My good health could be the social death of me at dinner parties

Ithink it was the great Patrick Leigh Fermor who coined the term “the organ recital” for the dismal conversation about failing body parts that gradually takes the place, at middleaged dinner parties, of those ubiquitous brain-numbers of earlier decades: house prices, careers and children.

I first encountered the organ recital a few years ago, at supper with some new acquaintances. They had had distinguished international careers, and I was looking forward to an evening of lively conversation.

Conversation there was. Lots of it. But instead of a glittering exchange of reminiscence about the places where they had spent their working lives, they settled down for a cosy chat about their aches and pains. To the recitative of creaky joints and alarming digestive events I had nothing to add: I was reduced to silence by my own dull good health.

You might think an absence of conversation worthy symptoms a blessing, but if a new dining trend catches on, a robust constitution may mean social death. The nutritionist and chef Toral Shah has launched the concept of a “health optimisation party”. For a starting price of £250 per head, up to eight people can gather to enjoy an individual blood test, a “banquet-style meal”, a talk on nutrition and a 30-minute follow-up phone call.

Is there time for table talk, I wonder, between the blood tests and the nutrition advice? And if so, what does one discuss at such gatherings? I suppose, with all that nutritional rectitude on offer, the discourse must revolve around food intolerances – and here a line from that kindliest of wits, Sydney Smith, comes to mind: “Madam, I have been looking for a person who disliked gravy all my life; let us swear eternal friendship.” When the artist Francis Bacon asked his chum, Barry Joule, to destroy one of two versions of a portrait of the banker and art collector Gilbert de Botton, he made himself perfectly clear. Joule was to get rid of the painting “on the left” – which he duly did.

The only problem was, his left wasn’t the same as Bacon’s. “Any fool knows left is left with your back to it,” screamed the affronted painter, on discovering the expensive error.

You’d think that such a straightforward binary option would admit of almost no ambiguity, but it is amazing how much hapless misunderstanding can result from a simple left-right confusion.

To this day, I cherish an ineradicable memory of my mother, navigating as I drove on the motorway towards Devon, saying brightly, “Turn left back there, darling!” while pointing right with a sublimely confident finger.

On holiday recently, I was briskly assaulted by a small bird (a white-breasted waterhen, as it turned out), which seized a chocolate cake from my astonished hand, and carried it off into the undergrowth, there presumably to suffer agonies of indigestion.

I returned home to learn that the visiting Commonwealth heads of government had received a security briefing about the aggressive mallard currently nesting in the window box outside the Cabinet room in Downing Street.

In a world full of danger and uncertainty, there is something rather touching about our human willingness to defer to the whims of assertive waterfowl.