Fergus Butler-Gallie’s fantasy dinner party: Nina Simone, Jonathan Swift and Czech author Jaroslav Hašek

St Thomas Aquinas is sick almost as soon as he arrives at Polar Adventure Soft Play and Ice Slides at Maidstone Leisure Centre. I have chosen it as the location for my dinner party because it represents a sort of lost Xanadu of my youth, albeit one scented with powerful cleaning agent.

At dinner one should never talk religion or politics, they say. Balls — what else is there to talk about? I am hosting a properly theological dinner party, which is why Aquinas is here. He is sick metaphorically — horrified by the materialistic world of the present day which, ironically, his clarity of thought helped edge us towards — and physically. As a man of voluminous appetite, he was unable to resist the Blue-Raspberry Slush Puppie at reception.

I recall the food at Polar Adventure’s depressing, vaguely Arctic-themed café all too clearly. Even a four-year-old can detect that particular culinary clag which denotes a cut-price chicken nugget. Consequently, acknowledging that man cannot live on own-brand Pom-Bears and soggy carrot sticks alone, I have chosen the chefs of the sublime Daquise, South Kensington’s Polish stalwart, as my catering crew. It is at this restaurant that I intend to die, midway through schnitzel, creamed potato and cucumber. This is what I am serving to my guests, alongside Daquise’s exceptional chicken broth, dumplings with cheese and sweet pancakes Franz Josef-style, as I recall my time living in eastern Europe. It’s my party and I’ll regale dead saints with anecdotes about the pubs of Prague if I want to.

My sommelier is Princess Margaret, a woman of very deep faith who enjoyed dropping in to theological colleges to chat about God. The Queen Mother once expressed a preference for drinks mixed by Margaret as she served “proper” (read, gargantuan) measures. I have secured a good champagne, rye vodka and Czech lager to wash things down, but given the princess’s fortitude of will, we end up with her preferred beverage foisted on us: cooling tower-sized glasses of Famous Grouse, each with a matchbox attached, to aid the lighting of cigarettes. I provide these too, served alongside thick, dark Nicaraguan cigars.

It’s my party and I’ll regale dead saints with anecdotes about the pubs of Prague if I want to

Tobacco is one of the many things that confuses my next guest, Julian of Norwich, the 14th-century writer and mystic. She spent the majority of her years as an anchoress, locked in the seclusion of a church cell — and tobacco didn’t arrive in Europe until two centuries later. She takes it, and Polar Adventure, in her stride. Both stand as evidence of the truth of her aphorism that “all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well”. She and Aquinas quarrel at first but soon settle into slurred agreement about the nature of the divine.

At this stage of the evening, Nina Simone is on hand to lead group chantings of appropriately theologically reflective songs, “Sinnerman” and “Mississippi Goddamn” in particular. To call her a force of character would be an understatement and she more than holds her own conversationally with the more formally canonised guests.

Jonathan Swift, the great controversialist, humourist and cleric has spent the evening spicing conversation with scatological jokes. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard such childish humour from such an intelligent individual. I am even firmer than ever in my belief that he is Anglicanism’s greatest gift to the world. Naturally he gets on like a house on fire with Czech author Jaroslav Hašek, who lampooned religion so effectively in The Good Soldier Švejk. It makes me cry with laughter and so I forgive the author his militant atheism. He and Swift are astonished by how much they have in common despite it. Indeed, these two loveable pranksters get on so effectively that they actually do begin a small fire while the saints, the princess, Simone and I are distracted by pudding. Inevitably, it is politics, and not religion, that causes the incident after the committed communist and the arch Tory discover that their mutual loathing for authority extends to disregarding Polar Adventure’s very reasonable stipulation that there be no open flames on the ice slides.

We end the evening wrapped in protective foil on the Maidstone ring road, having solved the question of the problem of evil once and for all. Unfortunately, such is Margaret’s generosity, when we wake up the next morning nobody can remember what the answer was.

Fergus Butler Gallie is a clergyman and writer. His next book “Touching Cloth” will be published by Penguin in 2023

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