Dinner Party Guests

 I was eating my dinner of sausage and chips, which I had just cooked  while Pat was on one of her holidays to Spain and my only companion was Arnold the dog. Arnold is a lovely dog and we get on really well but conversation with him is rather stinted and one sided so it got me thinking who I might have enjoyed sharing this meal with.

I decided it would be fun to imagine having a dinner party with 7 guests of my choice. My parameters would be that the guests would all have been successful in their chosen careers and would be sufficiently opinionated and outspoken to make for a lively debate on any subject. Many names came to mind but I had to try and create an even balance not just of opinions but also in the seating arrangements.

This is what I came up with and I leave it to you decide whether my choices of dinner companions would have been successful or a ‘car crash’ waiting to happen.

My very first invitation would go to BORIS JOHNSON. Boris is a ‘Marmite’ person, you either love him or hate him but few would deny that he is a colourful, humourous and very educated  personality. I would advise my other guests to bring with them two dictionaries, one in Latin and one in English

My second invitation would go to DALEY THOMPSON arguably the finest athlete that this country has ever produced. I cannot imagine that Mr.Thompson could be browbeaten by anybody and would most certainly be prepared to air his opinions. I have met him, very briefly, at a Sport Trade Fair when Pat and I had our Sports shop and found him to be a very polite and amiable man.

Staying with the Sport theme my next invitation would go to SUE BARKER who I believe would be a perfect mediator in whatever subjects were discussed as well as being able to give an insight into the tennis scene, past and present. She might also give us a glimpse of her relationship with Cliff Richard although I suspect her discretion would rule that out.

Invitation number four would go to a ‘blast from the past’ who has to rank as one of the fairest and finest Speakers the House of Commons has ever known, BETTY BOOTHROYD. Her opinion of Bercow the gnome and the current speaker Linsday ‘100 days around the world’ Hoyle would make very interesting listening.

RICHARD  LITTLEJOHN’s views on any topic would invariably be humourous and entertaining and he could be guaranteed to disagree with everybody and could grip you with a thousand stories. A man after after my own heart but well out of my league.

Number 6 would be JAN MOIR, also a newspaper columnist, who strikes me as being able to hold her own with any man when it comes to a debate especially a heated one.

My last invitation would go to a man you may never have heard of but he is the man I would most like to see pulled to pieces by my other guests. His name is DAVID BUTTRESS the CEO of OVO the energy company. To be perfectly fair Mr. Buttress he only took over from Ramon Bhatia in May this year and maybe (please don’t make me laugh) he has already made plans to review the companies policy of ripping off their customers and to replacing the majority of the Customer Services staff with people who have some knowledge and willingness of how to solve their customers problems. Encouraging Ovo customers to pay Direct Debits over and above what’s necessary to cover the costs of the energy that they have used in order to effectively subsidise the Company is sharp practice and needs to be stopped. Yes, you can request any surplus monies to be returned to you but why should that be necessary? I would like the government, any government, to make it compulsory that any credit that a consumer has accumulated of £100 or more should be returned to them in total immediately. Hopefully Mr. Buttress would offer to pay the bill for the dinner from the millions of pounds that his company is sitting on illegitimately. Any chance of that?

I doubt that seating my guests in any particular order would have any effect on the liveliness of the exchange of views and I believe they are all responsible enough to get through the evening without fisticuffs. If it does kick off I want to be behind Mr. Thompson or even Sue Barker come to that. More likely Betty Boothroyd would bring them to ‘order, order’

P.S I do not necessarily agree with any or all of views of the guests listed above but it sure would be fun.



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