Town Mouse
While country mice stay at home and tend to their nut store, we town mice find ourselves engaged in a non-stop round of inviting people to lunch and dinner … and being invited to lunch and dinner … and attending parties and drinks and launches.
I tend to say yes with great enthusiasm to every opportunity that presents itself. Six weeks before the event, it is easy to concur with the adventurous late Knight of Glin who advised, ‘Always say yes to a party. You never know what might happen.’
However, as the day of the festivity approaches, you begin to feel less keen. It’s a bit like going swimming in Cornwall. The sun is out and beats warm on your browning skin. Just the day for a bracing dip. You run down to the sea, ready to plunge in. But as you get nearer the water, the idea of hurling yourself into the waves becomes progressively less appealing. It’s cold. And once your toes are wet, you really feel like heading back to the house for some backgammon in a warm room in front of the wood-burning stove.
And sometimes you won’t get even as far as wet toes before turning back.
A couple of years ago, I was on my way to Christmas’s scariest party. It is the kind of do where the hostess pulls you away from the old friend you were having a perfectly nice chat with and introduces you to an unsmiling gentleman – who turns out to be a billionaire hedge-fund investor or owner of a well-known media conglomerate and has no interest in you whatsoever.
As I cycled up to the house and glanced at the various black limos parked outside, with chauffeurs sitting in them, I decided to keep on cycling. I arrived home, opened a bottle of real ale, on my own, in the kitchen – and what joy I felt.
Maybe I had missed out on something. But who cares?
For there is something liberating in the act of cancelling. Cancelling serves the quiet monk lurking in all of us, the meditative soul who wants to retreat from the vanity and competition of city life. Cancelling can feel like an act of self-preservation.
It’s the same with lunches. They seem eminently cancellable these days. But with lunches, it is usually I who get cancelled on. I can think of three friends and acquaintances who have cancelled on me three times over the last year.
When they cancel, I suffer a moment of disappointment. And then I feel a sense of relief. Great! I can just stay in my office. I don’t need to get on my bike after all.
But be careful. I’d had so many lunches cancelled that I was beginning to think that maybe, these days, lunches were always cancelled. No one ever seriously thought that lunch appointments would be kept. I was taking an Idler contributor friend out for lunch to say thank you. As the hour approached, my day started to fill up with deadlines – and I emailed my friend to ask whether we could postpone.
This did not go down well. He replied to my email with a seriously aggrieved tone. So I uncancelled and jumped on my bicycle and rode into Soho. It took a good half-hour and plenty of beer to persuade my friend to accept my apology.
Sometimes I have just plain forgotten a lunch arrangement, and that is profoundly embarrassing. I blame technology. In the old days, I would write the appointment down in my Smythson Featherweight diary, an item of great beauty and utility. I would keep the diary on my person and refer to it constantly. I would never forget an appointment. That would be simply impossible.
But nowadays the evil ical has taken over from the Smythson. In case you still have one foot sensibly planted in the old world and have no idea what I’m talking about, I’ll explain. The ical is a computerised calendar that can be shared with others. But it is not infallible. Sometimes the appointments simply vanish from it, because you have not updated it or connected in the right way, or because someone else has changed a blimming password.
As a result of the ubiquity of mobile phones, appointments are more fluid than they were in the old days. Before mobile phones, once you made an arrangement, you stuck with it. Now, because it’s easier to cancel, postpone or arrive late, people do. And unless an appointment is confirmed half a dozen times, it seems somehow not to be quite real – and that is because it has not been consigned to paper with a pen.
Having said all this, I don’t think you should ever cancel an invitation to stay with friends for a weekend. I would advise sticking to arrangements that you have made, because it is rude not to.
But once in a while, just keep on cycling. Stay at home. There will be another party.
‘The act of cancelling serves the quiet monk lurking in all of us, who wants to retreat’