Main featured image: photograph via Gwyneth Paltrow © Goop / Nordstrom.

The next time you’re invited to a dinner party, consider your host’s strict instruction to “just bring yourself ”; instead, pack a couple of pints of ice cream into a cool bag – you’ll be a hero to their kids, or to the exhausted host after the guests have gone and the house is tidied up. When you go to a party, do everyone a favour and leave yourself at home. The guest you need to bring is the enhanced you, the you that sparkles with brilliance, dressed to thrill in vertiginous heels, the you your friends were attracted to in the first place. Remember her? Before she became addicted to her devices, paralysed by the politics of fear, gluten-intolerant and worried about her bone density? Leave that bitch at home, in her slippers! Leave the cell phone home, too – or if you must bring it, pretend you’re at the Abbey, at a Tom Murphy play but with food, and switch it off.

The self you bring should either have something to say, be a good listener, an outrageous flirt or all three. Your role, as guest, is not to make small talk, but big talk. “Small talk should be banned,” according to an article in wired.co.uk by Kristen Bergman and Dan Ariely. To build relationships and deepen happiness, choose topics beyond the weather, the state of your joints, what you do for a living and where you plan to go on holiday. Your secret weapon might be the cute acrylic box set of TableTopics Conversation Starters, Dinner Party Edition. Memorise a few of its clever Questions to Start Great Conversations, like ‘What’s your most prized possession? The greatest invention? The most beautiful place you’ve ever seen? Your porn star name?’ So, call me Smokey Fairdale; I’m free this Saturday evening … @SusanZelouf

PET PEEVES

ASKING WHO else is invited before RSVPing; ARRIVING EARLY or on the dot; Turning up with TWO ARMS THE ONE LENGTH ie without a gift; Diners adding or asking for SEASONING BEFORE TASTING food; Guests offering to help and then STANDING IN THE WAY; Guests NOT OFFERING to help; Guests palming off CHEAP ALCOHOL AS A GIFT; TENSE couples; Obscure SOUNDTRACKS instead of the musical sweet spot; Diet DIVAS; Guests going to the loo and looking AROUND THE HOUSE; Vegetarians who are SUDDENLY PESCATARIANS; DOUBLE dippers; CUTLERY abusers; Water WORRIERS; Conversation MONOPOLISERS; Backseat COOKS; Children RUNNING RIOT; LINGERING, LOITERING guests.