A NEW ACQUAINTANCE with exquisite taste in interiors and a wicked way with all manner of baked goods sends me a text message: "Would you and your boyfriend like to come over for dinner, give you a chance to have a look at the work we've done on the house, get some ideas for yours?"
I read the generous invite and then I do that thing that I occasionally do when I get a text message. I instantly forget to answer and never think of it again. Some months pass.
The next time I see the acquaintance, all I can think about when we come eyeball to eyeball is the appalling rudeness of my non-answer. Would it have cost me just to answer the message? Instead, here I am pretending everything is fine, that the subtext to the conversation isn't an accusatory "I see. Too good for us, are you? So good you don't even bother replying to text messages? Ingrate." I stand there making small talk and squirming.
Of course, at the same time the small talk is going on, I am having a little conversation with myself in my head.
Okay, what would I be thinking if I was her? Well, I'd be thinking: "I can't believe she didn't reply to my generous invitation. How rude." So, I will just have to acknowledge it in the conversation somehow, get it out of the way. But how? What about if I just acted as though she only sent the invite last week? As though it hasn't been four months, as though it was more like four days? Brilliant, that's genius. There's no way she will call me up on the fact that four months have passed. Just act like nothing has happened. Brazen it out.
"So," I ask my new acquaintance. "Does that invitation still stand? It would be great to see the house, you know, get some ideas for ours."
"What about Friday, 8pm?" she says. Bingo! "See you there," I say, and wander off down the road feeling very pleased with myself indeed.
I tell my boyfriend all about my clever salvaging of a potentially embarrassing situation. "And now we don't have to make dinner on Friday night, plus she is a brilliant cook," I say. What a result.
During the week I bump into my new acquaintance, who I am rapidly promoting to new friend, and after Friday perhaps, new best friend - I mean, who knows how well the evening might go?
"What will I bring on Friday?" I ask her. "Oh, no need, just yourselves, don't bring anything," she replies. I always interpret this as middle-class dinner party code for "Please bring at least two items from an overpriced fancy grocery store." This time I don't even begrudge the price of the hand-crafted chocolates whipped with the milk of llamas that graze on the lower Himalayas and a bottle of expensive red.
On Friday, my boyfriend wants to eat something "to tide me over" when he gets back from work, but I persuade him to desist. "After the text message fiasco I want you to be able to eat every scrap of dinner, we can't afford any more slip-ups," I say. We get there on the dot of 8pm, starving.
They offer to do the tour of the house thing first which is fine, they are the hosts, I just hope they can't hear my boyfriend's stomach rumbling.
While we are admiring the floors, curtains, carpets and deceptively expensive-looking furniture from Ikea, I notice a few things. There are no cooking smells. None. The table in the dining room is not laid for dinner.
And when my new acquaintance's husband opens the fridge to get us a beer, I see that it is empty and not bursting with, say, strawberry cheesecake.
Thankfully my boyfriend is too distracted by the fact that our new friends have a whole room just for bikes to notice the lack of dinner action. They must have ordered takeaway, I think to myself. I mean who wants to cook on a Friday night after a long week?
The tour is over. We hover uncertainly in the kitchen. Our hosts look at the clock. We continue to hover. They ask if we'd like tea. We say yes to a cup of herbal hotness thinking this may be a new trend. Tea before dinner instead of afterwards. We sit down at the coffee table for a chat.
The chat is great and everything, but eventually it's 10pm and even my boyfriend realises that there is about as much chance of any food materialising as there is of us ever having a whole room in which to store our bikes. We say goodbye.
We make sure we are a safe distance away from the house before we turn to each other and give in to hunger-induced hysteria, which comes out in the form of maniacal laughter.
Later, eating fish and chips from Burdock's - which had run out of crispy bits, another cruel blow - my boyfriend asks whether the word dinner was ever even mentioned, other than in the original text message, which of course I didn't answer in the first place.
I think hard and have to agree that the original invitation may have been downsized to just a tour of the house in the intervening four months. My boyfriend tells me it serves me right and hopes I've learned my lesson. I secretly resolve to send an ambiguous text inviting our new friends to what may or may not be dinner in our house. Revenge is a dish best served empty.