When guests use at your house

Six people are coming at seven and three of them still smoke. Somewhere around four your stomach does something small and you notice you have been half dreading your own evening. These are your rooms. That is the sofa where you used to sit with one going. That is the balcony rail, the exact spot by the back step, the corner of the kitchen. Somebody is about to carry the entire old evening in through your front door, and you are the one who has to keep pouring drinks in the middle of it.

So decide it now, at four, while the house is empty and you are calm. A host is allowed to have a plan. Where do they go? Choose the place tonight: the front step, the far end of the garden, anywhere that is not the room you will be sitting in all evening. What stays outside? Coats, packets, the tray you somehow still own, which can go in the bin this afternoon and never be mentioned by anyone again. Decisions made at four cost you nothing. The same decisions at nine cost everything you have.

Then give yourself a job for the night. Hosts have their hands full, and full hands are the oldest trick there is. You are the one topping up glasses, carrying plates through, hunting for the bottle opener, standing up to check the oven that does not need checking. Hold something cold and keep it moving. Half of what pulls at you in a room like this is not appetite at all, it is choreography: your body knows this scene and wants its old part in it. Give it a different part and it will play that one instead.

And when they step out together and the door clicks and the house goes briefly quiet, notice that you stayed. That is the whole thing, and it lasts about ninety seconds. Then they come back in, somebody laughs at something, the night carries on, and something permanent has happened in your own living room without a word said about it. Ask God for the length of one conversation rather than the length of the night, because that is all you ever have to cover. You are hosting your friends in a house that is yours again.