My wife runs a business from home, and encourages people to come in at all odd hours — we’ve been surprised before even a cup of tea in the morning, and been woken long after we’d retired to bed — but while no rules may apply in their case, the stringency, when it comes to the family, can be quite tough. And all because my offers of hospitality, on those occasions when I was home and my wife had visitors, seemed to have boomeranged oddly on her work.
Take the time a group of ladies who were, let us say, not strictly au courant, arrived at, well, the cocktail hour.
While they looked and haggled and purloined (a surprising number of my wife’s guests are kleptomaniacs), I tut-ted away the cook’s offer of coffee and asked if I might bring them a little something stronger. “Beer,” said the first, without batting an eyelid. “Vodka-tonic,” grunted the second, while I felt more like a bar-waiter than the host. “And you?” I asked the third. “Anything,” she hesitated, the least sophisticated of the lot. “How about,” I suggested, “a glass of wine?” “Okay,” she said. “Red or white?” I enquired. “Red,” she mused, “white…”, then composing herself, she said with great conviction, “I’ll have a blue wine.”
I knew where that came from. Earlier in the same week, her husband had come to meet my wife when we were having ourselves a drink. It seemed the polite thing to ask the bloke what he’d have, to which his not surprising nouveau-riche response was, “I’ll have Scotch, but only if you have Blue Label.” He settled for considerably less by way of the label, though what I may have lacked in the way of quality, he more than made up for in quantity.
Which is not unlike a group of young professionals who found themselves in our home on another evening, complete strangers to us previously, but a friendly lot who just sat, and sat, and then sat some more. Yes, they agreed, they’d love just one drink, thank you, but actually ended up drinking rather a lot of vodka with orange juice, probably more than they should have. As a result, first they quarrelled fiercely, bringing up marital differences, and then each other’s families, and finally their friends in their line of fire.
In their state we could hardly have sent them home, even though it was close to midnight, so instead we thought to diffuse some of their giddyheadedness and roiling tempers by offering them something to eat. The cook had surpassed herself that night, but our new friends could hardly have realised that, for hardly had they eaten when they were throwing up over each other — and the sofa.
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The next morning when they called not to apologise but to excuse themselves of any business transactions they might have entered into in an inebriated state, my wife turned to me and said, “From now on I will not have you around any business visitors, so when they are here can I request you to please remain in the bedroom and refrain from attempting to entertain them and harm my work.” I thought it unfair she should blame me for her botched up business but agreed to mind my own in future.
As a result, I tiptoed around the house when she had visitors, I read (rather a lot as a result) and I shut myself away. But, of course, not all her guests respected such boundaries. So it was hardly surprising when a business acquaintance flung open the bedroom door, looked accusingly at me, and shouted, “What are you doing hiding here when my throat is parched? Go be a good man and pour me a tall whisky-soda.”