NO RETURN TO SENDER
Karen Robinson complains
that people no longer have the manners to RSVP
I RECENTLY invited my friends to a birthday party. Not a milestone 'big-O' occasion, admittedly, but as the day itself fell on a Saturday and I am a gregarious soul who likes to bring a little fun into my friends' lives, I thought a good bash would not go amiss.
Nothing elaborate — no catered boeuf bourgignon buffet or even swanky sushi canapes — just lashings of booze, a few nibbles, the au pair to help with coats and drinks and good bopping music. Turn up at nine-ish and rave into the night (babysit- ters permitting) to trendy-again Seventies dance music at my south London house.
So about three weeks before the day, I sent out invitations to about 60 people in all, mostly thirty-/forty-something middle- class professionals, couples and singles, straight and gay — my friends. RSVP my home phone number, it said. And answer came there, almost none. I was astonished. My friends are not grungy teens who could perhaps be forgiven for not knowing what RSVP means. We are no longer such social movers and shakers that we can afford to ignore an invitation for three weeks to see what better offers come up nearer the day. We are that most stable staple of society, the middle-class profes- sionals. Have we forgotten our manners?
There was a tiny trickle of replies. A sweet couple from round the corner, whose huge all-day pre-Christmas party is a neigh- bourhood institution, phoned promptly to accept. My friend Mandy also called, and repeated her offer to have my son to stay with her son and their au pair on the night. But then, she has exquisite manners. She even sends thank-you cards after dinner 'Get your act together.' parties. A fellow journalist phoned my desk from his desk to say he would love to have come but he would — audible smirk — be in Puerto Rico that weekend (was he really RSVPing or just showing off? I began to wonder, mildly paranoid by this stage). And, with a week to go, that was about it. There were a handful more yeses and nos, often in the course of a phone conversation about something else, usually work-related. (I even found myself asking, 'Er, did you get my invitation?', which felt a bit humili- ating.) A friend told me that another friend was coming — really looking forward to it, in fact. He'd told her but hadn't bothered to tell me.
I started to feel like that dotty old Irish- woman in the Evelyn Waugh short story who finds herself decked out like a Christ- mas tree in her stately home on the night of her ball and utterly alone. Or the Dorothy Parker character whose bitterly ironic diary records night after night of riotous Manhattan partying with a wildly fashionable mariachi band in attendance, which comes to a dismal stop the night she herself gives a mariachi party. Even at the whirlwind pace of metropolitan trends, surely Seventies disco and blaxploitation funk will be deemed fun at least until the end of the month?
It's not as if the arrangements I had to make depended on exact numbers. Glasses on loan from the off-licence, a few cases of fizz, and the au pair could always be sent out for reinforcements if I had under- ordered. I would just like to have known — known that my friends appreciated the invi- tations, the trouble, admittedly not elabo- rate, that I was taking. Parties are quite hard work these days, what with most of our energy being taken up with children and careers, and an acknowledgment would have been nice.
Or was I being ridiculously stuffy? 'Oh, people just don't RSVP these days,' pro- nounced a couple of friends as if declaring that antimacassars had gone out of fashion. I asked Mary Killen, the Spectator's agony aunt, about this phenomenon: 'Yes, I had a drinks party recently and only about 30 people out of 200 replied. And of those, 15 said they were coming and then didn't turn up. A good majority of even properlY brought-up people don't bother.' Her theo- ry: 'I suppose that with anything involving a herd where there is obviously no fixed seat.- ing plan, people assume it doesn't matter If they come or not.' On the night, I am delighted to report, people arrived in droves, bearing gifts and bottles, and we partied well if not wisely. After the first couple of glasses of chain- pagne I began to wonder what I had been so worried about. But even so, is it now acceptable to ignore the injunction 1? reply, if you please, on invitations? Is RIP, RSVP?
Karen Robinson is assistant editor (supPle- ments) at the Sunday Times.
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