It’s a funny old world: Adele Parks
‘No-one has mentioned leaving, but I’m counting down the minutes’
Ithink of myself as a warm, hospitable person. I’m always asking people to dinner, I work from home and I get bored of my own company. However, my hostess-with-the-mostest role is tested when people suggest bringing kids or staying over rather than having to be abstemious.
On three occasions in recent weeks, a stop-over has turned into a long weekend. Benjamin Franklin said, ‘Fish and visitors stink after three days.’ Three days? How generous! Depending on the behaviour of the guest, I can start to get a bit tetchy way before that.
I try, I really do. I start by planning a fun overnighter for Friday (with two different suppers, of course, as my friends all have young kids who want pizzas and fish fingers). The night always goes well – guests arrive full of bonhomie and good intentions
(or, at the very least, a genuine sense of relief that they’re no longer on the M25). They bring a stack of alcohol – maybe pudding, too – and compliment the food. But it tends to go downhill from there.
Problem is, there’s always the tendency to overdo it on a Friday.
The desperate relief that we’ve struggled through another week of work and the kids are currently drawing on someone else’s walls, leads to swift and excessive alcohol intake. Instead of excitedly embarking on the planned, refreshing, country walk on Saturday morning, we’re all battling hangovers, aggravated by a 6am start as the kids want to watch CBeebies – a particular purgatory I’d long forgotten.
Fry-ups are the cure for some, but make others ill, and everyone is snappy. No walk means no sweet, little country pub for lunch. People start passively-aggressively ‘helping’ to prepare lunch by pulling things from the fridge. They graze on all the carefully purchased ingredients
I’d bought in for dinner. The chorizo is devoured, the ‘easy raspberry iced mousses’ will be considerably less so now the children have wolfed down the raspberries. In minutes, the fridge is empty, there’s been a locust plague.
I head to the supermarket. Someone mutters something about needing a nap, someone else suggests I take the kids with me. My friends revert to teenage behaviour – the TV is on constantly and dirty teacups abound. No-one has mentioned leaving, but I’m counting down the minutes…
Weird, then, that when they finally go and my family stands on the doorstep waving, I close the door behind me and reach for my diary to plan the next invasion.
Guests may stink like fish after three days but apparently I have the memory of a goldfish!
Adele Parks is author of I Invited Her In (£7.99, PB, HQ Harper Collins)