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House party poopers
Good guests are wonderful, but not all guests are good.
It is often said that the world divides into guests and hosts. If so, I have stumbled on to the wrong side of the divide; I have all the inclinations of a guest, but every summer for many years I have found myself taking on the role of host.
Like most settled habits, this began without any intention at all. My husband hates hotels and likes spending time away from work with lots of friends. The obvious solution was to share a big country house with several other people, preferably somewhere hot, with good restaurants and beautiful towns not too far away. For much, much less than the cost of hotel rooms, we were able to stay in large and beautiful - if rather shabby - houses in wonderful parts of Italy, France and Spain. However, given the complications of making plans several months in advance with several other people, we began to take charge ourselves, and inadvertently turned into hosts.
Although it has been great fun, and is one of the things I enjoy most in life, it cannot be denied that being a host can be a mixed blessing. Good guests and good friends are wonderful, but not all guests are good. For this reason I do not feel so sorry as everyone else seems to for poor Prince Strozzi, who was at one stage being asked to move out of his sumptuous villa in Tuscany so that his guests, the Blairs, could have it all to themselves for their summer holiday. Of course he offered it to them with the intention of being their host, but I wonder whether he really knew anything much about them as guests - apparently not, since their first move was to eject him from his own house, something not even the very worst guests have tried to do to me. Would one really want to carry on with guests like that? For all we know, poor Prince Strozzi may be well out of this particular hostly experience. In any case, it is immensely important, as a prospective host, to be able to assess people as guests, because bad ones are legion.
Selfish and lazy guests are usually no problem, especially since they have the time and the energy to be amusing. The ones to watch out for are those who keep crying, "Oh, don't bother about me" - always a warning signal. Worst among them are vegetarians, who cause endless bother. They say they will eat anything, which isn't true - in my experience most vegetarians don't really like vegetables at all. And most of the delicious lentils and beans and pasta dishes and soups the hostess is laboriously producing have duck fat or pancetta or chicken stock in them somewhere. "Just plain boiled pasta," the vegetarian asks at the last moment, when the cook is wrestling with a shortage of large pans in a stuffy old-fashioned kitchen and the demands of producing food for 18.
Almost as bad is the guest who insists on helping. Competent guests are wonderful, but it is always, somehow, the incompetent one who is underfoot, begging to be allowed to break the one bottle opener, jam the filter mechanism on the pool, dump hot dishes on antique wooden surfaces, and put the rubbish where it will cause most trouble. Confronted with all this infuriating damage, the well-behaved hostess must then put up with hours of aggressive apology, and refuse, insincerely, all offers of payment for repairs.
Compared with this sort of guest, I think of the midnight creeper almost with affection. One must expect a certain amount of sexual misdemeanour on holidays in hot climates; there is something about the sun that makes the British very silly. So long as the midnight creepers are discreet, and don't barge into the children's bedrooms, or cause sulks next day, one can hardly object. In practice, of course, they tend to be disruptive. At one of our house parties long ago in Tuscany, no fewer than three men sulked for a week because they didn't receive an expected visit from a beautiful young midnight creeper.
Much worse is the rhinoceros-skin guest, remarkably difficult to identify in advance. The most flamboyant specimen I ever met was a clever, anarchic young fellow who, no doubt in some amusing deconstruction of opera, used to shriek out at odd moments, day and night, "Mario, Mario, Mario", shattering the peace of a remote Umbrian valley and almost shocking the cicadas into silence. This sort of guest is probably worse than the bad sport, who has to be allowed to win at tennis or at Scrabble, or, at the very least, to beat the hostess. He is about on a level with the guests who don't get up, and then lunch at three in the afternoon on all the prosciutto and figs intended for dinner; or the independent soul who takes off all day without explanation in one of the hired cars, stranding the other guests who had planned to visit Cordoba.
Then there are the charming parents, whose teenagers turn up with pockets full of wacky baccy and leave roaches on the terrace, to the outrage of other guests. There are the uncontrollable small children, who trail juice and crumbs everywhere, and who are allowed to ruin grown-up dinner with prattle. There are the husbands and wives who insult each other, and otherwise civilised men who wear sandals and shorts and floppy white sun-hats into Nimes or Arles. And then there are just people who are demanding, unreasonable and intolerant. That's why I see myself as a guest, not a host.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, August 02, 1998
