You know a situation has become over-complicated when you’re grateful for someone being direct to the point of rudeness. Round at a friend’s house for dinner this week, we’d had a lovely evening – great food, chat, ambience – when the host suddenly made an announcement.
“Right, you’ll have to go in five minutes,” she told us, “I need to be up early.”
Luckily we have all been friends for ever, know her well, and this is far from the first time she’s said something with her whole chest, so it was taken very much in the spirit in which it was intended. Nobody was offended – if anything, we were grateful for such clear instructions and tempted to take notes.
Her straight-down-the-line response to this sticky dilemma is nothing short of inspirational. Most are too polite to talk about this, let alone deal with it head-on, but what we’re nervously dancing around is the middle-class dinner party flashpoint dividing everyone I know.
When you’ve wowed your guests with your tablescape, sparkling repartee and a meal Ottolenghi himself would be proud of (probably because it’s from one of his cookbooks), how do you gently convey to them that they’re in serious danger of outstaying their welcome? Just coming out and saying it like my maverick friend did is a risky move, which can only be executed in very certain circumstances. How do the rest of us tell people it’s time to go, without telling them it’s time to go?
This quandary is apparently the great leveller, because even Vic and Dave struggle with it.
“You know what happens in the Beckham house when David wants people to leave?” Victoria said, recently. “He literally walks around the room blowing out the candles hoping that people will get the hint!”
Other strategies I’ve seen discussed are beginning to load the dishwasher, or even start washing up, which was described by the perpetrator as “the universal sign for ‘bye now!’” Simply stopping refilling glasses can be effective, although unfortunately past a certain lubrication level they won’t notice, rendering it useless.
My dad had a well-used three-pronged approach – first, he would disappear upstairs for a long time, and now and then that alone would be enough. If not, phase two: coming back down in his pyjamas. In the unlikely event anyone stayed put after that, he would follow his reappearance with the killer line, “My goodness, are you still here?!”
Most of us aim to be slightly more subtle than that – not hard – but there is a real art to an end-of-evening eviction. Namely, that you have to do whatever you do extremely innocently, as though getting people to leave genuinely couldn’t have been further from your mind, although oh, it is actually quite late, isn’t it, now you come to mention it. It’s unforgivably bad mannered to kick out people you have invited round, so that must be the very last thing you ever do. Wink wink.
However, you may suddenly be very interested in their future plans, a la, “So, what’s your day like tomorrow?” Or perhaps feel the need to provide a commentary, “Ahh this has been a great evening,” with the use of past tense hanging heavy in the air. Maybe you’re selflessly concerned with their journey, “How long will it take you to get home, then?”
In desperate times, if you have kids who want to earn a bit of extra cash, and usually go back to sleep easily, you can slip them a fiver to come downstairs with some kind of unexplained problem – therefore not technically a lie, especially this close to Santa season.
Of course, we’ve all heard the – hopefully urban – legend of the couple who eventually left the dinner party long, long after the exhausted hosts had begun dropping increasingly blatant hints. The door closed behind them. There may have been the faint sound of cheering as they walked down the street. Then they discovered that their car had been clamped, turned around, and knocked on the door that had just shut in their faces. There was no cheering that time. They were still around the table for breakfast. Shudder.
So no matter how you achieve getting your guests out, however long it may take, probably best to make sure you have a notice up somewhere, clearly informing them of your no returns policy.
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