Sometime in mid-October, my husband and I begin our annual deliberation: should we host a village Christmas drinks party? The conversation is almost invariably instigated by my charming husband who, mindful of all the invitations we have shamefully yet to reciprocate, feels that we ‘ought to do it this year, at least’. Almost invariably, I am the voice of dissent.
The arguments I give against are motivated by two competing – but not entirely dissimilar – emotions: vanity and concern. Vanity because I worry that my house is neither big enough nor grand enough for the sort of event I have in mind (think something along the lines of a reception at St James’s Palace, complete with hot and cold running staff and Old Masters jammed on to every wall). Concern, in this instance of the social variety, because I know from some years of experience that not everybody in the village likes each other. Or likes me, for that matter. Inviting everyone on the basis of shared geography alone is a recipe for disaster. In short, social geographies are not necessarily physical.
Villages are curious places. The former chairman of the National Trust, Simon Jenkins, may have said that ‘nothing is as thick as English village blood’, but he might have added that nothing is quite so liable to clot, either. Like any community in this country, the village is not a classless, New Town utopia dreamt up by Gordon Brown and bankrolled by Qatari money. Village tribes form on the basis of money, aspiration, religion, consumer habits and that old magic leg-up, education. The idea that the English village community is (and apologies, but I quote Jenkins here again) ‘like a medieval monastery, a place apart yet blessed with an innate goodness that trickles down to all society’ is, to my mind, laughable. Throw in social media and – that most pernicious of things – the village WhatsApp group and you have nothing short of all-out conflict.
But enough theorising, let’s get back to the problem of the Christmas drinks. Who should we invite? The people who have had us over for drinks, or the people we see and like on our twice-daily dog walks (even if they think our dogs are atrociously behaved)? Should we invite the other families who have children at the same prep school as our daughter, or should we wait to have the school village gang over at another time to avoid looking snobby? Can we invite our friends from the neighbouring village or does that defeat the point? Can we be selective, invitation-wise, or does this make us look bitchy? Does so-and-so even like so-and-so? You get the picture. Crucially, what we really want to do doesn’t seem to feature, if that’s even the point.
Village tribes form on the basis of money, aspiration, religion, consumer habits and that old magic leg-up, education
And so, every year, we fail to host the party. Every year, I consider this a shame. Not enough of a shame for me to actually host the party, but a shame nonetheless. Because there is a part of me, the girl brought up in central London next to the District line, that wants to consider the village a proxy family. It is this romantic view that propelled me here in the first place in my quest for a certain sort of Englishness. That vision can and does exist but not, alas, in the form of a crammed ‘stand up and shout’ in my drawing room.
I’m dancing around the obvious fact that I also hate drinks parties. It is my belief that everyone secretly hates them, which may explain my reluctance to put my neighbours through one at my invitation. Other Spectator writers have dealt eloquently with the problem of drinks parties, namely the dreadful internal fracture that occurs in situ – what Lloyd Evans calls the ‘mind dividing into an inner and outer voice’. At a village drinks party, the inner and outer voice suffers from all the usual social malaise – do they find me boring, am I distinguished or attractive enough, etc – but with the added distortion of knowing too much about your interlocutor’s bins, dogs, horses and cars. It’s surprisingly hard to make social small talk when the usual patter is already exhausted or, even worse, detailed and pre-empted on the village WhatsApp.
What’s the answer, then? Should we continue to accept the invitations of other villagers while we huddle in our own house in perceived Scrooge-like contempt? As usual, I console myself with the lie that next Christmas we will get it together and invite the village over in a Dickensian scene of rural utopia. I just need to send the save-the-date in time, or nobody will come. Which may be just what I was hoping for.
Comments