And there's nothing quite like hosting a dinner party to encourage the building of said table. Many hosts would consider the best course of action to be early preparation. Perhaps build the table the weekend before or something. Oh no, that's not my way. Arriving home from work on the Friday night - wrecked of course - the table wasn't built, the apartment wasn't cleaned (a bigger job when you're in a new place and the guests will expect to be shown every nook and cranny) and the food wasn't even bought from the organic local produce market. Or the supermarket.
Dividing to conquer, Dee rushed off to Tesco while I cleaned and built the table. I have built many IKEA flat pack items over the years, but I had never seen instructions like these. All easy to follow of course, but these ones featured drawings of people doing the work. A man was shown holding table-bits in place while a woman screwed them in. We did it the other way around, which was not a great plan as it turned out. It's hard to screw in the right place when the person holding the table-bits keeps moving to see the TV better. Enough said...
The good guests were invited to arrive at 7.30pm. By 7.10pm the table was built. By 7.40pm the first of the guests had arrived and the tour guiding started in earnest. By 7.50pm the aforementioned person who couldn't hold pieces of wood still had somehow - heaven knows how - managed to break the balcony door so that it wouldn't shut. For a while, I had visions of having to hand out blankets to everyone. Fortunately by about 8, we had it figured out and the door was closed.
The upshot of the table-building, tour-guiding and door-fixing was that dinner was not served until 10pm... surely the latest ever! Moral of the story? When planning a dinner party, make sure you're able to say "Here's one I made earlier!"
And here's the table... isn't it lovely?
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