The humble dinner

I've just read a great post by Laura over at Sarsparilla about, in part, dinner parties of the 1960s. They don't sound that different to the dinner parties we hold now - consisting of similar levels of stress about preparing something fancy, scrubbing the bathroom, looking nice, worrying about who will talk to whom, buying the right alcoholic beverage, etc etc... in short, usually resulting in a host or hostess too tired to enjoy their own party.

Last night we sort of did the opposite - my wonderful parents were visiting from Melbourne so we knew they'd be here for dinner. Richard just felt like cooking (actually, he always feels like cooking) so he spent the day preparing an Indian feast of sambal, rasadar aloo, chana masala & paratha... we also had rice & lots of condiments. Then Hugh asked if his friend Tristan could come for dinner... then Ruby announced her friend Jo would be here, then she added in Chris and Brendan and Deon. So there were ten of us! Amazingly, there was plenty of food for everyone, and then leftovers too (which we're having right now). And because of the way it unfolded there was absolutely no stress involved.