December is the cruellest month. You wait all year to be invited somewhere interesting, then December comes along and you have more invitations than there’s room for on the mantelpiece. There are three parties at opposite ends of London I particularly want to go to this week, one carol service, one St Matthew Passion, one Chanukah dinner and two mince pie happenings in bookshops. The trouble is, they’re all on the same night.
I don’t know how this comes about, but there is always one evening that everyone fixes on to hold their event, and it is always the same evening that Jonas Kaufmann invites you over to his place for a Mahler lieder singalong and Philip Roth happens to be in town wanting a game of darts. This happens too often to be coincidence. There must be some herding instinct that explains it, a memory trace of the day we all leapt out of the primal soup together. Or it might be beyond our volition, an imperative of the non-human calendar: the transit of Venus, a volcano erupting in Bali, a bad night on telly. But the reason for these clashes isn’t the issue. Etiquette is. Who does one say no to?
It should be easy. You say no to whomever you haven’t already said yes to. First come, first served. If you want me at your party, you’d better get your invitation in early. The human heart, however, is not so easily stilled. You said yes to people you quite like, but that was before you heard from people you like more. The people you quite like will pour you prosecco with a tea-towel wrapped around the label; the people you like more will pour you Krug Clos d’Ambonnay. I don’t say considerations of this sort should trump loyalty, only that at my age, a man doesn’t know how much more Krug he’s going to get the opportunity to drink.
The woman I turn to for advice when all I owe to other people comes into conflict with all I owe myself shakes her head and puts on You Don’t Always Get What You Want at full volume. “And what would you do,” I ask, “if you’d said yes to a quiet evening of charades with the Hepplethwaites, and Mick Jagger then invites you out to Annabel’s on the same night?”
“Hepplethwaites,” she says, but we both know she’s lying.
I might have found a way of negotiating these moral quandaries: never accept an invitation to anything. Hold yourself in suspense. Don’t, of course, admit you’re waiting for a better offer, but wait for it. True, a better offer might not come. But that’s the chance you take. There are some things you have to be grown up about.
