Immaculate Hostess

On new beds, the wrong coffee, and cultural appropriation.

I am, of course, an immensely relaxed and skillful hostess, as I’m sure you can imagine. I grew up reading Agatha Christie, with her endless descriptions of country house parties and formal dinners. Nancy Mitford too, all barbed social commentary, lampooning the unfortunates who did socialising wrong. I think I was twelve when I first bought a book on etiquette. If the world was divided into good people who socialised correctly, and bad, incorrect people, I was determined first to learn the difference, and then to achieve entry to the first group. That’s where the grand hostesses would be, dressed with an understated elegance that made no one feel inadequate or outshone, ensuring everyone’s glasses were full, introducing conversational topics to delight everyone and exclude no-one. Somehow this was easy for them. Through copying, it would become easy for me, too, I thought, as I memorised my etiquette book and planned my future dinner parties.

With so much research behind me, having my friend Guy Windsor come to stay for a night was delightful, but didn’t involve much anxiety or planning. I am, of course, lying. I had a couple of weeks’ notice, and in that time it became clear to me that our normal guest bedroom wouldn’t do. Not for Guy, who has a PhD. Actually, most of Hywel’s friends are also PhDs, and all have managed to stay in our guest room without any disasters befalling them. But Guy was my friend, and my responsibility. I ordered a new bed, and rearranged one of the rooms we generally use as a set for photography. I cleaned it in a relatively normal way to begin with, but then became compulsive about polishing the floor with my Purdy & Figg spray. I did it several times, enjoying the scent, and the eventual result was rather slippery. I wondered if it’d be dangerous for Guy, but remembered that he’s a high level martial artist, and concluded that he’d probably prevail.

Then I began to consider bed linen. The room is decorated in midnight blue and scarlet, with furniture of a Chinese design. I’d recently begun to worry about accusations of cultural appropriation, and had just bought a Turkish bedside lamp in an attempt to make the room less Chinese, more inoffensively international. The new bed was a futon, which I thought might help. I put plain, deep-blue cotton sheets on the bed and felt underwhelming. I ordered bright yellow instead, from Amazon. The result was gaudy, but at least it was welcoming, I thought. Then I became worried that all our duvets were a bit thin. I ordered a big fluffy cloud-like winter one. I considered the possibility it might be a bit much for April, but by this point I was out of time.