THE SUPPER CLUB

Would I have been part of the French Resistance? Not on tonight’s showing. I’d have been on my knees, kissing the jackboot, offering my wife to the Gestapo.

Dear Readers,

This week, a piece of new fiction from Carlo and I. The first since starting this blog.

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A group of friends meet once a month, nine times a year, for supper. This has been going on for twenty-five years, with each member taking turns to host. It is always an enjoyable, drunken affair—good food, wine, and expensive puddings from Soho cake shops.

Working in various branches of the media and entertainment industries, they are familial, their children are friends, and in the summer, they transport these dinners to the south of France, where they live in close proximity for a month.

There are discussions about contemporary politics, the tabloid press, and prostate cancer, as well as work collaborations, fallings-out, and love affairs. They text and phone one another daily, if not hourly. Some friends know politicians, political journalists, and lawyers, so the gossip can be very juicy, often scandalous and cancel-worthy.

One member was, in fact, recently cancelled and forced to retreat to a bunker in Bratislava, where he had less access to the internet and young females. He will be accepted back in due course. These are sardonic and so-called sophisticated people: the cultural elite, not famous but known—although one of them, Chris Hawk, an actor, would be recognised anywhere; a classically trained leading man who made his millions in American romcoms.

Over the years, they’ve mostly agreed with one another. All are socially left-wing—some with radical, Trotskyite histories—and enjoy sneering at the ignorant, racist right, believing themselves to be progressive and civilised.

A core of close friends has remained from the start, each claiming to have begun this monthly supper ritual. But it was Arthur Brisker, a television and film critic with a column in a broadsheet, who started it with a university friend.

It is the end of one such evening, and Arthur is tucking into his banoffee pie when he overhears Chris and Emily, a septuagenarian costume designer, discussing, in their phrasing, the ‘defensive war against terrorists’.

“They’re an ally.”

“And the only democracy in the Middle East.”

Arthur has a prejudice against murder and wars, although he understands how necessary a bit of killing is from time to time, to keep the peace. But the events of the last two years have terrified and repulsed him; a life spent reading about all kinds of man-made horrors had not prepared him for what his phone presents daily—a gateway to unspeakable horrors.

Before hearing this, he was stuffed and stoned, but now, suddenly, is overwhelmed with adrenaline, dismayed that his long-time companions are parroting banal propaganda. He wants to say something; he should, he must. He begins marshalling his arguments, but the conversation has progressed to air fryers.

That night, he struggles to sleep. For hours, he develops his ideas; going over the history of the conflict, the hypocrisies of the media, the vested interests of the British political class and their support of a gangster state. He can hardly bear to contemplate the maniacal sadism at the core of it all, the complicity of the Prime Minister he voted for, the families torn apart by gleeful, pitiless colonisers. And the children… orphaned and hungry. He must stop spiralling.

He checks the time—it's four a.m.—and he envies his wife, sleeping soundly. Is he, he wonders, capable of real thought anymore, or is he just a lazy, well-off London cunt? A boomer who grew up in what he considers to be the most luxurious and privileged period in human history, he recalls the chant, "Hey, hey LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?" A youth spent in the company of radical feminists, Maoists, communists and anti-colonists: what is he now, sharing banoffee pie with a moronic actor whose only skill is to deliver lines written by playwrights, and now neo-Nazis.

What a stupid profession, what a ridiculous little man. But who am I, a mere commentator on these ludicrous people? A life spent in service to the most vacuous game going. I should cancel my Christmas ski trip to Val d’Isère. Why the fuck am I even going to Val d’Isère when people are dying? The missus loves skiing, particularly the après-ski, and she will be annoyed, but I will have to explain that a person should have some principles. Perhaps we will only go for the weekend. I regret not giving Chris both barrels. I will do so at the next supper.