I took my own food to a dinner – don’t hate me

So we are absolutely, resolutely, sweatily slap-bang in the middle of summer. And that means one thing: it’s dinner party season, people. Prepare your hummus. In this specific stretch of summer, with public holidays bounding about like over-sugared toddlers, it’s the time of the year for sitting on your friend’s deck eating olives and bell peppers and ricotta-stuffed unicorn balls. And I think that I’ve discovered the cardinal sin of the season. I brought my own food to a dinner party.

This wasn’t a bring-a-plate/everyone pitch in/ eat five bags of chips dinner party. This was a real plates/silver cutlery/mushy olive snot in a tiny pot kind of affair.

To which I bought my own dinner (pre-frozen), which defrosted in the host’s sink while I drank three warm chardonnays, ate 43 peanuts and nodded enthusiastically at whatever the other guests were saying about their kids.

Now apparently that’s rude. Apparently, as it was explained to me in a whisper afterwards, you don’t bring your own food to dinner parties. Apparently she’d made me special diet-friendly food, gesturing to the greying chickpea salad sweating in the corner. Apparently, my host/friend explained, it’s incredibly insulting to her cooking.

I love this friend, but she doesn’t have any kitchen ability. Dinner at hers is the Victoria’s Secret fashion show for E.coli, featuring 17 varieties of watery, vomity, and spattery ways to spend the hours of 1am to 3am. I haven’t quite forgiven her for the last time she had me over when she used tank water (not drinking water) in the coffee, and the next day I had to do a five-hour photoshoot in a white tuxedo with raging diarrhoea.

And yes, I can’t cook either. At all. But the difference is I don’t throw dinner parties, while she insists on a gathering of the 5000 for lentil bake. So when she invited me over, I said I’d love to come but I was on a ‘‘new diet’’ that was too complicated to accommodate, so I’d bring my own food.

Judging by the whispered post-dinner kitchen dressing-down, I might as well have peed in the chardonnay.

But I was left with little choice. Bringing your own dinner to a party isn’t the politest thing to do, but it’s the only solution to the biggest problem of the summer season: everyone feels obliged to throw dinner parties, but not everyone can cook. And we’re not allowed to point that out . . .

There’s a point in life, normally a few years into a first real job and relationship, when your friends are visited by the archangel of antipasto, who explains that real adults show love and affection for friends through dinner parties. But the ability to both cook and host is unevenly distributed throughout us humans, just like the ability to dance or write poetry.

Everyone wants to give it a go, most of us harbour a sneaking suspicion we’re secretly amazing at it, but only a few can actually pull it off. So most of the time the dinner party is a huge ball of sweat, stress and sundried tomatoes as the host tries to perform the culinary equivalent of the Bolshoi ballet after taking one Zumba class.

The even bigger problem is that we’re not allowed to tell our friends when they’re bad. It’s always difficult to criticise someone when they’re trying to express love and doing it badly. Especially when it’s a female friend, and they’re subconsciously worried that being culinarily stunted makes us somehow less of a woman/loving friend/never as good as our Nigella-esque mum. As a result, you sit there politely praising your pesto chicken, while really all you can think is that this is what a roasted sofa cushion would taste like.

But there’s only so many times you can do that without remembering you braved rush-hour traffic, babysitters’ fees, missed gym classes or valuable Netflix time to be here . . . all just to hit Maccas drive-thru on the way home anyway.

However, the thing that tipped me over the edge was that I knew I was failing at my only job for the evening anyway. I cannot be an interesting guest when I’m hangry. I can’t be interested in you starting crossfit, or your awful boyfriend, or the fact you’re worried that peas give you cancer. All I can think is that my stomach has started eating other internal organs in protest.

So no, I’m sorry, but until we can openly admit that everyone would have just as much fun with Uber Eats, the only thing to do is make up a polite excuse to bring your own Tupperware box of mush.

Everyone feels obliged to throw dinner parties, but not everyone can cook. And we’re not allowed to point that out ...