Great blog by the way am having the fabulous looking pumpkin rissotto for sunday tea

I once made a huge dinner for 16 and only noticed halfway through that one woman (lovely, lovely woman) was only eating lettuce and potato – the previous time she’s been we’d happened to have seafood and all was fine, but she didn’t mention not eating meat. She insisted it was perfectly fine but I felt like an idiot, and people kept loudly sorry for her – I felt terrible and slightly irritated, cos I could easily have done something for all that would have suited her too …

Claire, reading groups are a Whole Other Topic of riveting disaster stories – have never been in one but have heard deliciously horrific stories of tantrums and bullyings and weird behaviour of many many kinds.

Lia, I spat water over my keyboard laughing when I read your comment earlier today about nibbling nuts from your pockets in the bathroom. And I too have had the ‘come at 6′ invitation and thought ‘fantastic, early weeknight dinner’, only to eat at 10 having almost starved to death…. I am quite militant on the idea that dinner should be on the table within an hour and a half of guests’ arrival, with or without nibbles first. Am I just a greedy freak? I hate hours of waiting for food.

Over on Facebook my friend Geraldine added ‘say thankyou afterwards!’ as a non-negotiable Good Guest behaviour and quite right too. I usually do the text or email the following day, but my husband has quite delightfully sometimes, if it’s been a special thing that the host has gone to a lot of effort over, taken to writing a card when we get home and running it to the postbox over the road before bed (the handwriting may leave something to be desired at that stage of the game, but still).

Nadia – you sound very nice about children. I LOVE kids, esp the teenyweeny variety, but children ‘running over’ your couches uninvited is bad. Irrelevant how crappy they are, they’re still your couches. I once had a parent watch fondly on as a kid tore a favourite plant of mine to smithereens in our teeny fledgling garden. I looked at the parent, then when they did nothing I walked over to the child and physically removed her. Parent unbotthered. Another time I had to take a small child by the shoulders and give her a calm but firm talking to as she tore through my freezer in search of ice cream – there was none, but the poor child could not believe this. Parent unconcerned as frozen goods went everywhere and child screamed hysterically & mercilessly. When I think about this I can’t quite fathom what was going on in parent’s head. Maybe they were so sleep deprived they just had to pretend it wasn’t happening. W.e.i.r.d. Not the most relaxing evening I’ve ever spent….