Confessions of a Reluctant Recessionista

exquisite-looking Japanese delicacies. Perfect. Absolutely perfect. I laid them out on the kitchen counter. Way too perfect. Even if I decanted everything from the Tsunami-branded platters, it was going to be completely obvious to everyone that I hadn’t made these. Shit.
    I grabbed a bunch of plates from the kitchen cupboard and began the process of laboriously transferring the rice-and-fish constructions from the platters to our plates, while at the same time squidging them in an effort to make them look less perfect. I took a fork and mashed a few of them a bit, and with a sharp knife I managed to unpick some of the nori roll in order to make everything look less professional. I heard keys rattle in the door. Jude was home. Bugger.
    I grabbed the platters from the kitchen counter and sprinted to my bedroom, losing my towel on the way. I slammed the door and flung the platters under the bed.
    ‘Cassie?’ I heard her call out. ‘Is everything all right?’ She was coming down the hallway. I grabbed a robe and flung it around me. She knocked softly on the door.
    ‘Come in,’ I trilled, as casually as I could.
    ‘It’s weird, I could have sworn I just saw you run through the living room naked,’ she said. ‘You weren’t preparing the food with no clothes on, were you? Because that would be unhygienic. And quite disturbing.’
    I laughed heartily.
    ‘You need your eyes tested, Jude. I was in my robe. And I wasn’t making anything. Everything was ready ages ago. I was just … checking.’
    ‘Well, it looks very good. I am impressed. I was expecting the kitchen to look like a bomb had hit it.’
    Phew.
    By eight thirty, half the guests had arrived. Well, Jude’s guests had arrived, anyway. They were all gathered around the kitchen counter, trying to find the bits of vegetarian sushi.
    ‘What’s this one got in it, Cassie?’ people kept asking. I don’t know, I didn’t bloody make it .
    ‘Oh, that’s avocado and cucumber,’ I said, sounding less than confident.
    ‘What’s the pink stuff?’
    ‘That’s … the sauce.’
    I’d ordered one hundred and sixty pounds’ worth of sushi and most of it wasn’t getting eaten because all ofJude’s friends are bloody vegetarians and none of my friends had turned up. Or should I say my ‘friends’. I’d emailed Ali about this thing when we thought about it on Wednesday and she’d sent back a message saying:
    Bit late notice but sounds like fun. Will rope in Kate and Soph. See you then x .
    The ‘rope in’ part of the message annoyed me. It was as if I’d asked them to do something arduous or inconvenient. I’d invited them round for drinks, for God’s sake.
    In any case, the non-appearance of Ali, Kate and Sophie as well as my other former work colleagues was inconvenient not just for sushi reasons. I had been expecting a bottle or three of Laurent Perrier Rosé to get the party started. Jude’s friends had all brought variations on a Jacob’s Creek Rioja. Rioja? Really? With sushi? I had mentioned to Jude that I was planning a Japanese menu. Perhaps she hadn’t told them.
    But worse than that, far, far worse, were the clothes. When Jude announced that we were going to get started (it was after nine and despite my increasingly frantic texts there had been no news from Ali or anyone else), I began to get a glimpse of my prospective new wardrobe. Much of it – the best of it – came from Topshop. Some of it was handmade. There was tie-dye, there was crochet, there were old pairs of leggings, there were endless nasty, stretched, holey T-shirts which I would feel embarrassed donating to a charity shop, let alone offering as realistic swap material to my friends.
    Oh. God. I had to get out of here, and I had to get out of here with my clothes. I was sitting cross-legged on the living room floor with my back to the hallway (the escape route to my bedroom), sipping a glass of warm red wine. My clothes, the clothes which I had intended to offer up for swaps, were in a pile next to me. Slowly, surreptitiously, I tried to push my pile behind my back while at the same time inching backwards on my arse towards the door. I was just about starting to think that I might be able to shove my clothes into the hallway, taking them out of eyesight and out of reach, then spill some red wine to create a diversion and leg it into the room with my stuff, when Tilly, one of Jude’s trustafarian mates, said, ‘Oh, gosh, look at these,’ pulling a pair of True