Will Self’s fantasy dinner party — a vegetarian feast served by Margaret Thatcher

Frankly, any dinner party is a fantasy to me nowadays. I was pretty disaffected from the polite pissing contest that constitutes the average middle-class munch-fest long before the pandemic, but the past couple of years have seen the psychic equivalent of sticky tape printed with “POLICE CRIME SCENE” stretched across this particular zone of sociality. So it’s with considerable pleasure that I retreat into a purely fantastical one.

I’ve chosen to whine and grine my guests in the Circular Hall at Lambeth Town Hall. Why? Because it’s local to me — I’ve lived in this area of sarf’ London for a quarter century this year — and its Edwardian elegance contrasts with the busy central Brixton streetscape which can be seen from its ocular windows. The Reliance Arcade and the entrance to Electric Avenue (of which more later) are both in view while the Academy music venue, where I saw one of my guests, Martina Topley-Bird, give an extraordinary performance with Tricky in the late 1990s, is only a trip and a hop away.

Topley-Bird’s ethereal voice was the skylarking that soared above the rocky soundscape of the late nineties, which was about the last time I truly felt the pulse of the zeitgeist. It will be a pleasure to dine with this remarkable artist, who went on to have an equally brilliant solo career. I’ve also invited Eddy Grant because he was not only a pathfinding black artist in the Britain of the 1960s, but he also subverted the teeny-boppy “Baby Come Back” (his first big hit) by recording that paean to all things anarchic — and the Brixton riots of 1981 in particular — “(We’re gonna rock down to) Electric Avenue”.

Obviously, I’m interested to see how Margaret Thatcher, whom I’ve resurrected to be my sommelier for the evening, will react to Grant’s presence. But we won’t find out much, because as my paid employee I’ve instructed her to say nothing to my guests beyond polite requests as to what they’d like to drink and tasting notes on the beverages.

Apropos: I’m not a great alcohol drinker myself, and haven’t drunk socially for decades. However, I’ve decided to make an exception for this party so long as the alcohol is generously laced with tetrahydrocannabinol, the psychoactive element in marijuana. A good way of infusing it is to get a bottle of overproof Jamaican rum and insert a handful-or-so of high-quality sinsemilla, then put it in the freezer for a month or so.

Thatcher can serve me and my guests with this, and also with other drinks favoured by the African-Caribbean community I live among, such as Dragon Stout and the extra-strong Guinness brewed in Nigeria. However, sensitive to those who don’t wish to indulge, I’ll also provide good quality ginger beer and Perrier (the only widely sold mineral water that’s naturally carbonated and, of course, a great symbol of the excesses of the Thatcher-inflected 1980s).

Raising the dead is always problematic, but I’ve an idea the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume will cope with the experience well, while his principled and rigorous scepticism (and legendary good humour) will make him a good foil to that termagant Times columnist and all-round moralising busybody, Melanie Phillips. I once almost caused Phillips to self-combust when on Question Time I suggested to her that since she believed British Muslims should take an oath of loyalty to the British state, perhaps Jewish Britons should as well.

Phillips is a great believer in an ethics rooted in tradition. Hume is that tradition both personified and transcended; locking antlers in the Circular Hall they’ll have half-Jewish (me) and other diverse companions to cheer them on as they set the world to rights. No doubt my chef, the late Keith Floyd, will join in as well. I’m a recent convert to his cookery programmes, having only watched them in the past year or so, but I love the way he breaks the fourth and glassy wall of the screen, involves the people in all the far-flung locations he visits in his cuisine and most of all cooks with a sort of intoxicated legerdemain that implicitly mocks the preciousness with which foodies approach their holy nosh.

I’m not a big eater myself and, frankly, I find disgusting the whole-body-fat-suits most of my fellow middle-aged Britons disport themselves in. So, I’ll be asking Keith to provide my guests with a series of simple, low-calorie vegetarian dishes (I haven’t eaten meat for three years now), such as West Indian callaloo, vegetarian patties, rice and peas, and hard food; together with South Asian staples such as tarka daal and chana masala. As a nod to my own Ashkenazi heritage, I’ll also ask him to whip up some potato latkes like Mother used to make. I think I’ll offer one to Melanie in a patronising sort of way.

Finally, my fifth guest is that most enigmatic of fictional figures, the grand cuckolder of (half-Jewish) Leopold Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses, Molly Bloom. This year is the 100th anniversary of her bursting upon the western cultural firmament like some new star.

In the novel we really only learn anything about her second-hand, as her complaisant husband keeps away from their Dublin home so she can have a liaison with that perfumed lothario Blazes Boylan. But at the very end of the novel, we’re treated to her slumbering soliloquy — a great and exuberant wave of recollection that takes in her current imbroglios before lancing back in time to her girlhood in Gibraltar, before fantastically depositing us on Bray Head above Dublin Bay, where she hymns the rhythms of her first orgasm with a series of triumphant affirmations. What better way to say, “Yes, yes, yes!” to 2022 than hosting this remarkable woman?

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