Oh, that beautiful Oxford peculiarity: the crew-date. Picture the scene. Twenty or so of you are jammed around a table. Ladies, you’re inevitably sat next to the rugby player who is known as ‘fishy fingers’, smells like he still has his kit on underneath his shiny grey suit and has the utmost conviction that a blow by blow account of the time that he successfully converted a try from over the half-way line is the sure-fire method of getting himself laid.
Chaps, you might have agreed to have dinner with the Oxford Ladies’ Chess Society – surely hilarious irony, you reason. Sadly, you were wrong, and subsequently endure an evening of agonizing awkwardness. All too often at crew-dates, the Chat dies a long, drawnout and painful death.
This is, of course, before the food even arrives. Delicacies on offer around Oxford’s various crew-dating establishments include anaemic curries, hardened blocks of rice and lone sausages swimming in oily pools of gravy. Fine dining this is not.
Arguably, the only enjoyable element to the whole bizarre experience is the ‘banter’. Once you’ve been on six or seven crew-dates, you become very hardened to sconces. In the mile high club? Good for you. Sex up a tree? Great. Shat in your college chapel? Try a toilet next time.
It’s safe to say that the novelty of the crewdate can wear off with alarming rapidity. Inexplicably, however, crew-dates have monopolised Oxford communal eating. The notion of a meal, with people you actually like, and where there is no expectation for you to smile sweetly as someone tries to grope you – it seems to send people running for the hills.
Mercifully, we at Students Supporting Street Kids (SSSK) have a solution. We think that dinner parties are the way forward; better still, that they should be done for a worthy cause, for children around the world who need it most.
Why dinner parties? They’re a perfect excuse to both get together with mates and meet new people. They’re an opportunity to showcase your culinary expertise – or lack of – in the comfort of your own home, or substandard Oxford college accommodation. They’re obviously BYOB, so you can get happily boozed, but safe in the knowledge that your bank balance isn’t getting decimated. The list perpetuates.
Indeed, although we advocate dinner parties for charidee, we must concede that dinner parties by themselves are absolutely brilliant. Many declare them simply a staple of middle class life, forgetting that some of the most momentous occasions in history stem from dinner party chat. Jefferson strategically invited Madison and Hamilton to dine with him in 1790; their conversation shaped the formation of the US as we know it today. Surely one of the most sensationalised dinner parties has to be John F. Kennedy’s 45th birthday, where Marilyn’s sultry rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’ ensured that her and the President’s dirty little secret became immortalised in popular culture forever more. The influence of the dinner party stretches to the literary world: in 1816 Mary Shelley dined with some friends, and (allegedly with the help of some naughty narcotics) was challenged to produce the most horrifying story she could. She went and wrote Frankenstein – strong effort from her.
We’re not guaranteeing that if you host or attend a dinner party you will rewrite American history, have relations of any sort with the President of the United States or produce a stunning work of literature (although you never know, we’re not ruling it out, either.) What we can guarantee is that you will have a bloody good time.
Since we’ve hammered home the point how great and jubilant an event a dinner party – even better an SSSK one – would be, it’s probably beneficial to give some insight into the charity behind it all. Fundamentally, Students Supporting Street Kids aims to raise awareness about the plight of street children, funding projects that help alleviate the issues affecting them. Significantly, we view street kids as people with potential and something to give, rather than simply victims. Set up by students, it’s an organisation run wholly by volunteers; 100% of the money donated goes to the projects and non-governmental organisations that we work with. The fund-raising we do helps children throughout the world, in Africa, Asia and South America; for us, any young person who is in need of help is eligible for our support. So we really want to get some serious dollar raised and to send it out as soon as possible to children who are really, truly struggling.
Your donations make a tangible difference, as our SSSK Oxford branch head honcho discovered when she went out to see the work being done in Howrah, India, with the street kids. She stayed at the Boys Home, where 40 boys who had been separated from their parents – be that accidentally, or from running away, or from being orphaned – were thriving in the stable, protected environment. She encountered some pretty heart-wrenching stories: one boy’s father murdered his mother, leading to the child’s isolation, his joining of a gang and subsequent solvent addiction.
Sadly, his tale is not abnormal. It’s grim stuff, and its juxtaposition with our musings about dinner parties makes it all the worse. However, the point is this: the money raised from these dinner parties will go directly to alleviating some of the suffering of these street children. It’s definitely worth a shot.
Our proposal is very simple. We want you to get involved: host or attend a dinner party. Get a group of people together; we’ve found twelve hits the spot, but whatever works for you. As students, finding a location for your little soiree can be challenging; a house is obviously ideal, but if you’re in college accommodation, this can be a particular test of your creativity. This, however, should not obstruct the dinner party dream. Push desks together, sweet talk a friend into letting them use their house and that all-important table or even just sit on the floor with cushions.
Now for the critical part: if everyone puts in a tenner, brings their own booze, and you cook a three course meal for less than ten pounds a head, then voila – we have profit for SSSK. Believe it or not, we’ve managed to cook for three pounds a head. Think bruschetta, soup or tapas for starters. For the main course, perhaps big dishes of pasta, homemade burgers and wedges or risottos. Eton mess, brownies or banoffee pie would suffice nicely for puddings. These are merely suggestions that can be made surprisingly on the cheap and with relative ease – but the culinary world is your oyster.
If you need persuading further, take a look at our blog. On it is a handy collection of everything you might need to know to hold the parfait SSSK dinner party. If you’re stuck for what to cook, we’ve put together some quick and easy recipes for even the most incompetent cook. You can browse photos of previous SSSK dinner parties for inspiration about decoration, themes and the like: we’ve found that fairy lights are the key to dinner party ambience. On that note, if you do wine and dine some of your fellow Oxonians, we would be simply delighted if you could send them our way, meaning you can enjoy your fifteen minutes of fame on our blog.
To get the ball rolling, we’re attempting to coordinate a university-wide dinner party extravaganza on Sunday 12th May: we want as many people as possible to be partaking in dinner parties, hopefully with a shed-load of cash being raised for SSSK. If we have even ten dinner parties being held at various colleges throughout Oxford, with maybe £70 of profit being made from each, then that’s an incredibly decent £700 raised in only one night.
For any more information, drop us a line at [email protected], whilst you can see the blog at ssskdinnerparties.tumblr.
Good times for a good cause: join the dinner party revolution today.
