Sitting next to Morrissey? You must be a bore
Lady Elizabeth anson, founder of Party Planners, has always known what’s what. In 1986, she published The Party Planners Book, billed as The Complete Guide To Entertaining Stylishly and Successfully.
It proved a godsend for those who had, up to that point, spent their lives worrying about things such as how to decorate a marquee. ‘an empty tent is a glorious challenge,’ declared Lady Elizabeth.
‘you can do a lot for very little: use autumn boughs, fragrant baskets of windfalls tied to the tent poles, artificial birds from China, gigantic rosettes made from the Financial Times tied with black and rosepink bows, stiff silver bows, doves and stars of cooking foil or a bobbing cloudscape of gasfilled balloons trailing slender ribbons above the heads of your guests.’
There is something magical about that advice. From time to time, when things aren’t going very well and I start to grow downhearted, I cheer myself up by telling myself that at least I don’t have to fill a tent with all that useless bric-a-brac.
Lady Elizabeth’s tips on how to handle troublesome guests are also worth remembering.
Under the heading ‘Nose bleeds’, she advises: ‘ do not panic: they always stop in the end.’ all you have to do, she adds, is: ‘Put a cork between his teeth; let the blood dribble into a bowl.’ Sorted! Cheesy straw, anyone? Immediately below ‘Nose bleeds’ comes ‘Suicide attempts’. ‘People who stage suicide attempts hysterically or as a means of emotional blackmail will, unhappily, often choose a party for the gesture, as it ensures a huge audience and plenty of excitement,’ she says.
She then recommends ‘putting a finger to the back of the throat’ and contacting your GP.
Happy days! and now, 30 years after the publication of her handbook, Lady E has issued a further set of tips, some of which involve fibbing. ‘If you’re trying to get guests to take their seats, tell them it’s a souffle,’ she suggests.
These days, she seems more concerned about bores than about nose-bleeds or suicides.
‘Seat all the bores together,’ is her advice. ‘They don’t realise they’re bores, and they’re happy. It’s my biggest tip.’
Let’s hope she won’t live to regret letting that particular cat out of the bag.
at the next party she organises, it seems likely that the guests will spend their time looking around to check whether they are on the bores’ table.
and how will they tell? If it’s a royal event, then obviously the presence of the Earl of Wessex toying with his bread will set the alarm bells ringing.
For a showbiz event, Morrissey will perform the same role, sullenly sitting there, banging on about how life has let him down.
In his interminable autobiography, he recalls how the Carry On star Charles Hawtrey, of all people, was driven to put the phone down on him.
‘I don’t blame him for finding me dull, since I, too, find me dull.’
To do Morrissey justice, we have all been in that position. I have sat through many dinner parties where everyone could have been usefully placed on a bores’ table, myself included.
Once, when dylan Thomas was on a roll, he suddenly interrupted himself, saying: ‘Somebody’s boring me — and I think it’s me.’
When you start being boring, it’s very difficult to stop. Before long, everyone else is infected, too.
Often, we become so trapped in dinner-party banalities — where we live, why we live where we live, how we get to where we live, where we lived before we lived where we live, how we used to get to where we used to live before we lived where we live, whether we know the people who lived quite close to where we lived before we lived where we live — that we begin to feel like skydivers wrapped in the strings of our own parachutes, spiralling to oblivion.
To paraphrase George Orwell, we are all bores, but some of us are more boring than others. It all depends on your perspective.
The verb ‘to bore’ might even be conjugated along these lines: I am on a roll. you go on a bit. He never knows when to stop. I am a good listener you are modest He has nothing to say for himself. I am the life and soul you don’t mind making a fool of yourself He is plastered. I am open you are uninhibited He won’t shut up
Perhaps Lady Elizabeth anson might be persuaded to embroider each of these onto pretty little placemats for her Bores Table, there to be read when things take a turn for the worse.