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[Music] hello I'm Mary killin and I'm at the idler Academy today to help you to gain social confidence and to teach you all you need to know about some of the most difficult areas of social life I'm going to give four lectures the first will be on drinks parties the second dinner parties the third has parties and the fourth conversation and flattery I want to help you to gain all the friends you need and the ones that you can feel most happy in the company of there's no point in recruiting friends with whom you have no compatibility once you've started to recruit friends you may wish that you hadn't because friends have become something of a plague species we've got too many of them we all have too many now the good thing is that Professor Robin Dunbar at Oxford University has recently come up with a theory which has gained full plausibility in scientific circles the Dunbar number states that no one can have more than 150 meaningful relationships as the brain is not evolved enough to process anymore neocortical e don't just toys yourself for having more than 150 don't feel guilty about it you have to work them off as we say one way of working off a so called payload of people is to give a drinks party a drinks party has a number of advantages over a dinner party people don't get trapped between two others you can circulate freely it only lasts for two hours so you can you know it needn't rob you of your entire evening if it's no good but you should go with the correct attitude go to a drinks party thinking I'm not going to make any kind of fantastically profound connections or have any amazing conversations you will just be talking in platitudes except that a drinks party is there for the purpose you do the groundwork there for full interchanges with others in house parties and at dinners and on walks well you go to a drinks party for is to exercise presenteeism it doesn't matter how witty and clever and powerful you are if you're always in your own flat watching things on your laptop people will forget about you going to drinks parties is a bit like speed dating for you and for the people you meet it allows you to sort of absorb the atmosphere of the other people and tune in rather like they do at speed-dating they can tell immediately if they like the other person you two can just sense whether somebody's on your wavelength or not like tuning a radio but only if they're actually in front of you so it's a very important duty for somebody with a lot of friends to give a drinks party because look at it this way for five hundred pounds you could buy a ticket to one charity event no doubt it would be useful to the charity your money but for the same money you could have one hundred people half of them will be reformed alcoholics and the other half can have ten Panza bottle wine you can make a hundred people very happy for five hundred pounds ideally you would have waiters but they're not entirely necessary you can have a counter at one end of the room with drinks on it and let people help themselves in some ways that's just as good because it allows people to get away from others they have been trapped in conversational cul-de-sacs with it's very important to invite all generations don't just your own age group that could be a disaster you want middle-aged old aged and teen and 20-somethings the Teen and 20-somethings meet useful contacts and they stop twittering and talking rubbish the middle-aged people feel I'm not quite so past it as I thought because look at these much older people I'm better than unless decrepit than they are and the very old people are thrilled to be in the company of the young exuberant sort of vital people who are glamorous never have a fiftieth birthday party with any other 50 year olds the viejas Dorie are a very important group to include in a social event just as the young once had the upper hand the VAR story are now the most sought after in terms of social desirability this is partly because their characters and intellect were formed in the days before media pollution when brains were active Questers rather than passive receptors consequently their conversation tends to be high-caliber such people also have lived compared to people born after say 1960 have lived at a tempo where thrills were actually thrilling and Boredoms actually boring and romance was much more exciting because there was none of the barnyard quality to romance that we have today you can take a tip from those old people and the way they concentrate when they're speaking to you and listen to what they have to say and learn something from their civility and general superiority to those of us who came after another formula that's very successful three men to everyone woman I know it's an silly and difficult to achieve but it isn't if you ask every female to invite three men and they needn't be people that she's attracted to the other females if every female invites three men that's about right you can see this formula successful because at public schools coeds they always have a policy one-third girls two-thirds boys otherwise some weird syndrome takes hold whether men become wimps and the women beret goes mobile college for example adhere to this policy and it trained someone good enough to attract and be ladylike enough in the company of the future King go early to a drinks party if you go late it'll be crowded you want if you've made the effort of getting ready and go into the party you may as well extract the maximum benefit from it arrive as early as you can and then leave you know at 8:00 if it's 6:00 too late come at 6:00 then leave at 8:00 don't linger the important thing is to realize that no one is thinking about you and whether you're inadequate or small or anything like that they're all thinking I wonder what she or he thinks of me so put others at their ease by smiling it doesn't matter if you've got nothing to say you can do take a tip from the Queen and just say have you come far now to avoid being stuck in a conversational cul-de-sac what you should do is bring a letter in your pocket in an envelope if the conversation gets sticky you can always say I was just handed this letter when I came in will you excuse me I better look and see what it says oh my goodness sorry I better pop outside and make a call something like that otherwise you can just carry on smiling pleasantly but allow the gap between yourself and your interlocutor get gradually larger until people start to push their way through it and other people will divide you naturally one tip a friend of mine uses when she goes into a party is to pick up two glasses and then she walks purposefully across the room as though looking for someone she sees people she likes she can go and join them if she sees people she doesn't want to be held up by she couldn't say nice to see you or talk for a couple of short sentences and then move on as though she's trying to deliver the second glass now I myself find if you go to a party where you know you're going to know too many people you are going to cause more make more enemies than friends if you can't talk to all these people particularly if you're important so what you do is you arrive but you stand very near the entry point the people flood in hello how are you very well nice to see you no more than 90 seconds because they themselves will want to surge on in to access the drinks also they will feel the seething crowd coming up behind them so that's one way of processing the maximum number of people and you know it may sound boastful but many of us know too many people Nicholas Coleridge the British chairman of Conde Nast calculated that by the age of 42 he'd already met 25,000 people you need to plan ahead when you go to a drinks party inevitably people will want to go out to dinner after it now you mustn't make the mistake of hanging around till the bitter end to see who's left and who wants to join you one there won't be a table in a restaurant for the number of people you've rounded up probably about 10 and also everyone will get tired and irritable and while they wait for the slack arts to leave what you do is you say in advance you ring somebody before the party when you want to have dinner afterwards yes okay so you arrive and then somebody you don't particularly want to have dinner with comes up and says hello Mary who are you having dinner with should we have dinner and then I can say oh well Rory Stewart is giving a dinner for me afterwards but I think he's you know he's asked everyone so I can't invite you I'm afraid he might go up to Rory Stewart saying can I crash your dinner Roy's jerk and say oh I sorry I didn't know that you'd be available and I've only got a table for six ideally some people who feel that they might be hmm irritable by the end of the evening some people especially the pregnant eat before the drinks party and then they can stay to the bitter end really enjoying it because they're not feeling hungry or faint a friend of mine who has is a well-known comedian finds at the end of his gigs that he just goes home because otherwise it would be divisive he can't when people say who you having dinner with he says I'm just going home and in that way he gets out of hurting anyone's feelings one woman I know who gave a drinks party suddenly realized at the last moment she was catastrophically short of men this was a small drinks party she had a brilliant idea costly but and only problem only but possible if you live in London she rang up the agency doctor call and ordered three doctors to come these three doctors of course are all very urbane and sophisticated young men and they made delightful company there's also the tutoring agency bright young things in London which boasts a huge number of graduates sophisticated charming why not try and hire some graduates if you're really desperate if for example you're trying to help her goddaughter who has just come to London for the first time doesn't know many people you could do a lot worse than to ha some possible friends from the tutoring agency as a starter guide to us 40 pounds on our might yes quite costly but they may give you a group rate reduction now one of the things that happens is you go to a party and you cannot think who on earth that person is walking towards you smiling what do you do this afflicted a man I used to work for an editor who was always causing huge offence he eventually got rounded by always carrying on him a petition to save the bar now it meant that when he saw familiar strangers coming towards him he was able to say stop right there before we say anything let me get you to sign my petition to save the bar now and then the person of course he said can you write your name and block capitals and then it was fine I mean it looks a bit corporate but if you do want to issue people with sticky labels with their names on it when they come in you can always say it's we've got a lot of geriatric guests here the VA s door a and they can't remember who anyone else is it's a marvelous excuse everyone loves it especially girls who see handsome Adonis's want to know who they are then they can just read their name tape do them on a post-it peel off sticky thing at a drinks party remember that you really shouldn't have more than two glasses I'm sorry to be depressing but if you're going on to a restaurant afterwards you'll have a further two glasses there and you really don't want to make yourself ill or dehydrate yourself Tran sticked to glasses the way to do this is to just take them as tiny sips of your first glass spin it out for the first hour then throw it back get a second glass and do the same with that otherwise the way to make keep topping you up and before you know it you've had six or seven units and you're talking rubbish and people are moving away from you occasionally one guest will drink too much and start to become objectionable there are various ways of dealing with this but I've had success myself with a following method I've taken the offender aside and whispered I've got something so interesting to tell you I've got to tell you in private come with me I've then led that person to a bedroom and said just sit on the bed I'll be back in a minute I must just go and get the glass of water to stand outside the door for about 90 seconds any drunk on a bed will fall asleep within minutes and you can leave them on the bed until the party's over drinks party should never be open-ended they should always have a definite cutoff point at which they end otherwise I'm afraid you run the risk of people becoming drunk and objectionable and for this reason two hours is usually the maximum that you should expect your guests to stay certain way to encourage people to leave is of course to hide the supply of alcohol once they are sort of revved up and ready to go if they look around the room and there's no more drink to be had they will automatically make their own way to the next watering hole or restaurant without you having to be so crude as to say will you go now as obviously you don't want to ever do that because you want to be hospitable so the best thing is for the drunk to think it's their own decision and their own idea to leave one thing that spoils parties these days is the terrible torturous high heels that women feel they ought to wear now I recently went to a party where 600 magazine women had gathered at the Bishop's Palace in Fulham for a farewell party for an editor all of them were on shoes at least 6 inches high all of them were in agony but if everyone else is 6 inches higher than you it's understandable that you would feel you should wear the high shoes too one woman I know has got around this problem in the following way she arrives early at the party in a paper brown paper bag from a book shop is a brick she stands on the brick in the corner of a room no notices she just stays there all evening people come and go because they can see her from far away because she's so tall and they come and go and chat to her yet she enjoys the full comfort of her flat manolo blanik pink suede brogues and I would advise anyone who feels they can get to a party early and stand in a corner to do that because it's humiliating to have to take off your high shoes halfway through or spend a huge amount of money on a taxi there and back when you could easily save the money and put towards giving another drinks party yourself at a drinks party you're sometimes talking to one person whose name you forgotten when another person whose name you've forgotten comes forward and you're forced into the position of introducing them I think the best thing to do is just to say you two will have to introduce each other as I get very flustered at parties then nobody minds that of course if they're wearing their name badges there's no need to worry about it now some people find it very disconcerting that the young nah double kiss new people are introduced to for the first time what should somebody over 30 do when this happens to them just passively allow them to do it some of them do it it seems to be a fashion there's no need to recoil from the unsolicited intimacy it's all very bubbly and meaningless should you shake hands with people you've just been introduced to yes of course you have to make that connection and what's more you may also find this little secret message coming from the physical contact that helps you even more to clarify whether you are compatible with such a person somebody wrote to me once saying she was giving a drinks party for some very shy teenagers and she wondered how to break the ice and make it go with a swing I advised her to hold the party in the studio in her garden it had a wooden floor and she was able to masking tape off the floor into numbered squares she was then able to issue the children as they came in with cards rather like dance cards ten names had to be calculated carefully beforehand when the bell rang you had to go in standings in sqrt n square 20 square 15 whatever and you had to talk to that person until the bell rang again the teenagers complained bitterly as they arrived they very quickly got into the spirit of it and they loved it teenagers love structure and they have nothing to say to anyone so they adore it when they're forced to make conversation you know by compulsion masking tape can be used on an ordinary carpet or seagrass to create the same effect the idea is to have save five 10-minute conversations and then allow them to circulate freely at the end by which time the ice will have been broken one of the most terrible mistakes somebody can make at a drinks party is to look over the shoulder of the person they're talking to now when I'm out and about I say Oh have you met so-and-so very often people say to me by way of criticism yes he is yeah he appears to be quite nice however he's the sort of person that's always looking over your shoulder at a drinks party looking out for somebody better to come in so he can move away from you people seem to be very offended by this now it's illogical because you go to a drinks party for the purpose of interacting with as many people as possible of course you want to know who's coming and who's going what if your own sister you haven't seen for a few weeks is about to walk in but you have to do it more subtly speak concentrate on the person you're talking to stare into their eyes and really listen for a little burst in fact you don't even have to listen as long as you're staring into their eyes then every so often act as though somebody's bumped into you and in your return sweep you can take in who else is in the room without causing offence to your interlocutor drinks parties are important for many reasons getting people together having their dynamism floorspace it's all part of your duty to give such parties if you're capable of giving them because the more sort of bonding that takes place particularly romantic bonding the better and many people are trapped in offices where there is no romantic potential whatsoever particularly the sad girls who work in magazine buildings younger people for example those at university may wish to give parties the trouble is who's going to pay for them one of my correspondents wrote in to say that while at Durham University he often gave a drinks party because he had plenty of money however other people who didn't have money would give bring a bottle parties and find to their annoyance that it was always the richest students who didn't bring a bottle now they didn't mean any harm it was just that they weren't used to bringing bottles so my friend Phillip wood the correspondent came up with the solution aided by me he gave buyer bottle parties he went to a Knopf licence and bought on sale or return bulgarian Cabernet which was acceptable in those days and Eden beer he'd then issue an invitation come to a buy a bottle party h14 the castle saturday that sort of thing when people arrived they'd be required to give five pounds in return they get a bottle of wine worth say eight pounds so they were still being hosted to an extent but it meant that they could or two bottles of beer the same amount but it meant that they could avoid making themselves ill by switching wines or drinking low-quality wine so that was quite a practical solution and you might consider it for if you're a student yourself or someone with limited income book launches and art gallery openings are a different type of drinks party there's really only one rule about a book launched these days you must buy a book the publishing industry is in such decline that it's really your duty to buy one and in fact most of the largest numbers of cells often take place at the opening parties you must keep this wonderful tradition of book writing going and in your own small way I hate to be spelling this out so graphically but if you're going to drink 12 pounds worth of wine you may as well buy a book at 15 pounds 99 as you'll still be you'll still have had two hours of entertainment out of the event at a gallery opening ideally you will look at the paintings on show some people feel they can't go to a gallery opening without buying a painting but I think that is not a requirement it's just that the super-rich feel they have to buy one the Ordre member of the public is just there or friend of the artist is there to swell the numbers bring a bit of gaiety be social Polly filler and it's nice to go to a gallery opening because there is something for you to talk about I hope this information has been useful to you in my second lecture I will be focusing on the difficulties and delights of dinner parties you