Going down the memory lane … swam at the Bondi Iceberg 17 years ago and swam at Little Bay of Ice today … sea is still very fresh …
Why I’m not tidying up before guests come over
Dispensing with the perfect life pretence of a rushed clear-up makes for better social events, better friendships and a better life
Jack King, an Anglican priest from Tennessee, coined the phrase “scruffy hospitality” a decade ago. He and his wife enjoyed hosting friends for dinner, and had a standard checklist they’d run through in the days and hours before guests were due to arrive: “Select a menu, complete grocery shopping, mow the lawn, sweep the floors, run the vacuum, clean the playroom . . . set the table, clean the playroom (again) . . . ”
Powering through the list certainly made their home more inviting to visitors. But it also dissuaded them from inviting more visitors, because it was so much work. Besides, King started to wonder, wasn’t there something odd about putting so much effort into hiding the daily reality of their lives from the people they called their friends? And so the couple made a decision: they would start inviting friends to dine in their home as it was, and on whatever happened to be in the kitchen cupboards. As King put it later in a sermon: “Scruffy hospitality means you hunger more for good conversation and serving a simple meal of what you have [than] in the impression your home or lawn makes.”
Arguably, the idea was ahead of its time: it’s surely right now, in our ever more virtualised, work-from-home world, that we need all the help we can get to lower the psychological barriers that stand in the way of real-life socialising.
As a concept, “scruffy hospitality” would be valuable enough if all it conveyed was permission to put a little less effort into keeping a pristine home. But King was on to something deeper. Being willing to let others see the reality of your life isn’t merely forgivable; I’m convinced it makes for better social events, better friendships and a better life.
Even before encountering King’s work, I’d observed a strange contradiction in my own attitude to household mess. If I noticed, say, crumbs underneath our fridge, or mail stacked inexplicably on top of our toaster, in the hours before guests arrived, I’d hurry to tidy things up. If I discovered an unflushed toilet — which I regret to say can happen, in homes with small kids — I’d breathe a sigh of relief that I’d discovered such a disastrous oversight in time.
Yet if I noticed crumbs or stray letters while visiting friends, I’d feel obscurely privileged, as if I’d been granted a VIP access pass to their lives — and so we really must be friends. Even an unflushed toilet would elicit no judgment from me. Why would it? Life happens. And most of us are much more instinctively generous about acknowledging it with our friends than we are with ourselves.
To put on an impressive show for visitors is to erect a facade, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that; some of us love the challenge of creating the most enchanting one we can. But any notion that such a facade is mandatory, before visitors are to be admitted to your life, must arise from the assumption that there’s something incomplete or inadequate about your life the rest of the time. Since your visitors’ home is presumably likewise usually a mess, it might even imply there’s something wrong with their lives, too. No wonder calling off the whole performance can forge a deeper bond. The moment I first see a friend’s chaotic kitchen is like the moment in a blooper reel when two actors can’t help breaking character and collapsing in laughter. Officially, it shouldn’t be happening — but it always feels delightfully real when it does.
The virtues of letting facades crumble aren’t confined to dinner parties, either. The writer David Zahl refers to the broader worldview in which we approach each other in the assumption that everyone is imperfect and struggling as a “low anthropology”. It’s the opposite of a “high anthropology”, in which we focus optimistically on the great things we expect from others and ourselves — yet which all too often leads to anxiety, judgment, resentment and burnout. “A high anthropology views people as defined by their best days and greatest achievements,” Zahl writes, whereas a low anthropology “assumes a throughline of heartache and self-doubt . . . [and] that the bulk of our mental energy is focused on subjects that would be embarrassing or even shameful if broadcast.”
Calling off the performance is a lot to ask, of course, in a world in which we’re so often evaluated on our surface appearances. And I’m open to the objection that embracing scruffy hospitality may be rather more socially acceptable for men than for women. Still, it seems a worthy and a liberating goal to which to aspire. It acknowledges what we all know anyway to be true — that any impression of flawless competence we may sometimes manage to project is really just an illusion. It invites us to find joy in the awareness of our shared imperfect predicament. And it points towards a vision of life as, metaphorically speaking, one extended scruffy dinner party — in which we’re all cooking for each other, and nobody’s pretending it’s anything fancier than spaghetti with tomato sauce, and the lack of pretence is exactly what makes it feel so convivial and full of life.
Oliver Burkeman’s latest book is ‘Meditations for Mortals: Four weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts’ (Bodley Head)
Not so little bay … old Prince Henri Hospital … rocks created a safe circled ⭕️ pool for the nurses to swim in …
