Part 1 Manners, Mores and Get Real Etiquette

Workers at Play

“It is true, true freedom to know that you are not and will

never be the centre of all attention.”

Last year the office party was terrible. People became very bad-tempered. Her best friend got red in the face and shouted at the boss: “Why is it that we do all the work and you get all the money?” The boss replied mildly that this was the capitalist system and somehow, very unfairly, it was agreed that he won the round. The year before, this woman had entered into a short-term alliance with a colleague – so short-term that it was over before she had thought it had begun. But still there was the lingering shame, the embarrassment on her part, the quite uncalled-for smirk and belief that he was Jack the Lad on his part, and the vague office rumour that she was a bit of a goer after three glasses of wine.

And now it’s party-time again. The restaurant has been booked for next Wednesday, the mini-bus has been hired, the expectations are growing, and she would give anything to get out of it. But nowadays she is more senior in the firm, and it would look bad if she didn’t turn up. As if she were trying to distance herself, make herself important even.

She says she has played it totally wrong: she should have shown great enthusiasm for it, and then suddenly and unexpectedly got a diplomatic 24-hour flu. No one could have said she was lacking in spirit. But she has already let it leak out that she isn’t looking forward to it; she has managed to ensure for herself the worst of all possible worlds. She has to go and they know she’s going under pressure. If she does take a drink, she could well head, like an unguided missile, for Jack the Lad again; if she doesn’t, she’ll be called an old prune and a killjoy. Oh, she says, isn’t it well for you, Maeve, working at home, no office party.

My eyes always narrow dangerously when I hear anyone saying isn’t it well for anyone else. An awful lot of the time I believe that we make it well for ourselves or we make it a pain in the neck. Many a home worker will confide to another that we miss the office parties, we get cabin fever, we yearn for the office, any office. I have even invented an office party for the two of us where we wear paper hats at the word processor all morning, have a drink the moment we hear the Angelus and then fall into the Sorrento Lounge for our office lunch.

But enough about the increasingly eccentric and unasked-for details of my own private life, and back to the woman who has to go to the office party on Wednesday. Firstly, she should book a hair appointment in some place that stays open late . . . that will keep her out of the pubs for the warm-up drinks. No one could fault her for that . . . They’d have to say that God help her at her age, over 35 and everything, it’s nice to see that at last she’s trying, uphill struggle and doomed to failure though it may be. So that means she will arrive looking groomed, old but groomed.

At the hairdresser’s, she should eat two sandwiches. To hell with years of being careful and avoiding carbohydrate. Great big sandwiches filled with things that will raise her blood sugar, like peanut butter and raisins and walnuts. Things that will give her instant energy but won’t cloud her brain. The lovely thick slices of bread will sit like sponges, or wodges of oasis, waiting to soak up the drink which she should accept and even buy with huge alacrity and enthusiasm.

She should smile knowingly at Jack the Lad, ask about his wife and babies, and keep a half-pitying smile on her face as if she felt the wife had not done well in the brantub of life. She should be interested in everyone else’s lives and loves and draw them out and find out their woes and their office rivalries. She should wear an inexpensive dress in a dark colour which will not suffer unduly if someone knocks a plate of untouched spaghetti carbonara over her, or pours the dregs of the last bottle of Bulgarian over her knees rather than into her glass.

She should know that, whether she is old or young, beautiful or like the back of a 46A bus, married or single, nobody at that office party next Wednesday is going to give her more than a moment’s thought. They are all obsessed with themselves. It is true, true freedom to know that you are not and will never be the centre of all attention.

It is an amazing arrogance to believe that somehow you are the guest of honour at every happening, and that there is an interest and anticipation in what you will do or say, how you will look and where you end up at the end of the evening. Most people are far too interested in all these aspects of themselves to have more than the merest and most passing concern about anyone else.

Unless she hits on Jack the Lad again in a spectacular way, or gets into a dramatic debate on the nature of the capitalist system with the Chief Executive. she will not be considered worthy of comment. She should bring a lot of tissues in a briefcase. In case other people are weepy or sick.

She should have sticking plasters (people are always cutting themselves at office parties) and painkillers (you can see the headaches forming over heads like ectoplasm). She should bring safety pins – clothes always come apart on these occasions. She should tell herself 11 times that she will contribute no office gossip whatsoever. Amazingly, even the most howling drunk will have a moment of clarity for the one indiscretion that you most regret having let loose. I know this may make her into a cute hoor but the alternatives are being a self-centred diva or a party pooper. She should drink a glass of water for every glass of wine, she should not order anything that has to be flamed either at the table or on its way there – flaming dishes and office parties don’t mix.

She should say that she’ll stick with the wine instead of port. No matter what anyone says about it being good with cheese, it’s the thing that crosses your eyes in your head. If anybody asks whether she would like a slammer, she should say no thank you. She doesn’t want to know about slammers. If they ask her to sing, she should say she will if someone helps her with the words, and she should begin with “I would do anything for love” because that’s all anyone knows of it anyway and they’ll all join in and roar it out and think she was a good sport and wasn’t it amazing for a geriatric in her thirties to know that this was the right song to sing.

And then on Thursday she might send me a postcard agreeing that nobody there took a blind bit of notice of her any more than they had done any other year. That it was all in her mind, and thanks to my good advice about the sandwiches and everything else, it wasn’t still churning around in her head and her stomach.

Cancel the Show

“I advise them to remember the marvellous song that Noel Coward once wrote asking ‘Why Must the Show Go On?’"

They have had a lot of things to spend money on and business has not been good. The recession. But is it?

Other people seemed to have survived the recession. They have new cars; they have Christmas plans that would make your head swim – a Sunday lunch party for 30 people; 10 kids going to the pantomime; New Year’s Eve, staying overnight in a hotel, 30 miles from Dublin.

That doesn’t sound like recession. They have had a red alert on telephone and gas bills. And now it’s coming up to Christmas. They have to take part, they say, otherwise leave the human race. What explanation could they give that wouldn’t sound like being as mean as hell or moaning when others are able to put a face on it? Everything costs so much, but nobody else they know of or hear of or read about is drawing in horns, so what does that make them if they take this stand?

They look at the shop windows – everything is so lush and extravagant. They read the suggestions for gift giving that seem to involve presents that would cost £15 to £20 a head, for people who are not immediate family. The toys and games and gadgets advertised on television, and everywhere, for children are even more pricy. Would it be ludicrous to put a notice in the paper saying you weren’t giving presents or sending cards? Well, yes of course, papers love advertisements; it’s what pays our salaries in fact.

No, it wouldn’t be ludicrous. A lot of people do it for the best of motives. But is it necessary?

I don’t think so. I think this angst-ridden and impoverished couple are making themselves over-important by going to such extremes. There’s no law saying they have to give people expensive presents or send them cards. There is, of course, the tradition and the feeling of guilt about not reciprocating someone’s generosity.

Still, there are ways of lessening their guilt considerably and also of heading other people’s generosity off at the pass.

Take cards for one thing. They used to send about 90 to 95, probably 100 this year, if the truth be told. Well they needn’t send any. That would save them 100 times 28 pence and, suppose the cards cost 30 pence, there is now a total saving of £58 in hand. But they’ll look so mean, so shabby, so forgetful, uncaring.

I wonder. I really wonder. There may be about 10 they should send, to those who get few Christmas greetings and might be counting on them. But who else is going to be wandering around their over-garlanded house, pacing the floor, waiting for a Christmas card from this couple to drop onto the mat? Do they really believe that they are going to be worthy of gossip or even the passing hostile thought from anyone to whom they do not send a card?

That way madness lies. I advise them to say nothing whatsoever about the drastic curtailing or even near abandoning of their Christmas card list. To draw attention to it is only to invite minor resentment. Exchanging Christmas cards is not an international treaty or a business deal, it’s meant to be a goodwill gesture, a kind of wish. If anyone is barking enough to feel slighted by the lack of a Christmas card, they don’t deserve one ever again.

Now on to presents which are a bit different. Years ago, when I was on worse than red alert about the phones and had actually reached red cut-off, I couldn’t give Christmas presents either. So I didn’t pretend. Nor did I give anyone a huge and pitiful explanation, because I was afraid it might look like self-pity or worse still, a plea for some kind of a hand-out.

Instead I went out and got everyone I should have been giving a present to a great clump of holly. I went to a friend’s house down in the country with a big secateurs and I chopped and chopped, then he gave me six sacks and put me back on the train to Dublin, the most dangerous passenger they ever had.

I tied them up in individual bunches and gave them to people with the slightest and most minuscule explanation about wolves being very vocal at doors and hoped they might find these early Christmas decorations nice, instead of a Christmas present. I said the words “instead of” fairly heavily so that you’d have had to be brain damaged not to know that this was your lot.

But nobody ever gave me a food parcel or a pat on the hand or a lecture on the virtue of poverty. As far as I remember, they all professed themselves to be delighted with these dangerous bunches of holly. They said it was highly imaginative and maybe they gave me something a bit less than lavish that year, which was the way I wanted it.

But the great thing is that I know in my heart that none of them gave two damns about it one way or the other and that, when times got better, presents would look up and, if times had not got better, it wouldn’t be the end of friendship.

What might well be the end of friendship would be an inane getting-into-debt to give someone four cut-glass, brandy tumblers that they couldn’t put in the dish-washer, which would set the pair of them back the entire Christmas grocery bill. And that would only be one gift to cross off the list. I advise them to remember the marvellous song that Noel Coward once wrote asking the question “Why Must the Show Go On?” If the show is going to drain them, bleed them dry and worry them to death, it’s no show worth having.

At a time that has always been meant to be one of peace and goodwill, they should realise that most people are normal and that their friends are bound to be normal and not human calculators, counting the gifts in and counting them out. If they have anything to spend, let them spend it on their children or on other people’s children.

They probably know all this already but in a welter of Christmas over-excitement, with the place coming down with advertisements for luxury gifts, I urge them to remember it. Friends who cease to be friends because they don’t get a pop-up toaster, or something with a plug on it, deserve to be discarded in early December.

Off Target

“We tell people if they have spinach on their teeth, why not

tell a woman if she has lipstick in her moustache?”

There’s this woman who used to be a real smasher some years ago. Although she was used to being admired, she wasn’t a peacock or anything. About ten years ago, when she was in her late 60s, we had lunch in a smartish place and she asked the waiter if he would go out and get her an evening paper because she wanted to look something up. And the waiter quite courteously said no he couldn’t. She sighed and without any affectation said to me, “I forget I’m not beautiful any more.”

It was as natural as saying you weren’t a teacher any more, or didn’t have an account in such-and-such a bank any longer. She had been so accustomed to smiling and dazzling people into doing things for her by sheer good looks. I said that she was still beautiful and she asked me a favour. If ever she started to look ridiculous, would I tell her?

She wasn’t choosing the most sensitive and discerning of people to advise her in this regard, and I told her this. My idea of ridiculous might not be spot-on. But anyway, I said I’d do it if I noticed, and she seemed pleased.

Now she is in her late 70s, her marbles are in great order but her sight is very poor. She is throwing make-up at her face, and mainly missing. There’s a big red gash in the area of her mouth and she puts that very bright blue eyeshadow on with a heavy finger. And as a result she looks terrible.

People speak of her sadly. She used to be so lovely, they say, and isn’t it tragic to see her trying to make herself up as if she were still young and attractive?

I don’t think this is what she is doing. It’s not a question of disguising mutton as lamb or anything. It’s just that she can’t see it. I can’t bear for her to think that she looks great because she has put on the war paint and for it to have misfired as badly as it has.

If you saw someone with their dress tucked in their knickers, you would tell them, wouldn’t you? It’s not the way people are expected to emerge from the Ladies. And the sooner you tell them the better, there will have been less of an audience for the spectacle.

So in theory it’s simple. You tell her. And say that you think the hand that applied the foundation may have been a bit heavy and the light in these places is monstrous, they should be prosecuted for not having kinder shadows for us to lurk in. And you change the subject sharpish.

But wait a minute. Her face was what people knew her for. She might think it still more or less is. You might destroy her self-confidence, and the gutsy spirit that allows her to lather on all this stuff. l remember well some thundering bitch saying to me, “Oh I am sorry. Did we come to collect you before you got ready?” And I was ready. This was as good as it got. It’s seven years ago and I remember it still.

And does it matter that she looks like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Amn’t I the one who’s always saying that only fools judge people by appearances? And remember the tiresome neighbour in London who says “I speak as I find” and, unfortunately, she almost always finds something unpleasant?

Is there an argument for forgetting to be the arbiter of elegance and ignoring it? After all, I am somewhat cosmetically challenged myself in terms of blusher and lip-gloss. Have I the right at all to mention anyone else’s attempts?

And is it taking a chance remark, made a decade ago, a trifle too seriously if I say that I promised I would tell her? This wasn’t some oath – marked by the exchange of blood. Almost certainly she has forgotten the request and my pompous delivery of the promised advice might come as a very unwelcome bit of news.

You could talk yourself out of it with ease. Why invite hassle, why criticise and upset? Why disturb, gratuitously, another person’s equilibrium?

But. And it’s a big but. It’s not telling her that she is old and trying to alter the natural progress of time. It’s trying to cope with the fact that she can’t see the dog’s dinner she has made of the face that was so important. If she were 18 and had partial blindness nobody would hesitate about telling her that her hand had slipped. We would see it as a normal courtesy, as you would raise your voice for someone deaf, or move a chair out of the way of someone with a white stick.

This woman, who could literally make people turn around and look at her, should not be allowed to have a moustache unless she knows she has one and has decided – to hell with it. She doesn’t have sisters and she doesn’t have daughters. The normal chain of over-honest response is not there.

With less lipstick and a little grey eyeshadow she would look lovely. The bones of her beautiful serene face would be a pleasure to look at. She is not trying to pretend that she is approaching 50 rather than 80, she is dressing up in the way she dressed in her 40s and 50s, and without being able to see that it isn’t working.

I got tired of people telling her how marvellous she looked, and then saying afterwards how sad it was to see her looking so gaudy and lurid. She may have many good years ahead, why must she try to read the sounds and try to interpret them without the information she needs? We tell people if they have spinach on their teeth, why not tell a woman she has lipstick in her moustache? I advise myself to tell her. Without apology, without reminding her that she did once ask me to keep her informed of any alterations.

She will not read this so it’s not a question of doing it by stealth. I don’t think it would be better to give her a voucher for a marvellous friend I have who runs a beauty salon. That’s being even more patronising. I advise myself to tell her quickly and casually because what is being told is in fact not at all important. But what is important is the motivation and reaction of those who wish to give dignity and fear giving offence.

Fighting Shy

“If they have opted to stay in the human race, they can damn well greet people and be greeted without making some kind of virtue of Not Being Good In Social Surroundings”

Shy people say they don’t understand extroverts. The people who define themselves as being shy say that it’s all right for the rest of us. This makes me very cross. It’s never all right for anyone. People have to make it all right. Those who smile apologetically and say that they are rather antisocial deserve a cuff in the ear, not sympathy. If they are antisocial, then why aren’t they sitting out in a desert somewhere, eating low calorie locusts and honey and doing the hermit number in style? If they have opted to stay in the human race, they can damn well greet people and be greeted without making some kind of virtue Of Not Being Good In Social Surroundings.

Right. Now we know where we all stand.

So anyway, I got this letter from a woman who was going to a book launch. She had never been to one before, but the author had rented a flat from her while he was writing the book, and he had included her in the invitation list. She was both thrilled and terrified by the invitation. It crossed her mind to write to me.

Her friend said I was the last person she should write to because I hated etiquette books and would probably tell her to act naturally. But, she said, she didn’t know what was “naturally” for this occasion, so could I be a bit specific?

I gave this a lot of thought, mainly because I wanted to prove her Doubting Thomas of a friend wrong, and also because she’s right. It’s useless to tell people to “be themselves”. It just doesn’t work. When you’re at a loss in a place, you forget who you are.

Or else there are too many versions of yourself that come to mind and you wonder which persona to bring to the fore. I felt she didn’t want the Practical Freeloader’s Guide to Book Launches, the kind that gives hints about going early, making friends with whoever is pouring the red wine, asking the waiter to leave the plate of canapés just there on the table beside you and avoiding eyes when it comes to the time to buy the book. No, she wanted to fit in and enjoy herself. And her main problem was that she felt, probably accurately, that she wouldn’t know anyone there.

She was dreading a sea of roaring, chattering folk, all baying at each other, while she stood on the outside looking conspicuous, because she was a stranger. So 1 gave her great advice altogether. I told her to identify herself to everyone she met. It’s one of the most important rules I have ever learned . . . and, if you do it without sounding like a fog-horn, it’s a very attractive trait.

Now the so-called Shy Brigade, for whom I have so little time, tell you that it’s arrogant to give your name before you are asked for it, but I don’t agree. I think they are too selfish and self-centred to help anyone else start a conversation or be at ease. Whom would I prefer to meet at a book launch?

Given the choice of two kinds of people . . . would I like to meet one of the self-styled shy people, silent, uncommunicative, always with a little smile playing about their lips? All right, I know it’s a nervous smile, but the rest of us are nervous too and we don’t give off vibes of superiority.

No, I have had too many years of trying to put the shy at ease and got nothing but scorn for my pains. I have often turned into my Gestapo mode, trying to get ordinary, everyday information out of those who refuse to part with it. I’m giving up on the shy. Their self-consciousness is, in fact, a monstrous selfishness. I’m going to leave them and look for the people whose insides may also be churning but who can identify themselves, in the interest of the common good.

I would so much prefer this woman if she came to his party determined to help other people to enjoy themselves by giving them a basic and harmless opening sentence. She doesn’t have to do it to the whole room. Maybe three or four times at most. Maybe only once.

A nice person who smiled and said “Hello, I’m so-and-so, I was his landlady when he was writing the book. Isn’t this a great occasion?” I’d be delighted to meet her. Wouldn’t anyone? She can give you loads of information. If you want to ask if he was starving in a garret, or if it was a penthouse, you can. If you want to ask if he had loud music or a colourful social life, it’s all open to you. If you don’t want to talk to her much longer, you can introduce her to someone else because she has given you her name.

I wouldn’t think she was arrogant. I would think she was making an effort, and I’d applaud her for it. The guy who wrote the book has a million things to worry about . . . like, will anyone turn up? Will too many people turn up? Will the drink hold out? Will anyone write anything in the papers? Will they write the wrong thing? Will the book die without trace or will it be vilified as the worst thing ever written?

What he does not need is the sight of his former landlady standing on the edge, twisting her hands and being antisocial and all those other awful things that shy people marshal as dignifying characteristics. He would much rather see her chatting away to people from other parts of his life. He will relax his shoulders momentarily and think that it was a good thing to invite her, and maybe, in a rush of gratitude, he’ll give her a free book.

And this great advice about identifying yourself holds good in every situation. In places where people mumble introductions, or don’t give them, always say who you are and say it with a slightly upward intonation, as if you are eyeballing them to repeat who they are too.

That way you might actually get to know who you’re talking to and there can be no occasion when it’s the wrong approach. Suppose whoever you’re talking to knows nobody – then he or she will be thrilled with this piece of information. If the person knows everybody, the chances are that the brain cells are beginning to die off and memory overload is setting in, so he or she will be delighted that you gave your name, while protesting that it hadn’t been forgotten.

Identifying yourself is the answer to any problems of shyness and awkwardness. I’m delighted that I was able to work it out so satisfactorily.

Surprise! Surprise!

“He died, the poor guy, because he thought he was coming home after a long, tiring day and . . . 100 red-faced, shouting people in party hats jumped out at him”

There is a surprise party coming up. It’s a sort of anniversary or birthday or homecoming or graduation she said vaguely, determined not to give the fun away. If fun it is. Everyone is sworn to secrecy and we all have to be in place and keep quiet while an unsuspecting person or persons are led in to what they think is something else. Then the lights will go on and we will all shout and scream Surprise! Surprise!

The success or failure of the thing will depend entirely on the range of facial expressions we will witness, from shock/horror, to lumps in the throat, to tears not far from the surface, to hands clasped in amazement, to smiles and beams of delight, to head-wagging saying this was a terrible trick to play.

Maybe some people are great actors, and they can turn this kind of performance on to order. Maybe a lot of people are so damn nice and uncomplicated that these actually are the emotions they feel.

Perhaps there are people who think they are not surprise party people but rapidly become those very creatures when a friend puts them through it. It is even possible to argue that a surprise party can take the onus off someone having to plan a thing all alone, with all the worry, indecision and expense involved. But I only say all these things to show that my mind is not closed when I say that I cannot bear surprise parties and I think they are a waste of time and kindness and goodness and energy and that it would be much nicer to tell the person that YOU are throwing some kind of gathering for them and then make it as lavish and cast the net as wide as you like.

My American friend who runs 20 blocks in her trainers to work every morning and does, I admit, have an extreme lifestyle told me that she was at a surprise party where the honoured guest had a heart attack and died in front of them all. The organisers are still in counselling over it and people are still sending them letters of sympathy. He would have died at that moment anyway, the sympathisers say, his time was up. Like heck it was. He died, the poor guy, because he had thought he was coming home after a long, tiring day and too much to eat and he was going to put his feet up and watch a movie. Instead, 100 red-faced, shouting people in party hats jumped out at him. That is why he died.

I didn’t know this man and it would be silly for me to get into some kind of retrospective outrage on his behalf. But I do know a woman whose husband had told her, on the eve of their 30th wedding anniversary, that he was about to leave her for a younger, shinier model. She tried to talk about it with her family and friends the next day but none of them would speak to her because they were so busy planning and disguising the limpest and dampest squib of a party that was ever held. Of course they couldn’t have known, and naturally they had meant well. But can you think of a more humiliating, hurtful way to get on to the next stage in your life?

1 know different people like different things. By this stage I may not know much, but I do know that. I had a friend who thought her boyfriend had forgotten her birthday and she had become very sad by the end of the day. He had actually arranged a great party for her in a restaurant that evening. At about 9 p.m., he pretended to remember it, and suggested they try and get a booking, by which time she had become quite tearful. Normally careful about her appearance, she wasn’t in the mood to dress up so she just pulled on her raincoat. Of course she arrived at the restaurant to find 30 people dressed in fine feathers. She hates the photos of the night because she looks like Cinderella before the arrival of the fairy godmother.

And I also know a man who said he didn’t want any fuss made of his 50th birthday and we all thought that’s what he wanted but he was sitting eagerly all day apparently waiting for all the razzmatazz to start. And it didn’t. Even his family had believed he didn’t want to mark passing the half century and they had all glossed over it. And he had been getting ready for the one that never happened.

It’s not that I don’t love celebration, I celebrate things like “It’s Wednesday” for heaven’s sake. But I do think that if you are over the age of 21, you are better off being given a little warning.

I checked this with a whole rake of people – not just ones of like minds.

One woman said she hated the surprise for the first half hour. She felt the thing was too lavish, she had always let her cousins think they lived a much more modest lifestyle, she was in agony in case her in-laws might be staying in the house which was in no way tidy, she feared they had forgotten a neighbour who would take eternal umbrage.

But gradually the sense of delight that all these people thought her worthy of a celebration took over. She felt important and the centre of something. She had short over-excited conversations with people. Someone had made her an album of greetings and snaps. It’s all bathed in a rosy delight, something she would never have had the arrogance to organise for herself. Yes, she says, surprises are great.

A man said he didn’t really like his surprise party because his workmates had nothing to say to his golf-mates who had nothing to say to his pub-mates and it had cost too much.

Being able to guess the response is a large part of the surprise party culture. There is the optimistic belief that the recipient will allow gratitude and celebration to cover shock and the business of not being in control. I think you need to be a fairly intuitive psychologist, with a record of reading people’s wishes very well, before you set a surprise in motion. While there can hardly be anyone who would not rejoice in a surprise gift or card, there must be many more for whom the wince factor of the sudden appearance of an unselected group of people would be too nightmarish to inspire a generous, grateful response.

Morning After

“She is praying that the guards were called to the party after

she left, in answer to the complaints about the noise level”

This woman went to a party on Wednesday and she doesn’t remember coming home. This is not a regular occurrence. In fact, it has never happened to her before. She was on a diet and didn’t know very many people at the party. Out of nerves, she drank a lot more than she would usually drink and because she hadn’t eaten, well, it must have all gone straight to her head.

There were lots of good things about the evening, like the fact that she didn’t drive home. Like she didn’t appear to have been sick anywhere. Like she didn’t bring anyone home with her. This was not totally clear to her, however, in the early hours of the morning. She thought she must have brought the taxi driver in with her because she saw him lying half in and half out of his side of the bed. But it turned out to be her coat, so that was a huge relief.

And she examined her eyes. They were, of course, red with drink but it didn’t look as if they were swollen with tears or anything, so she thinks she may not have sat down and cried publicly about the particularly bad behaviour of a certain rat in her life. Her clothes, though distributed wildly around the house, were not torn, so she didn’t wrestle with anyone. Her money and credit cards were intact. She hardly went to Leeson Street to bop the night away, buying wine for strangers.

In the absolute depths of alcoholic remorse, she was determined to explore all mitigating factors and find some signs of optimism, so she lists these very positively as proof that Things Could Have Been Worse.

Because she does not move in a crowd of screaming drunks who would meet for the cure the following day and make a half-hearted effort to fill in the missing parts of the jigsaw, she is totally at sea.

She doesn’t know whether to apologise profusely to her hosts, find out who took her home, tell them some lies about being on medication which reacted badly with the minimal amount of alcohol she had, or to say nothing.

Perhaps she looked perfectly fine. Maybe everyone else had been down on their hands and knees barking like dogs and she had looked cool and distant and superior in the melee. Maybe her hosts were embarrassed that she had witnessed such bad behaviour.

Like all of us, she has been weary of people who keep saying they were drunk and making a thing about it. The man who says: “I know I’ve had a few drinks but . . .” The woman who says: “There I go, slurring my words.”

Years ago, we all used to have a friend who was no drunker than any of us but who used to send a bunch of carnations with a note of apology after every gathering. It made us all think he was totally out of control. In fact, someone once asked him if he could send the flowers before the next party as it would save his hostess having to buy flowers.

And I have an American friend who says, after every single party he was ever at: “I’m afraid I was so drunk last night I was no addition to the scene.” On no occasion has he been anything other than articulate and charming, and it is an eternal mystery why he claims he doesn’t remember anything he said or did.

So back to the woman who got drunk on Wednesday. Should she join the ranks of the apologisers, or should she go along blithely assuming that everything was fine?

She knows quite a few people of the latter category – the non-apologetic sort. People who never mention the fact that they insulted you or spilled drink down your front or danced a hornpipe when other people were trying to have a normal conversation.

From time to time in Dublin, I see a woman who once told me that she had seen a documentary about yaks and every one of them reminded her of me. She told me this with her face dissolved in drink so that none of her features remained in the correct place. I think I would have preferred if, at a later date, she had said: “I’m afraid I was very peculiar the other night and I’m asking for a general absolution from everyone I spoke to.” It would certainly make me feel a lot happier whenever the image of a yak comes into my mind. Otherwise, we have to assume (a) that she doesn’t know she said this; (b) that she knows it and hopes I have forgotten it; or (c) that she meant it.

The woman who got drunk on Wednesday evening crawled around to the house and retrieved her car the following evening. She is in deep depression and in a lather of indecision. She is recalling every article she ever read which begged the question: “Are you an alcoholic?” She is searching desperately for someone who will tell her that it wasn’t really a blackout, not a blackout as such. She is praying that the guards were called to the party after she left, in answer to complaints about the noise level.

I would advise her to apologise. As she left the party without her car, I’d think it was pretty clear that someone had agreed to take her home or at least made sure that she got home safely. That has to be acknowledged. You cannot take for granted that you can fall to bits in someone’s house and that everyone else will look after you.

She doesn’t have to tell the story of the diet, the empty calories, the dirty rat who treated her wrong, the fact that she thought her coat was perhaps the taxi driver. All she need say is that she has only now recovered from her ferocious hangover and would like to thank them for everything. She can leave lots of pauses where they can fill in the things she is thanking them for – no self-flagellation but some acknowledgement that all was not as it might have been.

There’s an aggressive, macho charm about being the kind who never apologises and never explains. But it could mean you never get asked anywhere again, and are never given the opportunity to bring such principles into play.

Late in Life

“We should never again say to latecomers that they’re in perfect time when the meal is stuck to the roof of the oven and the other guests are legless with pre-dinner drinks”

I regard people who say they’ll meet you at 8 p.m. and then turn up at 8.30 as liars. I had a colleague, years ago in my teaching days, who used to smile and say that she was always late, as if it were something outside her control, like having freckles or a Gemini star sign. At first I went through agonies thinking she had been mown down by a bus. After that I would arrange to meet her, not on the corner of a street or at the cinema, but in a café where at least I could sit down while waiting. After that I stopped meeting her. There were too many main features beginning at 5.20 missed, too many buses gone, too many houses where I had to be part of an apology for an unpunctuality that was none of my making.

She lives in another country now and I met someone who had been to see her. Just as nice as ever, apparently, just as good company. Much loved by her children but treated as a dotty old lady who can’t be relied on. She would never turn up to pick them up from school, so they just adapted to doing their homework in the school-yard. So she is still at it, thinking she can say one thing and do another, and everyone will forgive her because she is unpunctual the way other people are left-handed or colour-blind.

Of course she got away with it because people are so astounded by the unpunctual that they forgive them and allow them to roam the world as ordinary people instead of as the liars they are. It’s our fault for putting up with it in every walk of life, and I advise people to declare war on the unpunctual. It’s no longer acceptable to consider it an attractive, laid-back, national characteristic. It is, in fact, a lazy self-indulgent, discourteous way of going on. Already there are a lot of signs that people do not accept it as charming.

I remember a time when the curtain never went up on time in a Dublin theatre because, as the theory went, the Irish were all so busy being witty and wonderful and entertaining in bars they couldn’t do anything as pen-pushing, meticulous and prosaic as coming in and being seated before eight o’clock. But enough protests from those who objected to people shuffling in late to performances have led to their not being admitted until the first interval, and it’s very interesting to see how that has concentrated the ability to get to the place before the lights go out.

Staff of Aer Lingus don’t think it’s charming and witty to leave late because their wonderful free-spirited clients can’t be hurried. Likewise with trains, the DART and the buses. Religious services don’t take account of some quirk in the national psyche by having Mass at around 11 or Matins at approximately 10. Races, football matches, television programmes start on time. Why should business appointments and social engagements be let off this hook? And yet this week I was talking to an American publisher on the phone who said that she was expecting an Irish author in her office but he was 40 minutes late. She laughed good-naturedly and, even though she was 3,000 miles away, I could see her shrug forgivingly. “Oh well, that’s the Irish for you!” she said, as if somehow it explained something. To me it explained nothing.

As a race we are not naturally discourteous. In fact, if anything, we wish to please a bit too much. That’s part of our national image. So where does this unpunctuality come into the stereotype? Has it something to do with being feckless and free and not seeing ourselves ever as a slave to any time-servers or time-keepers? It’s a bit fancy and I don’t think that it’s at all part of what we are.

Not turning up at the time you promised seems quite out of character and, if we do it, it must be because it has been considered acceptable for too long. If nobody were to wait for the latecomer, then things would surely change. If the unpunctual were to be left looking forlorn and foolish when they had ratted on their promise, then people would keep better time. We shouldn’t go on saying that it’s perfectly all right and, nonsense, they mustn’t worry, and really it was quite pleasant waiting here alone wondering was it the right day, the right place, or the right time. We should never again say to latecomers that they’re in perfect time when the meal is stuck to the roof of the oven and the other guests are legless with pre-dinner drinks.

Sit in any restaurant, bar or hotel foyer and listen while people greet each other. “I’m very sorry. The traffic was terrible.” “I’m sorry for being late. I couldn’t get parking . . .” “I’m sorry. Are you here long? I wasn’t sure whether you said one or half past . . . ” “I’m sorry, but better late than never”.

I wouldn’t forgive any of these things. In a city, people with eyes in their heads know that the traffic is terrible; they can see it. Unless they have been living for a while on the planet Mars, they’re aware that it’s impossible to park. If they couldn’t remember whether you said one or half past, that shows great interest in the meeting in the first place. And as for better late than never, I’m not convinced.

Pieces of Silver

“Inheritance, sentimental attachment, beautiful craftwork, valuable asset . . . it’s no life for a piece of silver”

It’s important that you know that this woman is not one of the Very Rich. She said I could write about her but I must say that her husband is a teacher and she works part-time in a dress shop. They have three children in their teens, they have one car, and pay a £200-a-month mortgage on their house.

Every July they go for three weeks to the seaside; they’re off today and, when I met her, she was on her way into the bank to leave in the silver.

It was in a carrier bag, all polished up, and each piece wrapped carefully in soft cloths. She had been doing this as long as she could remember, taking it to the bank for three weeks a year.

She didn’t know how much it was worth, but there were cream jugs and sugar basins and a teapot and salt cellars and a bon-bon dish. Maybe worth £2,000 or more.

They were mainly 1940s pieces, which her parents had received as wedding presents, and a few pieces from the 1970s, such as spoons which had been her own wedding presents. She clutched the bag as if she were expecting we would be felled to the ground by a bandit before she was able to pass it across the counter.

And, for the other 49 weeks of the year, did they use the silver, pour milk from the jug, spoon salt from the salt cellar, eat old-fashioned humbugs or fruit pastilles from the bon-bon dish?

Was I mad or something? Of course they didn’t.

Well, were the pieces of silver all nicely displayed at home and winking at them from a shelf, or even from behind glass doors, so they could see them and get pleasure from the shape of them and the way they looked if they weren’t going to be allowed to be pressed into service?

Did I live in the real world or where? Of course they weren’t displayed. Displayed, like an invitation to a burglar, like a notice saying “Look, here are the valuables.” Well, where were they when they weren’t in the bank for their holidays?

They were in a drawer behind the tea cloths, that’s where they were. And did they ever get out at all? Well, the pair didn’t entertain much, but suppose there was some kind of a do . . . but not always, they didn’t want to be showing off, loading a table down with silver. It looked like boasting. It said “if you have it, flaunt it”. That wasn’t good.

But was it good, I asked, to be in the situation that you have to hide it behind the tea towels? And then, if you still have it, lug it to the bank for three weeks in July? Now we were squaring up for the fight.

So what would you do with it, she asked, not unreasonably. As it happens I had exactly the same kind of silver. A share of the pieces that had belonged to my parents, all of it 1930s Birmingham for some reason; maybe that’s what they saved up for then.

Anyway, I used it non-stop, even to the extent of planting an African violet in one of the sugar bowls, because you couldn’t use two sugar bowls at the same time. And people were always shaking their heads and saying it was criminal to use good silver like that, and not respecting it. But I liked it and I thought using it was respecting it. Like having your Solpadeine from a Waterford glass, if you have one, seems to be the right thing to do rather than making a value judgement and wondering would the glass violently object to being used for such humdrum purposes.

In the end I didn’t keep the silver, because everyone was making such a fuss about it. We travelled so much, they said, it was inviting disaster to have it around the place and I was not going to beat a path up and down to the bank. What was the point of it if it was in a sports bag wrapped up in the dark? Someone should be looking at it and pouring things out of it.

I sold some in order to help with the house deposit, and 1 gave the rest away to the people I was going to give it to anyway in my will. They all said that, as usual, I was overdoing it and overreacting. But to me it was great.

Now I can see the silver when I go to their houses, and I don’t care if they have to remember to get it back or burrow in the tea towel drawer for it, and I don’t care whether they hate dirtying it up by putting milk and sugar and salt and pepper into it instead of leaving it in a sports bag. That’s what it was made for.

So I was in a fine position to argue with the woman in the bank. But she was a spirited person. She said that this was her inheritance in the sense that it had been left to her, not in the sense that it was worth a fortune. She felt a sense of duty to hand it on to the next generation.

And, no, she didn’t mind if they sold it when it came to their turn, or gave it away or used it to plant African violets in. That was their decision to make. And so, in front of my eyes, the silver went into a vault. To live a further lonely unseen life. Out of the tea towels and into the strong room.

Better by far than out of your house and into the meltdown or No-Questions-Asked gift trade, the woman said. The bank official joined in the discussion to say that quite a lot of people availed of their services. “There are people who value their silver,” he said very disapprovingly.

Yes, and there are banks who value the possibility of renting out space to the nervous, I said.

It doesn’t cost very much, the bank man said: £10 a year for an envelope, £20 a year for a grip bag.

Plus VAT? I wondered. Plus VAT he agreed. It was an animated discussion, and none of us changed our views. Inheritance, sentimental attachment, beautiful craftwork, valuable asset . . . it’s no life for a piece of silver or your own peace of mind if it is going to be spent in the dark. Look at it or offload it.

She thinks everyone will agree with her, but I know they will agree with me.

Where There’s Smoke

“I begged her to remember reading about the days when people used to pee into things under the table to save themselves the trouble of getting up and leaving the conversation . . .”

It’s bad luck but it’s true. It just sort of happened that smoking became unacceptable. And it’s very bad luck on a friend of mine who says that she knows I, at least, will be sympathetic.

I who wheezed and coughed and hawked with her over the years across people’s dining tables, over their new-born babies, in their brand new cars. Surely, just because I gave them up in some kind of act of foolish and public bravado, I haven’t forgotten the compadres of the ashtray?

Surely I’m not going to join a bandwagon spouting the politics of hate, and start laying down rules about where and when she can smoke in my presence? She says that cured alcoholics don’t go round shouting at other people who still drink: joggers don’t take you by the throat and force you into a tracksuit. But the bad news is that I am . . . on the bandwagon. If it were her liver she was punishing with daily downpourings of Red Biddy, then it’s her liver, not mine. If a jogger sees a non-jogger, then, selfishly, the jogger can leave the non-jogger be, sitting festering, getting fat and unfit. But if it’s a smoker, then it’s my air and my lungs that they are coming at and, for that reason alone, I think they have to face the fact that people are not cranks, weirdoes and freaks if they don’t want to be in their company.

Now this woman has just become a grandmother and the whole joy of having the beautiful baby to play with has been marred by the new findings which seem to prove that even a grandmother having smoked might weaken the health of the child. She is trailing this guilt and the child is only six weeks old. When the baby was born the parents were congratulating themselves on being non-smokers but with this statistic – and she speaks in heavy italics – their faces have grown glum and disapproving and they are looking at her as if she has contributed leprosy to the genes of her first grandchild.

She came to tell me about it, and how grossly unfair and hurtful it was, but she lit a cigarette in the car and I literally can’t bear people to smoke in it. So, in order to be kind, I stopped the car and we sat freezing on a beach, looking at the sea while she told me how rotten her daughter and her son-in-law were being and, for God’s sake, everyone smoked until recently. The whole thing was just a media-inspired, holier-than-thou bit of hypochondria, she said, and by the time her granddaughter was old enough to hate and despise her smoking granny, there would be a revisionist school of thought that said tobacco cleared the tubes to your heart or stopped athlete’s foot and everyone would be searching for it.

And then she said that we would both have hypothermia, so why didn’t we get into the nice warm car. And I told her that I was such a bad driver that if anyone smoked in the car – and I started to cough or anything – I would probably plough headlong into the traffic coming the other way and we’d both go for the chop, and what her granddaughter thought of her would be irrelevant.

She looked at me thoughtfully and said I was much calmer when I smoked, had less fantasies, a lower level of anxiety and wasn’t it a pity I was so doctrinaire. So I told her the truth. I said the smell of tobacco in a confined space really did make me feel sick and that the thought of emptying a car ashtray would turn my stomach.

She couldn’t have been more insulted. I was the last person she would have expected to follow the crowd. Where were all the libertarian principles of long ago about living and letting other people live? But I said to her that in wild west films you saw people spitting all the time, getting up a huge throatful of spit and hurling it out of the side of their mouths on the floor. And even in old-fashioned gentlemen’s clubs, they had a horrific thing called a cuspidor which people spat into.

And I begged her to remember reading about the days when people used to pee into things under the table to save themselves the trouble of getting up and leaving the conversation and the general conviviality of it all. Even among the most enthusiastic diners-out, you don’t hear much of a call to re-introduce that practice.

And it’s not only because the world had moved on from believing that there is one kind of person who would fill a cuspidor or a thing under the table and another sort of a person who would empty it . . . it’s just because we don’t want to accept unpleasant things if we don’t have to.

If you add the belief that passive smoking is now considered a fact, then the poor smoker really is beleaguered.

No longer can we even look at the smokers indulgently and think of them as glamorous if suicidal figures, old-fashioned throwbacks to the black-and-white movie years, rotting their lungs and moving in a haze towards an early grave. Now they are dragging the rest of us to the grave with them and if people even partially believe this then a smoker is going to be as much fun at a gathering as an old man with a long beard and a scythe.

And also they smell awful.

In Georgie Best’s gorgeous days, when he did that ad saying, “I’d never kiss a girl who smoked”, it made a lot of girls think for a bit. It was one of the most successful anti-smoking campaigns ever run. If you go to a restaurant where there is a lot of smoking, your own coat smells terrible later. I don’t think smokers should be attacked for the past; my friend should not be blamed for whatever weaknesses her granddaughter might inherit because, hand on heart, none of us knew. We really didn’t.

But she should realise that it’s disgusting and dangerous and, as such, you can’t expect to make self-deprecating little jokes and say that you’re afraid you’re one of these awful endangered species, the Smoker, and expect people to pat you on the head, hand you an ashtray and allow you to pollute their atmosphere and their lungs.

I advised her to think in terms of belching and farting and spitting.

She said we could still be friends but would probably have long phone conversations or maybe one of us could go to prison and we could talk through a screen.

Weary Words

“And if I was 25 years older than when last we met, so was she”

It was a lovely sunny day on Bloomsday and I was sitting in the hallway of the Joyce Centre in Dublin, delighted with myself. Why wouldn’t I be? I was watching all the comings and goings, the people dressed up, the American tourists, the faces I hadn’t seen for years. I was waiting to do an interview and was given a glass of lager to pass the time. Not many people would be having as good a time on a Thursday morning at 11.30 a.m., I said to myself.

And then a woman came in whom I used to know years ago, when we were young teachers. She was a very positive person then, I remember. She used to take her pupils on great trips to France, which they never forgot. She had amazing projects in her classroom, and she used to go around with a box on the back of her bicycle asking people who had gardens if she could have cuttings, and then she used to get the kids to plant them around the schoolyard.

She was a leader in everything, the first to give up smoking, the first to organise lunches where people were asked to contribute the price of a meal for the hungry, the first I knew to go to America for the summer and work as a camp counsellor. I had nothing but good memories of her. She seemed glad to see me too, but then her face fell. “You look desperately tired,” she said sympathetically. “Are you all right?”

Well, the sun went out of the day and the fun went out of the Joyce Centre and the taste went out of the glass of lager and the sense of being as free as a bird went out the window. Tired is not a good thing to be told you look. Tired is terrible. And the really infuriating thing is that I was not tired, I had been in bed nice and early the night before. And I was tidy. Tired can often mean that you look like a tramp, but no, I had dressed up, complete with white collar, for the interview. And I wasn’t sweating or collapsing up flights of stairs. I was sitting calm as anything in the hall. And if I was 25 years older than when we last met, so was she. So, stupid as this may seem, I looked upset. I must have bitten my lip or may have looked as if I was going to burst into tears, because she said at once that she was sorry, and wanted to know what she had said.

‘'I’m not tired,” I said, like a big baby.

She tried to explain that tired was okay. We were entitled to be tired. By God, we had earned the right to it. We worked hard, we had done so much. It would be an insult if we weren’t tired.

She was back-tracking, trying to dig herself out of it, I said.

No way, she insisted, and wasn’t I the touchy one trying to read other words into a perfectly acceptable observation, and more meanings than were implied in an expression of concern?

But what was she going to do about my tiredness? Suppose I had admitted it? Just suppose I had agreed that I was flattened by fatigue and had been waiting for someone to come in that door to identify it. What was her cure? Had she ginseng or Mother’s Little Helpers in her handbag? Did she have a personal fitness trainer, a protein diet, a Seventh Son or shares in a health farm?

We argued it away good-naturedly, as we had always argued in years gone by. She was always a woman of strong views, a characteristic I admire. I have even remembered many of her maxims, such as “Avoid restaurants that have strolling musicians”, “Never play cards with a man named Doc” and “Don’t resign before lunch”.

But what’s the point of telling someone that they look tired, even if you don’t mean it as a euphemism for old, ugly, unkempt or rapidly going downhill? Was it a kind of sympathetic come-on . . . expecting an answer along the lines of Nobody Knows The Trouble I’ve Seen?

She was spirited about it. And she nearly won the argument. Would I prefer, she wondered, if we were all to turn into those dinkleberries who greet each other with an effusion of insincere compliments: “Oooh, you look marvellous” and “Oooh, you’ve lost loads of weight and honestly, I never saw you looking better, what have you been doing?” – the greetings and the compliments becoming like a ritual dance where the vain and the self-centred rake through a form of words, wondering if there is a “marvellous” too few or an expression of astonishment not heightened enough. Surely we haven’t reached this stage?

But then, when she said “tired”, did she mean that as some sort of shorthand, to be a jovial punch on the shoulders between old mates, a kind of bonding between the worn out?

She thought about it.

She thinks she meant that she liked me from the old days, and it was good to see me again, and when she came upon me I had a serious expression on my face as if I had been talking to a woman about her late husband and maybe she remembered me roaring about, not sitting down. And in a sense, she didn’t want to be one of those people who always said twitter-twitter things and assumed other people had lives that were free of care. And on reflection, she said, now that we had argued the thing down to the bone, she would never as long as she lived tell another human being that they looked tired again.

Linguistically Challenged

“It is much more lofty to correct someone’s spelling if

you have not been invited or paid to do so”

It was probably right of that nice mild man who has been married to Margaret Thatcher for years to correct her when she got the name of the country she was in wrong. She was praising warmly the people, parliament and customs of one Far Eastern country when in fact she was in another, one which hadn’t had entirely cordial relations with the other for some centuries. Dennis cleared his throat and put her right.

I imagine that, when she took off her shoes and calmed down her hair and looked back on yet another bone-achingly tiring night, she might have been grateful. Suppose she had gone on mixing up Indonesia and the Philippines all night, the hatchets and the tumbrels might have come out for her even sooner than they eventually did. Also, he did it nicely. As if he weren’t entirely sure himself, but was taking the risk.

I thought of him last week in Manchester when a nervous young woman was trying to chat with her new in-laws. They were all in a big, somewhat anxious-making hotel lobby. It was the kind of place where you might expect a heavenly choir to come out of the woodwork. And I had already travelled down in the lift with Barry Manilow.

Anyway, the girl was trying too hard, her dress was too short, too shiny, her heels too high, too uncertain, her tone too screechy for the dowdy and slightly supercilious clan into which she had married.

Her young husband obviously loved her to bits. He had his arm protectively under her elbow to guide her through the minefields of slippy floors and dangerous conversations.

She was telling the in-laws their holiday plans. “Jim’s booked us two weeks in a commodium,” she said excitedly. Her husband would have liked the marble floors and the brass rails to part and deliver them inside the earth’s crust. “I think you mean condominium, love,” he said.

Her face was scarlet.

“Isn’t that what I said?” she managed.

“Well, sort of.” He didn’t really mean to but he did sort of smile a bit apologetically towards his mother and father and sister. I wanted to cry.

It’s a meaningless word. It’s a word anyone would pause over, wondering if by any chance you had said condom instead. It’s a made-up word coming from American culture, not ours. It has some technical meaning in the US, meaning you own it more than people in apartments own theirs, or on a different kind of lease.

Why should any of us have to know that kind of a word just because it has become travel-agent speak? I remember Terry Wogan saying he had a friend who owned a condominium who always referred to it as a pandemonium, because he thought that’s what it was actually called.

I longed to tell this girl this, but they take you away firmly from hotel foyers if you butt into other people’s lives with stories like that.

What should that nice boy, who didn’t intend to make little of his young wife, have done?

He could have talked about the advantages of condominiums or whatever, showing that he knew the word and maybe she would pick it up. Or he needn’t even have done that. They weren’t out to catch her, he only embarrassed everyone by the correction.

Would he have corrected a colleague, a friend, a stranger even? The women I had dinner with, booksellers, did not agree with me. They said, if they had said the wrong word, they would prefer to be corrected, then they would not make the same mistake again. Surely I as a teacher would go down that route?

If they pronounced the name of an author or a book title wrongly, they would prefer to be told, they said. That way they wouldn’t allow a conspiracy of pity to grow up around them, pigeon-holing them as people less than they were. All of which could be avoided by a simple correction.

But in public? Yes, they shrugged, they were young, they were on the way up a career ladder, they didn’t want to be held back by not being able to pronounce Anouilh on the rare occasions that anyone might want one of his works.

They told embarrassed stories of how colleagues thought that Carson McCullers was a man, or that My Secret Garden, a sexual fantasy book, was in fact a work of horticulture. How much better to have been told. The public embarrassment took 10 seconds and was then over.

I admired their courageous attitude but think that they might be over-optimistic about the thickness of their skins. And, of course, once you start going along some line of thought, there are dozens of examples to illustrate it.

The young trainee in the next hotel showed me the bathroom, and pointed out bath, shower, lavatory and duvet. Was I going to tell him it was a bidet? No, I damn well wasn’t. I don’t care if he takes longer to make general manager of the chain; he was a kid. I was not going to tell him one nouveau, poncey word from another.

I have had many letters from youngsters wanting to “persue” a career in journalism and I’ve let them “persue” it on the grounds that there is a spell check on most word processors and by the time they get there they might have learned how to spell it. Is this a lofty patrician attitude, a patronising tolerance of the lower orders? I don’t think so, truly I believe it is much more lofty to correct someone’s spelling if you have not been invited or paid to do so.

I have never corrected the numerous English people who pronounce my home town of Dalkey as if the L were not silent, because I surely have pronounced their home towns incorrectly too, and it doesn’t really matter. What would matter is to be called up short in front of someone and given a more acceptable pronunciation for a word that had just left your mouth innocently, when you thought it was fine.

Like the people in our road in London who know exactly what a woman means when she says that two nice people from the Johanna Hovises called. Very polite and asking you about being saved. Everyone knows she means Jehovah’s Witnesses; what a pedantic down-putting world it would be if anyone were ever to correct her.

House Private

“For some reason, they got locked into the phrase. They

thought, in their grief, that it had some dignity instead of

working out what it meant”

Some months ago I saw a death notice in the paper. It was the father of a woman I know. He was a man in his seventies, popular, respected, he liked his work. After his retirement he was known in his neighbourhood and much visited by friends.

Then I noticed the words House Private at the end of the announcement. It struck me as an odd thing to say in the circumstances. It wasn’t as if there was anyone else in the house who was sick or frail, someone to whom visitors or callers would be a nightmare.

His death had been a peaceful happening after some weeks’ illness, so there was no question of it being a suicide, a tragic motor accident or some drama that might have attracted the appalling gawpers.

He was not a well-known celebrity whose house might have been invaded by paparazzi or sightseers, coming in the guise of mourners – if such a thing ever happens, which in this land is not really likely.

They are a loving, warm family; they didn’t want to refuse access to their house on the day of a funeral because they would all be at each other’s throats and wanted to have their blood-letting in private. These are generous people who would be delighted to dispense drink and sandwiches; they were not trying to avoid putting their hands in their pockets to buy a beverage for those who came to sympathise over their father.

They are articulate and outgoing: it’s not as if they would be struck dumb by any emotional scene or the show of warmth by neighbours, colleagues, extended family and friends.

They must have been to enough funerals in their lives to know how consoled and pleased a family always seems when others come to mark the occasion and show that they cared about the person who died and those who survived him.

The more I saw the words, the more I wondered whether they meant that the removal to the church and the actual Requiem Mass were also private. Would it be an intrusion to go to those? But no, the paper had given the times, so they must be expecting people to turn up on these public occasions. So I went.

And a small, sparse group of people stood in a Dublin city church on an autumn evening waiting for the funeral party to arrive. It was a very small group, when you considered what kind of man was going to be buried the next day.

One of my friends didn’t come with me; she said that when it said House Private it really meant Funeral Private. She said we would be in the way.

The very short line of sympathisers went up and shook hands with the family.

“Please come back to the house,” the woman I know said.

“No, no, it says House Private,” I said.

“It doesn’t mean you, PLEASE come, there’s hardly anyone here,” she said with a different kind of tears in her eyes now, tears that her kind, gregarious father was not being given the send-off he deserved.

So I went to the house where they had glasses ready and bottles, and rooms cleared to receive people and plates of things covered in cling-film in the kitchen. And it was very sad, not just because he was dead and they had lost their father, but because, inadvertently, they had sent out the wrong signal and given him the wrong farewell.

It was hard to know whether you were making it better or worse by saying that people might have been kept at a distance by the House Private. I thought it might explain why the doorbell wasn’t ringing. This was the first funeral that the family had had to organise; their mother had died many years ago, long before they were old enough to be involved in the arrangements.

“I don’t know why we put that in the paper,” the woman I know said.

“We must have had some reason,” her sister said. They had regarded it as some part of a formula, one of the things that happened at this odd, unreal time, something they saw other people put in the paper, like Rest in Peace. They hadn’t thought about it at all.

It’s many months later. The woman wrote to me and suggested I use her example for this column. She said there must be many other people who might learn from this, might just pause before they fell into a form of words and made a gesture which was regarded by some as snobbish, as if they were excluding those who might come to the house, those who would not have been entertained in the normal course of events. This was what grieved her most.

Also, she said that the funeral director had asked them twice if they really wanted the house to be private; he had said that sometimes it was a comfort to have the presence of friends and that we were lucky in Ireland where we had the vocabulary of sympathy, unlike other cultures where death was treated as a personal sorrow to be endured and recovered from in private. But for some reason they got locked into the phrase. They thought, in their grief, that it had some dignity, instead of working out what it meant.

If all his friends had been there it would not have been a grotesque Irish wake, a roaring party with people forgetting the reason for their gathering; it would have been something that might have given them strength and banished the bleakness of the time.

There may well be good and sensitive reasons for saying House Private but she urged me to advise those who do so, merely from some sense of thinking it the Right Thing, to ask themselves who they are shutting out and why.

Advance Planning

“Making an arrangement in advance to meet friends is truly

not a sign that we have arrived in a yuppie culture dictated

by slamming filofaxes down on tables”

I was at a friend’s house recently, partly to set something up in aid of a charity and partly to have a great chat. There we were at the kitchen table when there was a knock on the door. It was a neighbour who had called in for a chat. She was a very nice woman and her chat was perfectly pleasant and, if she had been invited in, I would have been delighted to meet her. But because she had just dropped in I thought it spoiled everything. The fund-raising idea was left up in the air and the marvellous stories were half-finished because you wouldn’t try to bring a stranger up to date on the whole cast of characters involved.

The neighbour had a telephone but she hadn’t thought to ring. “I just took the chance that you’d be in,” she said with a beaming smile, and down she sat.

Eventually I left before her, with a great sense of dissatisfaction and frustration and also with some self-doubt. Was it perhaps churlish to resent someone calling uninvited? Not at all. I deeply resent it. I wouldn’t do it to anyone and I wouldn’t want anyone to do it to me.

My friend rang the next day to apologise. “I‘m so sorry,” she wailed, “but what on earth could I do? I couldn’t tell her not to come in when she had arrived on the doorstep, could I? I had to make her a cup of coffee too, didn’t I?”

I think not.

She could have said: “Listen, come in and say hello for a minute, but Maeve and I are doing some work and we honestly have to get on with it or it will never be done.” That was true. Well, 80 per cent true. The neighbour was a reasonable and intelligent woman; she wouldn’t think a door was being slammed in her face. And it would have been a perfectly courteous way to ask her not to make a night of it. We had papers and lists out on the table.

I honestly think that the hostess was to blame just as much as the woman who came in. After all, if people crow with delight that it’s lovely to see you, even when it isn’t, how are you to know that it’s an awkward time and you are not at all the welcome guest that they keep insisting you are?

But, my friend would say, that’s a very Dublin attitude. It’s not what people do in the country; they are much more casual there. In the country, the art of friendship and calling to see one another hasn’t fallen away.

Excuse me a moment. So where do we live?

Exactly, we live in Dublin. So I think we need not apologise for doing things in a Dublin way, even if that is meant to be some kind of a swipe at Dubliners for being ungracious fortress-holders who hate unlocking their ramparts.

And I bet you anything that in the country they don’t light up with joy at the sight of an uninvited guest bowling along through the green fields or across the mountain passes. No one is going to convince me that our rural friends are going to be dewy-eyed with delight when they see a couple of bores, or even nice people who have time on their hands, arriving unexpectedly at the door.

Making an arrangement in advance to meet friends is truly not a sign that we have arrived in a yuppie culture dictated by slamming filofaxes down on tables and checking dates like tycoons. I am delighted if someone writes or rings and says he or she will be in the area and what about a drink or a meeting.

Delighted. And then I regard it as a highpoint of the day and get all my work finished for a spurious deadline. On the other hand, I am enraged if I am with someone I haven’t seen for a long time and there is a knock or ring at the door.

So why not ignore it, you might ask? The world is divided into those who can let a phone ring without answering it and those who cannot. And what kind of atmosphere do you have if you are cowering in your own house while someone is belting at the door?

The young just love the adventure and the excitement of the Unknown in the ring of a doorbell. It could be their Future waiting out there. The rest of us find little joy in the appearance of someone who was Just Passing or who was Wondering How We Were. It’s a sign of age, I suppose, maturity – the realisation that there aren’t unlimited years left of visiting people and being visited, and you want to do it right.

It’s a question of experience, too. One casual dropper-in I know was cured when he went to a house where there was a huge argument in progress and bad feeling hung like ectoplasm at shoulder level around the place. Then he went to a house where they were having a supper party and almost all his friends were there, so everyone was mortified.

He gave up dropping in unexpectedly when he went to see his aunt and uncle on a Sunday afternoon and got the distinct impression they had been summoned from a connubial bed to answer the door. His own view, that they were much too old for that sort of thing anyway and if it had been wild and wonderful they wouldn’t have answered the door, was not credited by any of us as satisfactory. He telephones nowadays and is a much more welcome guest.

It’s not just the high fliers, the decision-makers, the self-conscious superwomen who can’t bear to be discovered unawares: it’s the people who have decided to take out the contents of all the kitchen drawers and sort them; the workers who are terminally tired and are dozing in front of the television. It’s the parents who have decided to spend proper time with their children; the couples who have made a bit of time to talk about a holiday; the woman who is just getting to like her sisters-in-law; the man who has decided to touch up the hair at his temples with a little dark colour; the mother whose baby has finally gone to sleep; the old people who hate answering the door after dark; the person who has just thought how peaceful this is . . . a good book, a nice dog asleep by the fire and a hot whiskey. Those are the kind of people you are interrupting when you call unannounced, and, unless you are as entertaining as Peter Ustinov, I advise you to think very carefully before you ring that doorbell.

Rash Decisions

“I’d prefer to have roast cocker spaniel than rabbit, but people don’t serve it very often so there is hardly a regular confrontation . . .”

When this couple accepted an invitation to go out to dinner last week, the wife did not say beforehand that spicy food brings her face out in blotches and her husband did not say that fish has always reminded him of cod-liver oil ever since his days in boarding school and that he literally can’t swallow it.

Now the reason they didn’t mention these two facts was because they did not want to sound like guests from the funny farm, finicky, faddish and laying down the law about what they were going to eat when they arrived at someone else’s table. But they were served a fish starter and, as everyone else was devouring it, he pushed it around his plate wishing there was even a lettuce leaf to hide it under, wishing there was a paper napkin he could wrap it up in like he used to do at school, wishing that he didn’t feel like gagging every time he brought it up to his mouth.

Eventually his wife came to his rescue and told a funny story about how mad we are to think of fish as a penitential dish and doesn’t it really show your age . . . And everyone took it in their stride, except for the woman who had prepared the meal, who said in a slightly aggrieved way: “But you should have said. I’d have made you something different.”

That was the first course.

In came the main course. A dish of chicken done with ginger and cardamom and garlic. The woman who had just managed a reprieve for her husband and saved him from having to eat a fillet of plaice looked in horror as the spicy dish was served onto her plate. As a couple they had already commanded enough attention as fusspots, she thought, and the conversation had moved on to happier channels.

She looked sadly at the plate in front of her and decided to go ahead and get blotches. First her neck reddened then the bits in front of her ears. She could feel the heat of the rash. Twice she saw her husband try to explain and twice she shook her head.

By the end of the evening, several people asked if she was feeling all right. Flushed and itchy, she looked as if she had an unpleasant rash, aggravated perhaps by drink.

She said there was nothing she could have done. You can’t turn yourself into some kind of self-regarding hypochondriac and go about listing the foods you find unacceptable, not when it’s hospitality that is being offered in someone else’s home, she said. She agreed that, if she was a vegetarian, then she would say so in advance but she thinks it would be pretentious to mention the two kinds of food that didn’t agree with them. Normal people are able to eat a little of everything and she and her husband are normal, even though they mightn’t have shown too many signs of it on this particular occasion. She said that most of the time there wasn’t a problem: people were going in more and more for buffets and more often than not you would be asked to help yourself. So the question of being faced with a plate of food you couldn’t eat rarely occurred. On balance, she said, she would prefer to take the risk.

I think she is wrong. When you invite people to your house presumably it’s because you like them and you want to feed them things they would like to eat rather than force them to eat their greens and their crusts and take spoonfuls of stuff that might even make them ill.

If you invite friends for a meal, it takes money to buy the food, time to cook it and you are hoping that it will all make for a successful evening. Wouldn’t you much prefer someone to tell you casually what they couldn’t or didn’t want to eat in advance? There are ways of doing this – as a race we are not known to be short either of a word or the right words.

“All right,” this woman said to me. “What would you do?”

Alas, in my case, I can eat anything, and have all the signs of it. The only thing I couldn’t eat is rabbit. I’d prefer to have roast cocker spaniel than rabbit, but people don’t serve it very often so there is hardly a regular confrontation between me and the bunnies.

Nowadays, however, people are using more oriental herbs and spices so it would be reasonable to expect things to have a more exotic flavour than in the more bland times of the past. The country has also become converted to fish, so it’s almost an even bet that some sort of seafood will turn up.

To answer her question: what would I do?

I would put myself in the position of the woman who had cleaned her house, bought the food and prepared a meal for her friends. And I would not have wanted to see a friend push food around a plate like an enemy. And I would not have wanted to see another guest go purple with allergies in front of my eyes.

I would have been perfectly content with a short and undramatic explanation of the foods that did not suit. But I would have liked it in advance and then not have it referred to again.

If someone says they are on a diet and don’t want big helpings, I think that is perfectly fair if they tell you quietly, but I think it is destructive and anti-celebratory if they say it like a Christian martyr during the meal and make everyone else feel guilty or gluttonous.

A friend of mine who is a caterer agrees with me, and says that Irish people can be uncharacteristically reticent about saying what they can’t eat. She thinks it comes from a fear of being thought a crank or being seen to have pretensions which our grandparents wouldn’t have had the luxury to entertain.

She does suggest, however, that if you plan to serve shellfish, that you should always offer an alternative, and leave it nearby so that your guests can choose a slice of melon as a replacement starter, say, or a large salad which would cover a main course. It is no trouble, she said, even at a formal dinner party, to prepare a special plate in advance. But it can create great trouble and disappointment when someone turns out to be not able to eat what you have prepared.

Airlines offer alternatives nowadays, so do caterers for functions and conferences – even at formal weddings, vegetarian dishes are available as a matter of course. So if exceptions can be made quite happily in public places among strangers, it seems odd to think that it would not be acceptable among friends.