Would you willingly surrender your phone if you were invited to the Clooneys’? Because that’s the deal, apparently. “I now have a phone basket that I use to take everyone’s phones away!” Amal Clooney recently told Glamour magazine in a rather stilted “conversation” with the cosmetics diva Charlotte Tilbury. “It’s important to get that balance where you have time alone with your family and with your friends where people feel like you can have a safe and frank exchange,” she explained.
Hmm. I’m fine with shoes-off households (although you reap what you sow when it comes to the state of my socks or my toes). But the phone basket is reminiscent of those aggressively jocular pub signs that say: “No wifi – talk to each other.” What if you’re dealing with a family or work situation, need to hide in the loo and stroke your shiny pocket rectangle to recharge your social batteries, or want to show George a cool meme of an anteater posing? Yes, the Clooneys are the A-est of A-list, with attendant privacy concerns and young children. But if you can’t trust people to behave properly, what are they doing in your home?
Most house rules imposed on guests feel iffy to me. My husband still recalls, horrified, a sign he saw at an acquaintance’s that read: “In this home, we eat, we clear away and then we talk.” Isn’t hospitality about being expansively welcoming and tolerant? If you can’t manage that, don’t have people over (as someone with the relaxed and patient forbearance of a wounded honey badger, this is my default option).
But having talked it through with friends, I’m coming round. Clooney food would probably be excellent, as one said, and fellow guests fascinating – I wouldn’t want to be distracted by junk WhatsApps from “recruitment consultants” when I should be committing every detail of the menu, interior, conversation and outfits to memory for future boasting. So, on balance, I think I’m pragmatically, if not philosophically, OK with it. I’m sure Amal will be thrilled. I look forward to my kitchen supper invitation.
• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
