A Table!

How Do You Make New Friends, Across Generations and Inhibitions?

One of my 2023 resolutions, as I launch into my 60s - but also upon returning to London after a year away - is to invest more attention and intention in the pillar of life that all the research shows is most key to human happiness: relationships. The past decades have been so busy with work, travel and family, that like many of you, I didn’t have much time for neighbours, new friends and hanging out at the corner pub. So now’s the time. But this project is easier planned than executed. How and where do you meet new folk at my age in a bustling metropolis like London?

Neighbourly Meals In Welcoming Homes

Luckily, my neighbours are one step ahead of me. This week the local residents’ association organised a Progressive Dinner, aka Safari Suppers. The idea is that you organise a network of neighbours into 3-course meals together, in their homes. Each household prepares a single course, timed on the hour. Entree at 7pm, main at 8 and dessert at 9. We were assigned the entree, so at 7 the doorbell rang and four local neighbours I had never met showed up at our door. At 8pm, we all moved on to the next course, and a different group of people. By the end of the evening, my husband and I had met and had delightful conversations with 12 people of all ages and backgrounds. I had met some, but barely knew any of them. They were fascinating and very London, from the young cinema director whose second film just got picked up by Amazon, to the older couple who had gotten married in order to be able to double up on a professional gig in Nigeria a half-century ago. We got an always-curious glimpse into people’s homes and shared stories of lives and loves and careers. It was … surprisingly deep and delightful. At the end of the evening we all met up again at the local pub to celebrate a great community initiative.

Funny how you can spend years living next to people without really knowing them - and not finding a ready path to doing so. I should note that this activity, along with the new ladies’ get-togethers at the pub on the second Tuesday of the month, are both the initiative of the new American woman on the block. It often takes a foreigner in need of friends to start the socialising rolling.

These roving culinary get-togethers aren’t a new concept, they seem to have been around since the fifties in various guises, often aimed at the amorous or the single. But in an era of online overload and post-pandemic appreciation of physicality, they are a welcome route to making sure you do more than nod good day. I love knowing my neighbours - especially in big cities. They are a warm layer of protection from the alienation and isolation that so many suffer from.

The story of the past decades has been one of the decline of traditional meeting places - churches, pubs, traditional social clubs, community centres, even libraries. Venues closed as people focused on more insular activities, networks and entertainments. The sheer size of cities like London or New York makes organising gatherings of dispersed friends a major logistical challenge. It also makes the notion of a tight, geographically proximate community as challenging as sustaining a single drop of water in a constantly moving ocean. And yet, as we discovered this week, within just two minutes walk of us live a veritable coral reef of colourful and like-minded fish keen to venture out from their hiding places and bask in the warm waters of community.

How Do You Define a Good Gathering?

Having spent 30 years living in Paris, I’m particularly addicted to social gatherings around meals. Is there anything better than engaged conversation among a small group of humans over great food and wine? I laughed when I read this morning (in the essential newsletter Culture Whisper) that London’s 22nd Serpentine Pavilion this year at Kensington Gardens will honour this idea of culinary togetherness. Lebanese-born, Paris-based (of course) artist Lina Ghotmeh’s pavilion is titled À table and will welcome visitors to sit and chat around a spectacular, circular table.

Years ago, my son and two of his best friends, shocked by the political discord in France and the rising risk of a right-wing, Marine Le Pen victory in the Presidential elections, organised events of the same name, À table! Their vision was to pick 20 towns along the Tour de France’s cycling route, and organise dinners where they showed up in town, and ran around inviting locals of all political stripes to come debate the upcoming election issues - constructively and cordially. In their early twenties, they learned a lot - about people, politics and the skill of facilitating what the poet David Whyte calls ‘courageous conversations.’ It ain’t easy.

The best meals, in my mind, require one thing above all, and it’s the rule in our house (you are forewarned): a single conversation. I hate dinners where you are stuck talking to the person on either side, and never get a chance to learn from any collective discussion (or hear it, because of the noise). Then, the dance becomes ensuring that no voice dominates, and everyone is heard and engaged. This may require a degree of social engineering if you want good talk that goes deeper than the usual polite (or positioning) platitudes. You want both diversity and balance.

During my year at Harvard, we often held small dinner parties at home on Saturday nights. There, the (secret) rule for a dinner of six (excuse me, gentlemen and Americans), was no more than two men and no more than two Americans. In conversations, as in companies, a balance of genders and nationalities is a winning formula. We learned this mix the hard way, from evenings where successful type A personalities, used to being listened to, would start regaling the assembled company with endless stories - usually involving their exploits. A good host(ess) has to be very good at politely (occasionally pointedly) interrupting. After a career facilitating ExCo debates, and a lifelong dream of becoming like one of those 18th century French ladies hosting enlightenment-hastening ‘salons,’ I’ve gotten very good at interrupting. (My husband would say it’s my nature).

For years I’ve hosted ‘Ladies Dinners’ in cities where I’ve lived, as a wonderful way of meeting people. But now, I’m more interested in getting men and women to talk together (and hubby was accusing me of hypocrisy in my principled preaching of inclusion). There is too much divisiveness between the sexes, something I wrote about in my FORBES column this week, in a piece titled The Tragic Disconnect Between Men and Women - No Sex, No Babies, Lots of Loneliness and Ageing Societies.

Generations Over Dinner

I’ve found another route in, thanks to Marc Freedman and the folks at CoGenerate, (which used to be called Encore). They’ve created a platform for organising inter-generational dinners, called Generations Over Dinner. Based on the success of Death Over Dinner (sic), where you had a serious discussion of mortality, this is aimed at bridging generational divides. You can make an event public or private, and they give you a toolkit of prompts for discussion around three different themes: the future, love and relationships, or purpose.

The questions are well done, although in the dinner we just held, the eight of us didn’t have time to get past the first one, even over a leisurely, 3-course repast: ‘Name your favourite ancestor, and the impact they had on you.’ This led to a fascinating discussion of grandparents - almost everyone named a grandparent - as the most wonderful relationship they had enjoyed and the role model they most looked up to. As a new grandmother, I was hugely inspired by the potential impact of the role. There were fascinatingly few differences between the decades around the table (20s, 30s, 50s and 60s). All waxed lyrical about the very special relationship they enjoyed with a special someone - the oldest of whom was born in the 19th century. So the biggest differences were the social rules, restrictions or wars these different ancestors were exposed to, or constricted by. I left that dinner deeply touched by the continuity of family and love, the relay race of history, and the inevitable entwining of human experience.

“One of the reasons I painted,” wrote the artist Alice Neel (soon coming to the Barbican in London), “was to catch life as it goes by, right hot off the griddle.”

That’s why I write - and eat.

Bon appétit, all. May you dine in good company this week.