Save the date. . .
. . . but lose your mind, says Rachel Johnson The email whooshes into the inbox. I click it open, thinking, ooh, goodie, let's have a look . . . 'Save the Date' it orders. My heart sinks.
I have just gone through a slew of these maddening, temporising e-vites, and I can reveal that I have been ordered to save the date for cocktails and canapes at the Mandarin Oriental to celebrate the WTM (don't know either) party of a PR company.
I have been told to save the date for a 'breakfast forum' to discuss 'Where is Britain's Innovative Edge?' with Editorial Intelligence at Nesta. I am ashamed to say I do not know what or where Nesta is, and never bothered to find out. I have been instructed to 'save the date!!' for a debate at the Royal Society of Arts on the motion that growth can be green-powered by Intelligence Squared in one of their futurecasting series of notto-be-missed events (as you might be able to detect, I am cutting and pasting the hype from their email).
I have been told to leave the lunch free for the next Brunswick Arts Lunch to chew over the details of upcoming projects and events in the context of the busy arts calendar.
'We will be sending formal invitations shortly but in the meantime,' Brunswick's nice people warn, 'save the date.'
I confess that all year I have only saved the actual date for three corporate events. One, a launch for India's and Neris's diet book (wild horses, etc, and the publicity guru, Katherine Stroud of Penguin, was also clever enough, in this case, to innocently leave a bulging cc list for all invitees to drool over). And two, I enthusiastically saved the date for an 'exclusive Vanity Fair screening' — four words calculated to get my juices flowing — of Taking Liberties at the Soho Hotel, a film in which my brother and my friend Henry Porter both appeared. And three, the Tina Brown Party, which was hosted by Reuters. 'Please do keep the date in your diary, and an invitation will be with you very soon,' I was informed by Random House, who were co-organising.
But still, I don't like it. I preferred the scene in the Eighties and Nineties when, far from sending plural notices of invites and email chasers and stiffies, energy was poured into trying to avoid gatecrashers. Now, the boot is on the other foot. It is a buyer's market. With so many launches and events now happening in London, capital of the world, hostesses are desperate for anyone to show at all. Even people they haven't invited.
So, inevitably, the curse of Save the Date has now struck private parties too. In the old days Betty Kenward (the ur-Jennifer of Jennifer's Diary) used to save pushy mothers endless grief by publishing, in the April edition of H&Q, a detailed calendar of forthcoming thrashes so debs' mothers could avoid clashes.
Now there are so many competing events, mostly promotional parties with agendas, party givers — both corporate and personal — are all at sea. Nobody replies. Everyone hedges their bets. Nobody commits So 'Save the Date', I am desperately begged, for an event in September. It could be a wedding, a wake, a three-day event involving 16 changes of clothes and guns six hours away on a grouse moor, but I am not to be told. I am only to save the date, and like it. Which I don't. It's like being told to 'Now wash your hands'. It manages to breed resentment and a lowering of social expectation, which is the opposite of the desired effect. We don't want to save the date, if we don't know exactly what we are saving the date for.
'I think it's indefensible for a private individual to do it to their friends,' says the etiquette expert Celestria Noel, a more recent Jennifer. 'People ought to send out an invitation the correct time before the event — six weeks is plenty — making sure it doesn't clash with Midsummer's Eve or Ascot Gold Cup Day, or the FA Cup final, and then they ought to trust, if it's a proper old-fashioned party, given by them, paid for by them, for their friends and neighbours, for their daughter's 18th or a 50th, that their real friends shall come.'
Amen. Oh yes — but that reminds me. I've another book out next year, so I hereby give general notice that you are to save the date — say 19 June — put a ring of steel around it in your diary, and then I will fail to send you an invitation, probably.
Annoying, isn't it?
www.racheljohnson.co.uk
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