How finite is your dinner table?

As everybody knows, it was Earth Hour on Saturday. So The Pond and I decided to invite a couple of people over for a braai. Then Saturday morning dawned, grey and rainy. So we changed the braai to soup. But this post is not about the food (although, knowing me, I'll mention it again). It's about the fact that The Pond and I do not have the ability to have a small dinner party. We just don't.

Now we do share many friends in common and, when we initially thought of our little Earth Hour shindig, we came up with a nice, short, list of about eight. Perfect to sit around the table in the kitchen. However, as the week expanded, so did the list. The thing is, you see, that both of us find it impossible not to invite anybody who phones us, or we bump into miscellaneously in the Spar etc, during the week leading up to any kind of 'intimate' dinner party. I fear that, in fact, were we not aware of the fact that the house is of finite size, we'd probably invite the lady she chatted to in the queue at the Post Office and the guy I met while reading the notice board at work... you get the picture. Sometimes the finity of the house alludes us.

Despite all this, and with three people cancelling last minute, and two people not pitching, we dragged the outside table into the lounge, moved the kitchen table in too, and had a (very) cosy, candlelit, Earth Hour soup dinner, with twenty of our closest friends. And it was great. An ecelectic mix of people, lots of chitter-chatter, laughter, wine and yummy soup, bread and cheese. So some people had to sit on the heirloom pear wood coffee table which was charading as a bench (my granny would've loved that actually), and a couple of people had to eat their soup with the measuring spoons, but nobody complained. And my nasty neighbour even turned off his lights at 8:30. He is now my not-so-nasty neighbour.

I do like the fact, though, that the dinner table in my brightly-coloured house, seems infinite.

I wonder if I'll ever have something I can refer to as an intimate dinner?