “going to the pub and talking shit for hours and getting steaming,” but it’s okay. Do you want to do this again? Let the question sit in the air a second, allow it to settle. The first person to blink loses. The first person to make the move is the one who—Ah, fucksake. You’ve just said, “Maybe we can do it round my place next time!” and someone has brightly said, “IT’S A DATE!” and the next morning at 9 a.m. sharp you get a “Sore head? Haha me too. Here are the next seven Tuesdays we have free—let me know what’s good for you?” and that’s it, now, you’re going to have to go on BBC Good Food and panic-learn how to mash a potato. You only have three plates. You didn’t think this through at all, did you? You didn’t think this through at all.

  That Time I Invented Sitting Down

  I came quite late to drugs. I came quite late to drink, too—I was near sanctimonious about it as a teenager, and I suppose if you’re a nerd teen who primly purses his lips at the idea of a swig of beer, then nobody is exactly going to offer you drugs, are they now—and never really dabbled in weed, the Teenager’s Drug Of Choice™, because both my parents smoked when I was a kid and I couldn’t stand the smell of burning tobacco. They tell you, in assemblies at school, how weed is a “gateway drug,” and it’s always painted as some sort of Mach-speed descent into the abyss—“One toke of weed,” drug counselors with pocket protectors tell you, through orange-fade glasses lenses, “and a week later you’ll be high out of your mind on smack, then dead”—whereas in fact all weed really does is open you up to the idea that stimulants can temporarily alter your brain chemistry in a pleasant and/or unpleasant way, and how fun that can be. It’s very tiresome, living in your own mind all of the time. Weed tells you that you don’t have to do that quite so rigidly as every previous year of your teen existence before. Anyway I skipped that lesson because I was a fucking square.

  The point is: I am cool now and have had drugs.

  Recently a friend of mine came to town for what we termed the “Final Sesh,” a pour-one-out-for-your-comrade weekend of excess, the type of which he will never have again, due to his partner being pregnant with a baby. Jay is an old friend, a pink-faced Liverpudlian who walks like he’s smuggling gear into a Creed concert, and over the years we have seen each other in various states of distress: fat, drunk, dumped, vomiting, and now expecting. When that baby comes—tiny, pink, screaming—his life as we have known it will end permanently, and a new and more responsible one forged in its place, and one, we imagine, that does not involve staying up until 4 a.m. getting really quite high on a sofa and putting hour-long techno mixes on YouTube and turning it to such a level where you can hear it—really, really hear it—but also hear each other as you turn and sink room-warm lager and tell each other how important the notes you are listening to actually are. Exact transcript, from the weekend in question: “These notes, man. These—god, these fucking notes.” Sounds become very important when you are high.

  Because we are thirty now, and that is a difficult thing to be. Internally, I fundamentally still feel like I am a lost child still slightly bewildered to have pubic hair. Externally, the world expects me to work a job and pay bills and know what politics is. And somewhere in between those spaces, there is a dissonance: I want to be out partying and drinking and shooti
ng my mind out of its skull to some distant, unknowing place, far along the galactic realm—but also my face really, really does look thirty years old under the thudding UV lights of a club, where young people are, gazing upon me like a specter of death. More and more over the past year I have felt my age, not because my knees hurt or my back has gone or because I started a savings account or any shit like that, but just simply because when I’m in a bar, I’m no longer part of the vital, sexy élite at the center of it: I am the weird guy, on the edges, wearing a formal pair of shoes because he came straight from work and didn’t really expect to be coming out tonight, drinking a Diet Coke because he’s learned through years of hard lessons that pacing two beers with a soft drink really does help mellow the hangover the next day without softening the buzz the night revolves around. My clubbing days are dwindling down now, not through any great lack of motivation on my part, but just by the sheer embarrassment of how I look when I’m there.