Sunday 19^th December 2010

Tomorrow is my party. Forty are coming, snow and ice depending. Before breakfast I cleaned my papier mâché cornucopia, loathed by my architect, Bruce MacBain.

Well, I’ve got to have something more traditional.

There are to be fourteen different canapés for my party. Were I Angus Willis, leading Poor Little Rich Gay and world-famous food stylist and writer, I would be curing a salmon, making a ginger jelly, cutting each into cubes and mounting on sticks, while preparing individual self-made boxes with a selection of oriental delicacies, finished off with a raffia bow.

I’m less thrilling and utterly unique, I’m afraid. Val is bringing the cocktail sausages, provided he doesn’t re-bottle or get snowed in, from a special butcher in Chiswick. I’ve had to compromise (for the first time ever) owing to the weather conditions. Waitrose have run out of Heston Blumenthal’s Lapsang Souchong Smoked Salmon. No chance of covering all the branches. But I did very nearly forge by car to Borough Market yesterday during the actual blizzard to get manchego and quince paste. I fancy a 1970s cheese and wine party element.

This is the only canapé not yet bought. I don’t quite see how it will be. There will just have to be a rather luminous absence where manchego and quince on sticks, descended from cheddar and pineapple chunks on sticks, might have been.

I won’t list all my canapés because it will spoil the surprise. But I have made the Parma ham bundles. Very annoying the way the pig doesn’t offer itself in exact squares of paper-thin flesh.

My Cornucopia, Loathed by My Architect, Bruce MacBain