Yes, a budgie can save your dinner party
The Duchess of Cornwall says that being obliged to participate in her parents’ dinner parties was the perfect training for life in the Royal Family.
her mother would force Camilla and her brother and sister to sit down at dinner parties with ‘some of the most boring neighbours in the world . . . she’d sit us down at the dinner table and the minute there was silence, she used to say: “Talk! I don’t care what you talk about, talk about your budgie or your pony but keep the conversation going.” ’
Sixty years later, she instinctively fills any void with banter. ‘I’ve never been able not to talk. It’s in the psyche, not to leave a silence.’
her experience will ring a bell with most of us. A dinner party is best defined as a looming two - hour silence staved off by chatter and chewing.
Where do you live? Chew, chew. how long have you been there? Chew, chew. What are your children up to? Chew, chew. Did you see that new TV series with whatshisname playing the serial killer? Chew, chew. Do you know the Robinsons, by any chance? Chew, chew.
After half an hour of this rigmarole, we all yearn for a magical bell to ring. This bell would summon the Duchess of Cornwall to the table, ready to go on about her budgie and her pony, allowing the rest of us get on with our food, unencumbered by any obligation to carry on talking.
What is it about a dinner party that makes most of us so tongue- tied? I am perfectly chatty in a car, or out walking, or watching television.
But the moment I am faced with a dinner party, I feel as though my brain has been emptied of anything remotely interesting, and that nothing worth talking about has ever happened to me, or to anyone I have ever met.
Anxiously, I search my memory for something to bang on about. Panic stations! Nothing appears! From now on, faced with these awkward moments, we can all ask ourselves the question: what would the Duchess of Cornwall say?
Aha! Budgies! Ponies! But as we open our mouths to speak, it may suddenly dawn on us that we never had a budgie or a pony, and that the goldfish we won at the fair when we were six lived for only a couple of days, had no discernible character and departed this world without leaving the slightest trace of an amusing anecdote or interesting remark, fishy or otherwise.
Perhaps we should all take comfort from the fact even the most lauded are just as clueless. The BBC Music website is currently running a fascinating presentation which allows one to click on the individual heads of the figures on the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album. There follows a two or three-minute clip about that particular person.
If you click on the head of the druggie Beat writer William S. Burroughs, up comes a short clip of Burroughs at a dinner party with Andy Warhol at New York’s Chelsea hotel in 1981. Burroughs and Warhol were — and, to some extent, still are — regarded as two of the most interesting men of their time, so many will leap at the opportunity to see what the two of them had to say to one another. It turns out that their conversation is very disappointing. ‘This is the first time I’ve ever had hare,’ says Warhol, who wears headphones throughout. ‘Yeah, I mean it’s really good.’
‘It’s a rabbit, it’s not a hare,’ says Burroughs.
‘What is the official name of this meal?’ says Warhol. ‘Well, it’s meant to be lapin au moutarde, but there’s not a great deal of moutarde in here, there’s a lot of cream.’
‘ Where do you find the rabbit?’
‘They order it.’ ‘Oh, really.’ Perhaps sensing that this part of the conversation has run its course, someone else says: ‘ Can you tell me what chicken fried steak actually is made out of?’
‘Just a thin slice of steak breaded and fried very quickly,’ answers Burroughs.
‘ Oh, oh. Oh really. Oh.’ says Warhol.
Oddly enough, I spent a couple of days with him around this time, and he barely said anything else.
BuRROughS continues: ‘What I particularly like is the biscuits and gravy.’ Someone adds that it’s usually served with mashed potatoes and beans.
‘ That sounds really great. Mashed potatoes and beans are my favourite,’ says Warhol.
Where is the Duchess of Cornwall when you want her? At this point, one longs for her to pop her head around their door and start enthusing about her budgie and her pony. But instead, they drone on, their dinner party instantly transforming these two famously cool iconoclasts, as if by magic, into two of the most boring people in the world.