Like many Australians, I’ve given occasional thought to the guest list at my Ultimate Dinner Party. You know the one. If you could invite anyone in the world, living or dead, to a dinner of, say, a dozen people, who would you include?
And forget about being polite.
You don’t have to invite relatives or loved ones, just because they wouldn’t speak to you for a month if you left them out. This is your fantasy list. Go for broke.
Have a wild drunken lunch with Mad Aunt Maud and Silly Old Uncle Frank another day. They’ll still be wild and drunk in a few weeks’ time.
You don’t have to include the names of famous people, just because they sound impressive. Henry Kissinger, Henry VIII or Wagner might have been hugely significant in a historical sense, but I’m guessing jokes would be thin on the ground with that lot. And you’d keep your eyes on the knives if you were eating pheasant with the dead royal.
Margaret Thatcher and Mother Teresa would certainly have stories to tell, but you’d only have to put elbows on the table to have Thatcher freezing the room with a look, and Mother Teresa would tend to put a dampener on excesses of any kind.
Likewise Stalin, Mao, Hitler, or any of the despots and dictators. Who’d want to break bread or pass the potatoes with them?
Princess Diana? How many sad stories about her ex would you be up for?
So, no. Forget trying to impress. I’m talking capital P for Party. You want to sit with the raconteurs, the wits, the fun people who’ll have you crying in your soup with laughter, or dazzling you with their experiences. Or at least that’s where my guest list would go.
Off the top of my head, I’d put Oscar Wilde beside Gandhi, Bill Bryson with David Attenborough (predictable, but how can you not?), and Shakespeare with Jane Austen.
Throw in Bill Clinton, Leonardo da Vinci, George Clooney (eye candy), Queen Elizabeth I, Mozart, Ricky Gervais, Billy Connelly and Amy Poehler, and you’d have more than a dozen, but what the heck. This is my concept and I’ll invite who I want to.
I’d also like to throw in a saint, just for the heck of it, because of my lifelong – and rather disturbing if I think about it too much – fascination with saints.
Way back when I was a young Catholic, bored witless while supposedly praying, it was stories about saints that kept me interested.
Why was Saint Erasmus the patron saint of abdominal pain, or Saint Sebastian of Abaricio the patron saint of road builders? Where was Abaricio anyway? And wouldn’t you like to know more about a saint called Blitharius?
But despite the obvious attractions of saints Ampliatus, Gaspar Bertoni and Bogumilus, or the chance to go three courses with saints Crispulus and Restitutus, I have a special saint in mind for this occasion.
Martyrs might be pure and virtuous souls whose lives we should venerate and aspire to follow but, really, there’s a bit too much flagellation and suffering in your average martyr to make for a good dinner party guest.
The saint I have in mind is a rocker, an icon, and I’ve even made a pilgrimage, of sorts, to visit his shrine.
I’m talking, of course, about the king of saints, my personal favourite, Saint Elvis.
He’s been dead for a while, which makes it a bit hard to sort out fact from fiction, but when did the absence of fact stop people from believing? According to legend, Elvis’ father fled a king who wanted the baby Elvis put to death.Why? I don’t know.
There was a lot of that going on back in the day.
Elvis’ mother’s servants placed the baby on a rock in the wilderness and he was “nursed by a she-wolf”, according to a saints’ lives webpage. Not even out of nappies and he’s got a story to tell.
Elvis was ordained in Rome, and went on to ordain St David, who headed for Wales and became that country’s patron saint.
It was on the Pembrokeshire coast in south-west Wales that I stayed at the historic village of St Davids a couple of months ago, and went searching for St Elvis’ shrine, a few kilometres out of St Davids at a place called St Elvis Farm, or Fferm Llaneilw in Welsh.
The sun was shining, the wind was wild, the scenery was breathtaking, and there was something very satisfying about walking a coastline looking for a saint’s shrine, while dropping into ancient pubs every few hours for a restorative drink.
I never did find the shrine. I found St Elvis Farm, and on that farm I found a couple of attractive piles of rocks that might have been a shrine, but then again might just have been piles of rocks. It didn’t matter in the end. As they say in the self-help books, it was all about the journey, and the journey was a hoot.
This is the season for dinner parties, barbecues and being with each other. Best wishes as we say goodbye to 2014 and welcome a new year.
Joanne McCarthy is a Fairfax Media journalist.