ALEXANDRA SHULMAN’S NOTEBOOK: I’m a Party Expert: These are the Do’s and Don’ts

After 25 years of hosting parties at Vogue, I think I’m something of an expert on party etiquette, for both guests and hosts.

Although Vogue parties aren’t exactly like inviting friends over for a drink and a sausage on a stick, the problems are surprisingly similar, and bad manners are bad wherever they are.

Below are some of the top dos and don’ts for anyone hosting or attending a holiday party.

Hosts

• Dress codes are awful – why make people wear something that doesn’t necessarily look good and will probably never wear again? PS: Costumes are totally unacceptable.

• Never seat couples next to each other at the table unless you’re in the United States, where, for some reason, the practice is common. I’m surprised how often people do this at weddings. Who wants to sit next to the person they’re carpooling with?

• Allow people to bring someone else, but maybe not their mother. Leonardo DiCaprio once took his mother to a Bafta dinner, but not everyone is Leonardo DiCaprio

• Don’t apologize to your guests for anything; let them assume that everything is as it should be.

• Remember that young people don’t drink wine, they love cocktails.

• Don’t worry about the food, no one remembers what they ate if they had a good time. Although Daylesford Organic founder Carole Bamford’s ‘caviar and carols’ party is an exception because even the most important guests are like pigs at the trough when it comes to caviar.

Guests

• Never accept an invitation to an event that you know you’ll want to skip when the day comes. Nigella Lawson refers to this as the “distant elephant”, the obligation that lurks in the mind and grows larger as the day approaches.

• Don’t ask who else is invited.

• Never involve the host in your transportation problems.

• Don’t bring flowers. No host wants to fight over a vase.

• Never tinker with the seating plan that the host has spent hours working on. Recently, I sat next to a man who was not supposed to be in that chair. He had changed seats because he didn’t want to be in front of someone whose wife he had had an affair with. Understandable to a certain extent, but before knowing the circumstances, I thought that the person who was supposed to be next to me had moved to avoid me.

• Do a French exit and just escape. Hosts don’t need to know you’re leaving, and when they’re done being able to relax, they don’t want to start saying goodbye.

• Don’t sit in a corner with your best friend.

Forget furoshiki – just fix the potholes!

Our council, Brent, North London, has provided residents with an A-Z guide to Christmas recycling.

This is the same group that once sent someone to advise me that if I thought I had too much food for the recycling cart, I should consider using old cheese to make a quiche instead of throwing it away. On that note, I was intrigued to see your latest advice.

Bows and ribbons, apparently, cannot be recycled and must be saved for next year; metal mince pie boxes and sweet wrappers should be crumpled into a ball and thrown into the bin headed for landfill; and we should consider adopting the Japanese practice of furoshiki: using cloth, instead of paper, to wrap gifts.

Personally, I would prefer the City Council do something about the terrible state of the sidewalks.

Figures are not Clive’s specialist subject

Poor Excuse of the Week: BBC newsreader and Mastermind presenter Clive Myrie, who is clearly a smart guy, claims he mistook paperwork as the reason he failed to declare more than £150,000 in freelance speaking fees . With those profits, plus the £310,000 a year he receives from taxpayers, he will surely be able to afford an accountant.

Would Gregg say I’m middle-aged?

When Gregg Wallace claimed that only “a handful of middle-class women of a certain age” objected to his disgusting behavior, I wondered if he qualified.

Middle class, yes, but am I middle-aged? What is the breaking point when you become old instead of middle-aged?

And did you consider that Generation Z, which we all know is the most censorious generation of all time, would give you free rein?

Brilliant Eddie, the baby-faced killer

Thinking about age, not only police officers look younger, but also murderers.

Eddie Redmayne, brilliant as the killer in The Day of the Jackal, seems like a fresh college student compared to how I remembered Edward Fox in the same role. Eddie is 42 years old, but Fox is only 36. However, at that time, when I was a teenager, Fox seemed almost ancient.

The show goes on, without the clever Anna

Judging by the reviews, it seems that the musical The Devil Wears Prada has fallen into the usual trap that everything related to the fashion industry falls into. They are almost always a bad caricature and never convey anything resembling the glamor of reality.

To support Elton John, who wrote the score, Anna Wintour was at the first night dressed in Prada, but sensibly snuck out before seeing the show. No one knows better than her that what is important is optics.

Will the last buyer turn off the lights?

Oxford Street used to be the highlight of London’s Christmas lights. But now the big bucks are on Bond Street, where the spectacular decorations outside stores such as Dior, Cartier, Louis Vuitton and Brunello Cucinelli bring traffic to a standstill due to selfie-taking crowds.

But will anyone come in to buy? Well, not so much.