Full house
Had enough of your summer visitors? Regretting the day you threw your arms open wide? Our etiquette angel Lady Sybilla Hart on the perils and pitfalls of being a host with the most
Above: Image courtesy of The O'Shea Gallery
Benjamin Franklin famously said that fish and visitors smell after three days. In some cases, even less. Other than overstaying your welcome, we have scaled the country to track down some notorious guest (and host) faux pas that should at all costs, be avoided.
Guests, try not to bore your hosts with mundane conversation. One hostess was so fed up with the vanity of her daughter’s guests (they spent the whole weekend talking about make-up and clothes) that she decided to take matters into her own hands and inform the girl’s boyfriend of her opinions. ‘I’m fed up with their sheer vanity. Just wait until they have children,’ she warned, ‘then they’ll never have time to do their make-up.’ At this point the boyfriend looked horrified (presumably either at the hostess’s boldness or at the prospect of his girlfriend turning into a slummy mummy).
Hosts, if you invite someone on holiday, do be clear about how long they are staying. It is fine to extend their stay but you cannot shorten it. I did hear of one poor sod who was thrown out of a Scottish lodge halfway into his stay. The host had got bored of him and had pronounced him dull. He discarded him like Franklin’s rotten fish. This is cruel and unfair. The former guest had to go and stay in a dubious B&B down the road until the end of his stay. The Portuguese proverb, ‘Visits always give pleasure – if not the arrival, the departure,’ certainly applied to this particular Scottish host.
If you have friends for a weekend of shooting, don't tell your guests how much they should tip the keeper. One host I know used to insist on everyone tipping the keeper the hefty sum of £100 at which point one of the guests said, ‘I asked how much to tip him, not copulate with him.’
And please, make sure your guests can shoot properly. One rather over-zealous young buck with minimal shooting experience shot an old Colonel in the behind by mistake. When he heard a squeal, he thought it was a sign of encouragement and fired his guns for the second time. The poor Colonel couldn't sit down for a month.
Guests, don’t use and abuse. If you really do need to sleep and flee, stay at a B&B. Granted, it will cost you more but at least you won’t lose a friend. My friend, Henrietta recalls the time when ‘we once had someone to stay who arrived at 8.30pm with two work friends who we never even met and then left the following morning at 6.30am! Now that's short and sweet, but I can't help but think that what they were after was a hotel, rather than a friend’s house?’ Ask the night before at what time you are expected to get out of bed. One particular Spanish boyfriend did not emerge until seven o’clock in the evening over Thanksgiving in Palm Beach. The girlfriend’s father was furious.
The protocol surrounding thank-you presents is important; one friend recently witnessed a flagrant breech. One of their guests brought a packet of smoked salmon for the house. When, on his departure he saw it was half used, he asked if he could take the remaining morsels of salmon with him. The hostess was so shocked she agreed, waving goodbye to her evening supper and friend. ‘I shan’t be inviting him back again’ she fumed.
Hosts must give some thought to health and safety. One dowager, who is known to be sporting, threw a party for her daughter’s coming out ball. Bored with the banality of events she decided to liven things up. She marched over to the mechanised merry-go-round, pushed the operator out of the way and thrust the lever well passed the red for dangerous mark. Several young dears came flying off and there were a number of broken limbs.
Three young girls of about thirteen years of age were staying in Gloucestershire. Despite the beautiful surroundings (which you take for granted when you are thirteen) they had become increasingly bored and were looking for trouble. The owner of the main house had various cottages in the grounds. One such cottage was located right next door to the manure dump which until that moment had never caused him any problems. When the bachelor was out the naughty girls seized their moment. They wanted to see if they could throw manure into his bedroom window. They succeeded, rather successfully. His entire bedroom floor was brown and smelly, and to top it all off, it was in the heat of the summer. When they had managed to lob several days of horse wallop inside his bedroom window they then decided to take matters further and shove some through the letterbox. At this point, the white car belonging to the offended appeared at the drive. When they were being castigated by their parents, the elder brother asked them in disbelief, ‘You did it with your own bare hands?’
I heard of some other children who were staying at a wonderful guest house in Phoenix, Arizona. They decided to put some of the surplus lemons to use. They gathered all of the lemons up and discarded them down the loos and then added lots of coffee for good measure. Remember children are prone to a lavatorial sense of humour. The moral of both these stories is; keep your children under control when staying with guests. If you haven’t seen them for a couple of hours, this is usually bad news.
After a long dinner in Norfolk one male guest was so intoxicated that he passed out in an armchair while talking to one of the female guests. The host and a friend decided to take him to bed and carried the still sleeping man upstairs. They put him into bed, took off his shoes and tucked him up on his side. The fun and games continued downstairs.
A couple of hours later the host thought that he should check on his guest and make sure that he was OK. The bedroom was empty, no sign! Where was he? Not in a bathroom. Not in a cupboard. The party trouped outside – no sign. As they came back into the house through the front door they saw a naked body being pushed out of the hosts’ parents’ bedroom followed by a bundle of clothes.
Thank you to the O’Shea Gallery for granting us use of Annie Tempest’s famous cartoons ‘Tottering By Gently’. For more information visit www.tottering.com