Time please, ladies and gents

It is gone midnight and your visitors show no sign of leaving the table. Well, here's how to get rid of them if you have the nerve says Rachel Cooke

ONE of my friends likes to call me the Margot Leadbetter of E8. This nickname refers not to my dress sense (though I like a swirling Pucci print as much as the next girl) but to my fondness for entertaining. When it comes to dinner parties, I like all the bits that other people seem to hate. I love reading recipe books and I love trawling the supermarket for weird-sounding ingredients that I know will sit at the back of my cupboard getting all sticky and covered in dust. You need pomegranate molasses? I've got two bottles of the stuff. Hell, I even own a fondue set.

No, my problem with dinner parties lies entirely with the guests.

First, you have to find eight people who can spend four drunken hours with one another without coming to blows over the passion fruit pavlova. Then you have to navigate your way through all their boring dietary requirements.

Finally, on the night itself, you inevitably spend the entire evening worrying about what time they intend to go home. Too long before midnight and your self-esteem will be shot down in pieces (they hated it); too long after and your backside will be numb, your jaw will ache and you will have resolved not to see your good friends X and Y for at least another 12 months.

So how do you make sure that your guests do not outstay their welcome? Well, for starters, it is best to hide all spirits in a secure location. That way, once your delightfully chatty friends have downed the last dregs of the red wine they will quickly begin to sober up. When you serve coffee, make sure it is decaffeinated so as not to give them a second wind.

Turn off the music. Yawn a lot in a very faux-discreet way. If your dining table is in the kitchen you could even begin filling a couple of hot water bottles - though it is embarrassing to have to admit to owning such items.

"Of course, if you are really enjoying someone's company, it is perfectly easy to just say you are tired and going to bed," says Mary Killen, agony aunt of The Spectator. "It's only when you are entertaining dullards and you are really tense that you feel you have to stay up."

So how does she advise people to get rid of unwanted guests? "One good idea is to go into the next room and ring a taxi. When it arrives, ask your guests if anyone has ordered a cab. Someone will always end up saying, 'Well, perhaps we ought to take it'. Then the other guests will follow suit.

Or you could just turn the heating off. People tend to leave pretty swiftly once they start to feel cold."

Others will go to more extreme measures to avoid suffering from what a friend of mine calls a "bored-over" (as opposed to a hangover). I have one acquaintance who regularly appears before her guests in her pyjamas and another who has been known to lie down in the middle of the sitting-room floor, arrange a cushion under her head and ostentatiously close her eyes.

She did this to me once. It was very hurtful - but it worked a treat.

Some friends of my parents, meanwhile, have perfected a failsafe technique for getting rid of unwanted visitors. The husband goes around the room asking everyone whether they would like coffee or tea. When he gets to his wife, she announces, in the most puke- inducing little baby voice she can muster: "I want dinkin log log, I want dinkin log log." (In English, this means "drinking chocolate".) He then pats her head playfully, while she makes big gooey eyes at him.

The assembled company tend to be so deeply embarrassed that they drink their Kenyan and make a swift exit.

Copyright 2001
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