Networking, to my mind, is something people do when they work in computers. Or fishermen. Or drag queens who mend their own stockings.

The thought of 'going forward' by socialising with people I do not know, just to get work, gives me ulcers. Breaking bread with strangers who have no idea who I am, is enough to make me book a post-dinner party psychotherapy session.

For years I thought I was the only one. Then I started to share my discomfort. I discovered we all hate these things. So I began to ask the question: Why do we all do it?

Dinner with strangers is hard work; dinner with strangers to talk about work is even worse. Only politicians enjoy them, because nobody likes them and they would never get invited anywhere otherwise.

One Fine Gael member once told me that if he had to sit down and eat another overpriced meal with another person who had the initials TD after their name, he was going to buy a grave plot.

A great friend of mine who is a multimillionaire businessman says he never makes his wife go to his work meals.

"Why would I do that to her? I love her." Now he's made his living he never goes to them either: "I'm rich enough and successful enough to choose my own company, because I own my own company."

I don't, and I'm not, but that doesn't stop me from doing the same as him. I know I have held myself back over the years, but I find in any false social environment that I develop the kind of rigor mortis that looks good on exhibits at the Natural History Museum and bad on me.

The only bodily function I am capable of in artificial settings full of small talk is sweating. People don't like sweaty people when they're wagging over canapes.

I hate the real thing, but I love the televised version of staged dining events. Come Dine With Me is a programme that makes all the right comments about all the wrong people, who put themselves forward for four nights of slavery, hosting and attending dinner parties with strangers.

It features the kind of side plates and swipes, the kind of painful reactions and quips that assist me in my claim we should never do anything we don't want to do outside of working hours.

I am a Come Dine With Me fan for the ammunition it provides for my antisocial gun. Hours of visual proof of what the socially desperate will do to get into other people's houses and get people into theirs.

And I include horrendous so-called celebrity cum diners such as Paul Ross and Tamara Beckwith, one famous for never shutting his mouth, the other for never opening hers, in that description.

Obnoxious

The only way those individuals get work is by going to obnoxious gatherings to meet other obnoxious people who might be in a position to hire them. I prefer the ordinary people who feature, most of whom are inordinately snobby and dissatisfied with their lives, or just plain mad.

There's something comic and wonderful about a show whose website asks viewers to comment on whether they have ever cooked a recipe from the show, and gives "No, they always look disastrous", as a multiple choice option.

There is no doubt that I am reclusive, becoming more so, in my desire never to talk b***x again to people I do not know. Because you always end up talking about your work.

I still cringe over an encounter with a tea taster who described every leafy turn of her career to me. What began as something genuinely interesting to me degenerated into a forensic examination of her favourite drink.

She spoke for 60 minutes about the minutiae of her occupation and I grew older. It put me off tea for life, robbed me of the will to live and make further conversation. But suddenly, she stopped in mid-sentence and left her mouth open, waiting for me to give her a prompt to fill it. My mind was a Sahara. They don't grow tea there, so I asked her what she did for a living?

She barrelled off to put the kettle on, you could have boiled it on my cheeks. I know I was horribly rude, but it was her fault for being so boring.

So I was very pleased to get an invitation to a dinner party, by people who I've got to know through friends, where it was stipulated: "We will not be talking about work."

This gave me back the hour of life I lost years ago to the tea taster. I pictured a laidback scenario, no piled-up operatic food arrangements, no holding in of the waistline, no stifling of yawns as the ins and outs of brokering are explained to me by someone who thinks I have money and opportunity to care. Proper talking. People being honest.

When I got there, they had printed up cards. I kept one. Suggested Topics: Space Exploration. Greening Our Economy. Is European Central Government A Real Solution?

At the end of the card, it also advised that we were not allowed to talk about our children.

I felt we were in the audience of Questions and Answers and being made to eat food as well as listen to the panel.

I fought for something interesting to say and found nothing, but for the fact I had once met a tea taster, who thought all Green Tea was not mature enough to let near the palate. This fitted into a category. I fitted into none.

Painful

It was four painful hours of people trying to make their lives more interesting, but instead placing themselves in a conversational harness which meant they might all as well have gone to a work function and earned brownie points.

Time is short, precious and far too good to be wasted in rooms you don't want to be in, with people who make you feel you don't know much. Nothing beats a fried egg sandwich and the people who don't mind what mess you make eating it.

In years to come we will pay for that kind of home comfort, after we have strangled ourselves cooking from a plethora of cookbooks and forgotten how to actually speak to each other as human beings.