People find that baffling. My own sister thought I’d lost my mind when I told her in June.
But the point was never to make her pay. She has money. Handing her a bill would have got me a row and a story she’d have told for a decade about the daughter-in-law who invoiced her.
The point was that she should stand at the end of a table in her own garden and be the one who welcomed everybody.
Because I had worked out, some time around the middle of June, that she had not done that in nine years, and that a woman who has not hosted anybody since her husband died is not being greedy when she turns up at your house for the ninth time in a year.
She’s being lonely in the only shape she has left.
The barbecues stopped being a problem the day she got to be the host of one.
