Fifty Is Not a Four-Letter Word Read Free Page B

funny.
    I do love giving parties, though, and I would have been thrilled to be giving one on New Year’s Eve if not for the F-word.
    Jack and I sat down to do the invites under various headings. First, Family.
    “That’s easy,” said Jack, “what with my parents both being dead and yours on holiday in Cape Town.” I ignored him and wrote
     down my sister, Sarah, her husband, William, and their three girls, Jessie, Amanda, and Sam.
    “Don’t forget
my
delightful sister,” Jack continued.
    “As if I could,” I replied glumly, adding Anita to the list. Anita, who hates me, and her husband, Rupert, who hates everybody,
     so at least I don’t have to take it personally. Next up my cousin Mike, who loves me, and his new boyfriend, a ruggedly handsome
     Slav named Stanko whom I’m prepared to love, but only once Mike tells me he is definitely The One.
    Then Best Friends, mine, Jack’s, and Olly’s (I’m already resigned to the fact that Olly and his pals will exit the party at
     the first opportunity), with marvelous, maddening, unpredictable Maddy—Dr. M. to her adoring patients—right at the top of
     the BF list; then the aforementioned BFs abroad. There are about ten of them in various parts of the globe, and they book
     flights as casually as they make restaurant reservations.
    After that came the second tier. Colleagues and bosses, school mums and dads (Olly would have gone ballistic if he’d seen
     this category on the list), old school friends whom I see once a year, neighbors so they won’t complain about the noise, plus
     one set of neighbors who have been promoted to New Best Friend status. (Original BFs, like Pringles Original or original Branston
     pickles, need to have been around for at least twenty years to qualify; NBFs can be made in a week, although you’ll never
     love them as much as your BFs.) What is it with me? I may be pushing fifty, but I still think like a small child. Fifty going
     on four. That’s part of the problem, I suppose. When the numbers reached eighty-five, Jack declared a halt.
    The guest list sorted, next came the question of food. If there’s anything that marks me out as Jewish—apart from hair that
     frizzes at the mere mention of the word “moisture”—it’s my attitude about food. It’s one of the many reasons Jack’s sister,
     Anita, hates me. I do food all the time, and in copious quantities. My fridge is so full it keeps springing back open the
     second I shut it. Once a frozen chicken fell out and landed on Anita’s toe, and it broke—the toe, not the chicken. Some people
     have second homes on the Costa del Sol; mine’s on the Finchley Road at Waitrose. Quite a hike from there to the coast.
    In the almost twenty years Jack and I have been together, we have been to Anita and Rupert’s place for dinner maybe five times.
     Anita has been to our place more like five hundred times. She thinks I invite her to spite her. It’s me who does Christmas,
     too. Jack’s a Christian (lapsed), and Olly is whatever suits him on any given day. It’s not that I particularly like cooking,
     but for me, friends around a table groaning with food (even if the food has come straight from the deli) is one of life’s
     great pleasures.
    So the food was going to have to be fantastic.
    I rang Pam. “Pam? Fancy doing a New Year’s Eve party for eighty-five?”
    A former junior editor on my magazine who left journalism only six months ago to become a caterer, Pam was perhaps a bit of
     a risk. But she deserved a boost, and if all went well, she’d make lots of new contacts.
    “Food stations, darling,” she insisted, “so right for you and so right for now.” I could swear Pam never called anyone “darling”
     before she went into the party-planning business. And I didn’t have a clue what food stations were.
    “What exactly—”
    “Grazing areas. Food stations are strategically placed so you can pick up delicious morsels of sustenance—some hot, some cold—as