WHEN IT COMES around New Year's resolution time in another few days, I'm giving serious thought to swearing off throwing dinner parties for the next 79 years or so. As I've long suspected, the things are bad for your health. There's scientific proof for it.

I've become, it appears, a victim of Kitchen Performance Anxiety. Plus I seem to have developed a knack of nearly starving or dying of thirst while serving up mounds of food and reservoirs of drink.

A few weeks ago, my wife Elizabeth and I hosted a buffet dinner and drinks for 18 of our neighbors, all British, ostensibly to introduce them to the glories of an American-style Thanksgiving nosh-up, but not incidentally to show off our newly refurbished cottage.

When they all downed last drinks, upped stakes and waddled off down the lane to their own abodes three hours or so later, we surveyed the dozen or so empty wine bottles, traumatized cats and the skeleton of a turkey that looked the victim of an attack by some particularly ravenous piranha fish.

And it occurred to me that I'd had exactly half a can of diet Pepsi to drink and zilch to eat, so eager had I been to keep the plates of others topped up with turkey, dressing, sweet potatoes, corn and, latterly, baby pecan pies.

It also occurred to me that this is not the first time, in a long string of dinner parties stretching back to my early days in the missile and space coverage business, that I'd become semi-malnourished and in the process nearly reduced myself to a gibbering pile of loose nerve ends simply by having folks around for eats.

Now I find there's actually a syndrome covering my suffering, complete with scientific name: Kitchen Performance Anxiety. It's a phrase coined by a professor named David Warburton, who pours test tubes or whatever scientists do, at England's Reading University.

Says the prof: "Cooking for guests has always caused slight worry and some butterflies." I can attest to that. Then he warms, as it were, to the subject:

"For many people, it has moved beyond this and become tremendously stressful because they burden themselves with irrational and unrealistic expectations of their cooking skills."

So, okay, Elizabeth does nearly all the cooking, but I still can suffer what I would describe as sympathetic irrational and unrealistic expectations of my cooking skills, even if they don't extend much beyond opening a can of chili and prying it into a saucepan. Sort of Kitchen Performance Anxiety by Proxy.

"Butterflies can become physical sickness," says Prof. Warburton, "and nervousness can become extreme irritation and impatience." Which probably explains the nearly overwhelming urge I felt to shove Christine's face into the sweet potatoes when she stepped on Angel Gabriel's tail.

(Angel Gabriel, as most readers of this column know all too well, is a tabby cat with a penchant for nicking chicken legs and lamb chops and hauling them to the bedroom for dining in privacy, but he is another whole story. His tail measures 11 1/2 inches long.)

Back to the professor, whose detailed description of Kitchen Performance Anxiety would appear to qualify sufferers for hospital attention in the emergency room, or perhaps an extended stay in the local home for the terminally bewildered.

One of the symptoms, he says, is suffering mental block, such as freezing up while cooking (is it a half-teaspoon or a half-bushel of sage in the stuffing, and do the shells serve any useful purpose in the pecan pie?), and mental distraction (I burned the potatoes because Angel Gabriel meowed).

Physical symptoms can include difficulty in breathing (which also could be blamed on a blazing turkey, the result of mental distraction), headaches (bumping my head on the door while blinded by the turkey smoke) and nausea (too much molasses in the sweet potatoes).

Actually, we were spared most of these at our dinner for the neighbors because Elizabeth was in charge and I was duly instructed to stick to my one and only party trick, pouring the drinks. But all the results of Kitchen Performance Anxiety mentioned above I've experienced at one time or another while hosting dinner parties on my own.

Once, during the years when I held annual Christmas dinners on Aug. 9 (it's a story too long to go into here), I did figure out a way to minimize the risk of Kitchen Performance Anxiety - let the guests do the work.

The first year - this was during my stint as a New York suburbanite - I bought three outdoor barbecue thingies, a "starter" supply of hamburgers and hotdogs and beer and booze, and invited a hundred or so folks in - with instructions to "bring your own - and enjoy cooking it."

I started the barbecues and set up the bar, and after that stepped back and relaxed while they helped themselves. It all went swimmingly, and for good measure I was left with enough booze to host the next three or four Christmas parties with only minor topping up.

The only other occasion when I can safely say I avoided Kitchen Performance Anxiety was 35 or so years ago, when my wife of the time invited about 30 or 40 of her cronies to a dinner at our place, allowed me to invite four pals of my own, then sent me off to buy some "pate" for the occasion.

This lot wouldn't know pate from pickled pussywillows, but I dutifully trudged around to the various stores in Seabrook, Texas, none of which stocked pate, as I knew they wouldn't.

But at one supermarket, I found a variety of catfood that could loosely be described as resembling a fish pate. I bought six cans of the stuff, took it home, spread it out on a cheeseboard, surrounded it with Ritz crackers and, as they say, invited the neighbors in.

Then, after advising my own four pals to "enjoy - but steer clear of the pate," I sat back and watched the other guests, who included some rather pompous space engineers, lap up cat food. They cleared the cheeseboard in about 35 minutes.

It was my first, early success in avoiding Kitchen Performance Anxiety.

Thought for the Week: It's hard to make a comeback when you haven't been anywhere.

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