Why cabbage isn't served in posh houses, and other top 'etiquette' tips

Also, blackberry pie, a terrific new book, my disappointment of the week and some bonus Dennis content...

William offering croissant tips

Do you know who I mean by William Hanson? You may know him from newspaper articles about etiquette, or the hit podcast Help, I Sexted My Boss, which he co-presents with Jordan North. Alternatively, from Instagram, where he posts waggish videos to 3m followers offering advice on, for example, how to eat lobsters or a croissant (to some fairly mocking comments underneath. ‘He must be booking a hotel room just to fart,’ one of his followers said scornfully underneath the croissant video, to which William gamely replied ‘I don’t pass wind. Although there was one moment when something stirred and a little bit of Chanel No 5 came out.’)

Often, if I hear that someone is an ‘etiquette expert’ I’m quite dubious about them. Who is this bossy charlatan telling me how to eat peas? But I first met William some years ago, while I was working at Tatler maybe, and was totally charmed. He is a very good egg, very funny, self-deprecating, and while he does have quite firm views about how to eat peas, he also has perfect manners and he’d never say anything if you embarrassed yourself by eating them, for example, with a fish knife.

@williamhansonetiquetteYou can Spear(s) your peas more ✨elegantly✨ by using your nearest sticky foodstuff as a glue with your tines! #dining #etiquette #williamhanson

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

He’s also got a book out this week, called It’s Just Good Manners, and I was sent an early copy. I felt quite nervous about reading this. Could it possibly better the classic blue Debrett’s guide to manners which all new Tatler employees were presented with when they joined the team? The classic etiquette guide that insisted pears must be eaten with a spoon?

Having read William’s book, I can happily declare it a riot. Although actually, not just a riot. Properly informative too, with a incredible amount of detail on subjects including but not limited to: how many kisses to offer when meeting someone, wedding invitations, dietary requirements, shoe colour, voice notes, the correct number of canapés to serve per person (10-12), naff and non-naff napkin shapes, and why cabbage isn’t usually served in posh houses.

Towards the start of the book, he makes the point that while the word ‘etiquette’ has all sorts of connotations these days, and people may think it stuffy and old-fashioned, actually all it means is making someone comfortable. It’s just good manners, in other words. And don’t we need it now, William argues, more than ever, when people are quite so rude to others in real life as well as on the internet?

The preface alone is a joy, incorporating the British madness over whether cream or jam goes first on scones, and a note on the wooden cat that The Savoy keeps to hand which is placed in the 14th seat should they have a table of 13 in for lunch or dinner (bad luck to have 13 around a table). It’s a wonderful book - witty and waspish, just like its author, and never finger wagging in tone. I learned a good deal from from it (I know, even me), and think it would make a particularly jolly present if you’re going to stay with anyone soon.

Here are my top 10 nuggets:

1. On meeting new people.

   ‘The best-mannered people will always ask questions about other people, and then a follow-up question or two about whatever anecdote has just been offered,’ says William. He and his husband apparently have a rule that, if anyone talks about themselves for 10 minutes or longer, they’re probably not worth bothering with. Quite right.

2. On what to do when someone’s flies are open.

   This is in the section where William says that you should make eye contact and someone and discretely gesture at your mouth if you spot another around the table with a seed or spinach in their teeth. ‘I was once at dinner with friends and I noticed the host’s flies were undone,’ he writes. ‘Now, had I made eye contact and touched my own flies, the evening could have gone in a different direction. Instead, noticing his Apple Watch, I visited the lavatory, messaged him, and by the time I had come out of the loo the flies were fastened.’ You see? Brilliant.

3. They’re called breakfast, lunch and dinner.

   ‘Wearers of flat caps and owners or whippets will insist that I should have said “breakfast, lunch and tea,” but I am afraid I am right and they are wrong and that’s all there is to it,’ William says simply.

4. Why cabbage isn’t usually served at posh houses.

   Or sprouts, he says in the book, although I suspect this rule must be thrown out over Christmas. Apparently it’s because there’s a chemical found in both which blackens silver - ‘solid or plate’, William clarifies. Who knew? I certainly didn’t.

5. There’s no such thing as being fashionably late.

   ‘With all the tech and information at our disposal today, there should never be any reason for anyone to be late again.’ YES WILLIAM.

6. ‘Unless you’re staying for the weekend, there is really no need to ask for the wifi password.’

   I sososososo agree with this. People who arrive at others’ houses for lunch and immediately demand the wifi password are tiresome. Are you the prime minister? Is the sky about to fall in? ‘Hosts should make sure their wifi password is as long, complicated and laborious as possible…so guests who have been so rude as to ask for it get flustered and bored.’

7. In the wedding section, ‘guests should have some loose change to hand for any retiring collection there may be at the end of the ceremony.’

   I am always the person who forgets change at weddings and have to ask a pal sitting nearby for a coin, as if a small child in church being given a pound on Sundays by a parent. William also includes a little anecdote about a particularly acerbic vicar who once was heard to comment ‘We prefer notes as coins do scratch the plate.’

8. ‘Being succinct is an art when it comes to voice notes.’

   Hard agree from me. I have a general rule that I try not to go over a minute, which I stressed to my boyfriend fairly on in our relationship to the extent that now, whenever Paul sends me a voice note, he will rush if he realises he’s nearly used up the allotted time and say ‘Ok-I’m-nearly-at-a-minute-bye!’ William goes on to say that once a voice note has been sent, it’s considerate to add a line of text summarising the contents. ‘That way, the recipient knows if you need something urgently or are just passing the time of day as you mince down the road.’ I’m not entirely sure I agree with this as I think the last thing any of us needs is MORE Whatsapps, but it’s a nice gesture.

9. On restaurants that are slow.

   ‘If I were prime minister, I would allow all patrons to be able to leave the table without paying after ten minutes of sitting with the bill in front of them but no card machine brought. Sadly, however, I am not yet in high office and this practice remains illegal.’

10. On being spotted if you’re a celebrity.

    It’s not necessarily a problem that will plague many of us, but William includes a wonderful anecdote about Claudia Winkleman here, who is apparently often stopped and mistaken for Davina McCall. ‘Claudia does not burst their bubble,’ William writes, ‘but instead signs “With lots of love, Davina MCall” and walks on.’

The book is full of little joys like the above. It’s out on Thursday and you can pre-order it HERE.

Picture of the Week

Pie. Is there anything better?

Behold, a delicious blackberry pie. Or at least, the remnants of a delicious blackberry pie. Every year, Mum’s postman - Gary - picks the blackberries along her farm track in Sussex and every year he then presents her with a pie. Isn’t that the sweetest thing ever? (Is Gary single, I once asked Mum, and she laughed it off, although I note she didn’t technically answer the question.)

I read over the weekend that Royal Mail are about to hike the price of a first-class stamp to £1.65, and I did joke to Mum that it was no wonder Royal Mail were in such trouble if all their postmen were picking blackberries on company time. But she said Gary does his picking on his day off.

There are still some berries in the hedgerows of West Sussex atm, not sure about the rest of the country, so you might be able to make your own pie if you’re quick about it. Gary’s pie was splendid - not too sweet, not too sour, and very good pastry. If there’s a postman called Gary in the new series of Bake Off (Prue, Paul Hollywood and co return to Channel 4 two weeks today, FYI), you heard about him here first.

Recommendation of the Week

You might have read this already. It’s been out for a couple of weeks, immediately hit the bestseller list and has been discussed at length in the papers. It’s Robert Harris’s latest, the story of the affair between HH Asquith, the 61-year-old prime minister at the outbreak of World War One, and a 26-year-old aristocrat, Venetia Stanley. I feel like I vaguely knew about this affair already, and as Harris says in his acknowledgments, various biographers and academics have written about the matter before now. But in sparkling Harris form, he’s managed to weave it into a novel that reads like a thriller (he’s the master of taking historical events and turning them into gripping semi-fiction. See also Fatherland, Pompeii and Archangel).

I ripped through this one, astonished by the endless, endless letters and telegrams that Asquith sent Venetia (this isn’t a spoiler. At the beginning of the book Harris says that, while he invented Venetia’s replies to Asquith since the originals were burned, all the correspondence from him to her that he quotes is - amazingly - real.)

The book’s been in the papers because the Asquith family say that Harris has played hard and fast with the truth. ‘Absolutely tedious!’ the Earl of Oxford (Asquith’s great-grandson) has declared of the novel. What can’t be denied, however, is that the prime minister did send over 600 rather mopey letters to his young lover (although the question of whether they *did it* is also controversial), at a time when his mind should possibly have been less on his trousers and more on the trenches.

PS. In other book news, Richard Osman’s new novel - a new murder story, ie not one of the Thursday Murder Club series - is out this week. We Solve Murders, it’s called, and it’s about a father-daughter detective duo. Some people are snotty about his books (‘imagine writing anything so hideously popular!’), and sneer at ‘cosy crime’ in general. I love them. Also, at the risk of repetition, I think those who sneer at others for their choice of reading are REALLY BORING.

Nonsense Ever So Slight Disappointment of the Week

Now, I’m a bit sad about this. Last week, I cheered and celebrated that the second series of Colin From Accounts had just landed. I hadn’t watched it, I said, because it had only just been released that very morning, but after the triumph of the first series, it was hopefully going to be just as brilliant.

Hmmmm. It’s had pretty glowing reviews. The Telegraph gave it five stars and said it’s overcome that ‘tricky second series’ curse. The Guardian’s given it five stars. Camilla Long in The Sunday Times, never one to overly praise something, also gave it a big thumbs up this weekend. And yet… I’ve now finished it and am a teeny tiny bit disappointed.

I never want to slag anyone’s hard work off (honest) and I’m not sneering about it (see above). There are definitely moments of brilliance in the second series, the two leads are unbelievably talented and clever, and the facial expressions pulled by Ash (Harriet Dyer) in particular make me lol. I read over the weekend that the couple have moved to LA now because the show - and them - have become so huge. GREAT. Amazing. Well done them.

I just felt that the new series suffers from the problem which often afflicts follow-ups, chiefly that now the couple in question have got together, all the tension has gone. Without that ‘will they, won’t they?’ question, it’s not as engaging. The storylines in the second series mostly centre around their friends, colleagues and families, and I don’t care as much about their friends and family as much as I care about them.

It’s the same with plenty of love stories (the majority of them?). Once the main couple have got together, what then? It’s why we’re hooked to One Day all the way through, because we’re not sure whether they’re going to finally get together. It’s why Pride and Prejudice works, because we’re so entertained by the slow burn between Lizzy and Darcy. Gone With The Wind! The Notebook! I’ve only recently read Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín but the same applies - which way is Eilis going to go? You could say the same about Precipice, discussed above. It’s engrossing because you’re not sure what’s going to happen to them. The only book I can think of right now which I LOVED and which starts after a couple have got together is Alain de Botton’s The Course Of Love, which declares at the beginning that it’s unusual because its love story kicks at the point where most others finish. That’s the whole point of it.

Like I said, there are still jokes in Colin From Accounts Part Two. It’s funny! It’s original! It’s not like so much else on TV! I just don’t think it quite lived up to the first series. Or am I being too harsh?

(On the other hand, the first episode of the new Slow Horses is, obviously, brilliant. Thrillingly, this is also the series that filmed a few scenes near my house in Crystal Palace. Remember that freezing Monday in January that I spent loitering around my local streets trying to catch sight of Gary Oldman? See below…)

A day well spent tbh

PPS. Bonus Dennis content

He was on the cover of YOU magazine on Sunday, because I wrote about our summer road trip for their travel issue. If you want to read that it’s HERE (I’m so sorry if it’s paywalled. Plenty of people complain about this but newspapers have to find a way to monetise their websites so that journalists can be paid! And most sites allow you to read one or two pieces for free if you register!)

Cunningly, even though that photo looks like it was taken somewhere in the Swiss mountains (Swiss? Do I mean Swiss?), it was actually taken in a studio in Shoreditch against a canvas with this image on it. And Dennis was a very good boy all day; only three or four designer shoes chewed and 83 widdles on the studio floor. I joked on Instagram last week that I’m using him like a Victorian chimney boy. ‘Come on lad, up you go!’ But I promise he has a very lovely life, and his favourite venison-flavoured biscuits (!) don’t come cheap, you know.