Hi, I'm Margie Nomura and welcome to the Dream Dinner Party. This is our brand new mini episode

which is going to be starting this week and we'll sit alongside our main Desert Island Dishes

episode. So don't worry. Nothing about Desert Island Dishes is going to change. This is just a little

something extra to entertain you and I really hope you love it.

Each week, I'm going to be talking to a different guest about their dream dinner party.

They're going to be choosing four guests who can be dead or alive, anyone they like,

and they're going to be talking us through their choices and the all-important question of what their

dream dinner party menu would be.

This week's guest is Esther Corrin. It only felt fitting to have Esther as our first dream

dinner party guest, as she was my very first guest on Desert Island Dishes way before I had a

single listener. And so that felt like a very fun, full circle moment.

Thank you so much to Esther for being so generous with your time

and for taking a chance on me and my little dictaphone that I plonked on the floor between us.

Goodness knows what she was thinking when I turned up.

Esther is a fantastic writer. She's so witty and I just love her writing.

She has a brilliant substack which you should all subscribe to. I will pop the link in the show notes.

So without further ado, here is Esther's dream dinner party.

The way I feel about dinner parties has really changed with age.

I absolutely love the idea of a dinner party and I really love getting ready for a dinner

party. The actual dinner party itself, I actually find really stressful.

And I spend quite a lot of time talking to my therapist about how my dream situation would be

planning a dinner party, doing all the cooking and preparing and decorating for a dinner party,

...