Party season is coming – and I am the tense, sweaty, shrill hostess with the leastess | Polly Hudson

Being a bad friend is presumably like being a narcissist – wondering whether you are one probably means that you’re not. However, a writer for the US magazine People questioned this topic just this week, with an article asking if she was letting down her mates by refusing to host Friendsgiving. (For the unfamilar, this is Thanksgiving you spend with friends rather than family, and is increasingly popular in the UK.) She has a good reason though. “I simply don’t want people in my house.” After mentioning “the foot traffic, the proximity to my stuff, the general vibes of it all”, she admitted, “there is a rhythm and reason to the way my fruit bowl is organised, how my coffee table books are placed and how my cushions lie on the sofa. I would hate to be half-cooking, half-monitoring my guests to make sure no one has their feet on my coffee table and everyone is using coasters. (I’ve seen those types of hosts, and they are the type guests talk about on their way back home!).” My ears are retrospectively burning. In the run-up to the festive season there’s an abundance of advice around on how to be the perfect host, but I don’t think you can learn this. It’s the same as sexual orientation – something you’re born with. Or, in my case, not. I’ll always be the tense, sweaty, shrill hostess with the leastess – the anti-Princess Meghan – and no amount of reading up on tips is ever going to change that. The problem is that you go to somebody else’s bash and get lulled into a false sense of security because they make it look so easy. How do the relaxed, effortless bon vivants do it? Their home is swarming with people – shudder – but they’re completely laid back and carefree. Laughing, chatting, casually introducing people, making everyone feel welcome and included, but in a calm, discreet way. They can’t be that drunk, because they’re usually standing up. If you didn’t know them, you wouldn’t even be able to tell it’s their home that has been invaded by revellers, because they’re so at ease, rather than surveilling proceedings anxiously to make sure no one is touching, looking at, or moving anything, or making a mess, and that everybody is having fun. Oh yes, because while I’m dashing around with armfuls of coats, fretting about where to put them, taking the same drink orders repeatedly as I keep forgetting them, plus stacking and unstacking the dishwasher because getting a load or two on now will make the tidying up so much easier tomorrow, I will also be devastated if all attenders aren’t having the best time ever. So I will be checking regularly, frantically, in increasingly high-pitched tones, helicopter-host style, to make sure of it. My mum had a lunch party where some people had been invited from 1pm, and others from 1pm to 3pm ... Being an awful entertainer may actually be a combination of nature and nurture, as I am descended from a long line of them. My dad once subtly communicated his belief that guests had stayed too long by disappearing upstairs and coming back down in his pyjamas. My mum had a lunch party where some people had been invited from 1pm, and others from 1pm to 3pm, so with a strict end time. A few of us were still eating when, without explanation, half the table stood up and left. I imagine they felt amazing about themselves, and extremely fondly towards my mother, and the lucky few permitted to remain in the warm embrace of her confusing hospitality. Just as with grief, there seem to be five stages of terrible hosting – the People magazine writer is clearly still at bargaining whereas I have reached acceptance. No matter how much prep I do in advance or how solemnly I promise to try to chill out, I never enjoy my own parties, which gives me something in common with my guests. But at least they can duck out early – I have to stay until the bitter end. I have absolutely no doubt that the best way I can be a good friend to everyone I know is to never invite them to any kind of party at my house ever again, and be confident they really do not mind or hold a grudge against me because of it. Funnily enough, I have a feeling they might have been washing their hair that night anyway.