Another thing: Hospitality

On the art of freeloading.

Welcome to Letters From the Knot. This is a free weekly newsletter, primarily built as an outlet for a fiction writing project I’m working on. On the weeks I’m not publishing fiction, I’ll be sending something a bit more freeform and personal. This is one of those.

“After a pause she said, ‘I see your magic is not good only for large things.’

‘Hospitality,’ he said, ‘kindness to a stranger, that's a very large thing.’”

-Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan

There was some work to be done in our flat this past week, so our life has been turned over to some extent. The work itself was of the middle class and aspirational variety, so I’m not complaining. Quite the opposite. Being turfed out of the flat for a week turned out to be a nice opportunity to experience London as relative outsiders again. We ended up staying with different friends each evening which is a real coup because it meant being treated to a series of home cooked meals all week.

The whole experience made me think a lot about hospitality. There’s something very intimate about welcoming people into your home. You’re letting them see a slice of how you live and, more than that, you’re making all these special little efforts and compromises to make people feel welcome. You clean sheets and towels and maybe you make the bed nicely, put a couple of extra cushions on it, plan a nice meal to cook, think of games to play. Hosting is at once a sort of showroom for your life, and an opportunity to express love and affection to other people. It’s a fascinating little dance, and I love it.

‘Make yourself at home,’ people say. ‘If you’re up first in the morning, help yourself to anything.’ We fall over ourselves to make people feel more welcome, more comfortable, more provided for. It’s such a fundamental human instinct and, I think in British culture at least, a sort of unspoken indirect way of building intimacy where we’re often too repressed to do it directly. (Possibly just speaking for myself here).

All the people we stayed with this week had slightly different ways of hosting, but all were amazing. All thoughtful, all generous. If you ever want to feel loved and looked after, you can do a lot worse than coming up with a reason to go and be hosted by your friends for a few days.

Of course, the other side of this equation is how to be a a guest. There is no host without a guest, and yet we tend to think a lot less about what it means to be a good guest. Luckily I’ve been overthinking it all week and I’ve started thinking of some principles. You have to eat everything, of course, greedily and gratefully. Don’t be too self-effacing or restrained; dig in. If someone tells you to help yourself to things, you should. It’s gratifying when a guest feels comfortable enough to make themselves at home, it’s an endorsement of the host’s hosting abilities.

Second, try not to break loads of stuff like I did at one of our stops this week. And if you do break stuff, replace it immediately. Try to carefully read the bed-time vibes. You don’t want to stay up too late and impose on your hosts beyond the point of hospitality but, also, if you go to bed too early, it might suggest that you don’t really want to hang out with your host at all. That you really just want somewhere to sleep for the night. Don’t offer to financially contribute to the meal, but definitely do take wine or some other gift. Maybe offer to do the washing up?

The one thing I’ve never quite cracked is the etiquette around what you do if you need to go to the toilet in the night. Do you flush the toilet or not? This is a particular problem if you’re visiting people in relatively small flats or houses. The dilemma is: if you flush, you wake everyone up, potentially ruining several people’s night’s sleep. If you don’t flush, does that make you a disgusting weirdo? I’ll simply never know the answer to this. My tactic is usually to try and press the flush more gently than usual in the hopes that that softness will somehow translate through to the flush itself. This is unhinged obviously and, in case it needed saying, doesn’t work. V interested in other people’s thoughts and tactics though.

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I’ve decided to end these little newsletters with a round up of things I’ve been reading or watching or whatever. The cultural digest that nobody asked for.

Reading - I’ve just finished Who They Was by Gabriel Krauze, a violent and tragic coming of age story set in an estate in South Kilburn. Beautifully written and a confronting insight into a part of London that I’m shamefully ignorant of and have learned to live alongside without ever really looking straight at. It’s got such a clear and propulsive voice and also one of the best openings to a novel I've read in yests; if you read the first page, it’s hard to stop.

Watching - Watched that film The Menu, directed by Mike Mylod. Quite an enticing premise, but joins a long list of films that have very little to offer beyond an enticing premise. It makes me think that the pitch meetings for films like this must last about five minutes. The imperative seems to be coming up with an idea than can be sold on a streaming service in one sentence, as opposed to a story that actually goes somewhere or has anything to say. Still, a few laughs and Ralph Fiennes does creepy well.

Playing - I’ve always thought of video games as the thing I do to relax because it seems the most effective medium for completely engaging by brain and hands at the same time. You can’t look at your phone, and it’s hard to get distracted. Oddly, given that imperative to relax, I seem to be always drawn to games that are intensely stressful. I’ve been drawn back into Elden Ring after about a six month hiatus and, having forgotten all of the controls, it’s more stressful than ever. On a similar note, I’ve finally reached the actual ending of Hades and, to confirm what everyone already knows, it’s a masterpiece and has some of the best writing of any game I’ve ever played.

Eating - pret egg and cress sandwiches.

More of this sort of thing coming soon if you fancy it.