3 tips to survive visitors

We all have those moments of hubris when we invite people over, often after a glass of wine too many. The difficulty comes when they accept.

Living in France means that people see visiting as a bit of a highlight. It isn’t like a dinner party, where it can be easily forgotten. They tell people before coming and then expect to go home with great stories to recount. Especially now with people just coming out of covid lockdown. Holiday expectations are riding high for many.

Having offended a few people in my time I now try to be a little more careful.

So who do we have coming to visit!

He is a friend of my husbands. His politics are diametrically opposed to mine. And to make life a little harder he is rather lacking in a sense of humour.

So my usual topics of politics, controversy and jokes are pretty much unacceptable.

I did suggest to my husband that I stick to talking about sex since it was one thing everyone on the planet had an interest in….

After spitting his wine across the table, nearly choking and causing quite a scene in the bar he answered “no”.

This leads us to the crucial questions of ‘how am I going to survive this visitor?’

Tip to survive visitors. Number 1 do your research!

This is really important – if you can’t talk about what you want to you need to find something else. There is a good chance that you won’t use any of these – but having them there is a security blanket. So what exactly do you research? You can’t just suddenly become an art expert, but you can have a churn through the memory banks, try and remember if they have been interested in anything. Have they talked about travel? Where have they been? Questions are always a good on. Didn’t you go to…? What was it like? Have a little look through their social media. Discover what they want to talk about.

Tip to survive visitors number 2 – be busy!

Plan lots of things to get you through. You are obviously not going to be sitting down and enjoying chewing the cud with these people. So don’t sit down! Be on the move and see lots of things. Then you are creating conversation topics everyday. Talking about places you have visited is probably going to be fairly safe.

Tip to survive visitors number 3 – Drink!

I am not talking water. I mean alcohol. Drinking can excuse a lots of sins. We can blame the booze for our misdemeanors and conversational slip up. Also hopefully we can ply our guests with enough that when we get it really wrong we can hope they either won’t care or won’t remember it in the morning.