Sports Calendar

For those guests so amusing and mentally bracing, Who talked about racing, and racing, and racing . . .” But staying with people calls for a three-line-whip on thankyou letters. Laurie Lee, whose easy charm and entertaining skills with conjuring tricks and violin made him a much-invited weekender at country houses, wrote lyrical letters afterwards: “There’s a health in the air, a sweep of grandeur in the country that makes one feel superhuman . . . What lovely country for the flesh and spirit . . . All the clumsy knots and neuroses of London disentangle themselves as if by magic.”

Jan Struther, author of Mrs Miniver, came up with a novel idea in an essay she calledSnillocs. This is “Collins” backwards, a reference to Mr Collins, the egregious clergyman in Pride and Prejudice who makes such heavy weather of his thanks to the Bennets after being their house-guest (so bread-and-butter letters are in some circles still called Collinses).

Struther questioned the convention that a host is conferring a great favour, the guest receiving a boon.

Why should Collinses adopt a fawning, servile tone? she asked. “Thank you a thousand times for having us to stay . . . it was TOO KIND of you to think of asking us.” Sincere these may be, but for many guests the whole business of accepting an invitation and thanking afterwards is hedged about with a sneaking resentment.

Perhaps the boot should be on the other foot, Struther suggested: the host should write and thank the guests for going to all the trouble of uprooting themselves from their cosy hearths and undergoing the expense and discomfort of travel, trains and motorways, packing and unpacking, getting there and getting home. (Of course a guest who received a thankyou letter from hosts before having time to write his thanks might feel furious at being upstaged.)

Virginia Ironside mentions the additional complication of country hosts who take you along with them to their neighbours’ drinks party. “You turn up like a spaniel at your hosts’ heels – ‘We’ve brought Virginia’ – and then have to write and thank them too and say what a lovely house they have.” But the chief rule of these bread-and-butter letters is to indicate that you wished you could have stayed on. You can always quote Jane Austen: “It was a delightul visit – perfect in being much too short.”

My own most cherished thank-yous are the truly original ones, unique to the sender. Two artistic examples hang in frames on our dining-room wall: one is by the brilliant cartoonist and author Posy Simmonds. After Sunday lunch, she sent a note with a drawing of our dalmatian in a chef’s hat and striped apron, standing at the stove on his hind legs, stirring a pot.

The other is by an amateur watercolourist who, after staying with us, had cleverly dashed off a small painting of our house to use as his letter-head. One friend is adept at composing cod-Latin verses; another takes surreptitious photographs of the occasion, without fuss, and sends these as a welcome memento. Artists know how to please: the late John Ward would decorate not just his letters but also his envelopes with flowers and flourishes, priceless to receive. But you don’t have to be an R. A.: anyone writing thanks to a child can illustrate the letter graphically in the rebus style, so the letter becomes a picture-puzzle they can easily decode.

After events that incur a shoal of letters, it’s possible to formulate a simple response to all. When John Betjeman became Poet Laureate, he received more than 6,000 “congratters” –The Timesreported that two secretaries were dealing with the incessant flow in his tiny Cloth Fair house – so everyone got a typewritten “Thank you OH THANK YOU” with an extra scribbled line underneath, signed John B.

But the nonarrival of thanks for a gift must surely leave the giver slightly aggrieved. Did the card fall off my gift, so that they puzzled over who it came from? Did they despise my choice? Was it simply beneath contempt (“Oh lord, not another scented candle/panettone”)? After a dinner party the unthanked host may find the sin of omission hard to forgive. “It stays in the brain for ever,” says Virginia Ironside. “And even if they write ages later, adding “Did I ever thank you for . . .?” you just think, well, humph.”

The writer Francis Bacon, however, said “late thanks are ever best” and some go along with that: a late letter means the occasion, or the gift, is not forgotten, the gratitude (compounded by guilt) still felt.

Do mega-celebs send thank-you letters? “Mick Jagger and I send thank-you texts,” I am told by Nicky Haslam, London’s most sociable person. “But the well-bred young do still send charming letters.” He has kept all his “sweet, effusive” letters from Princess Diana: “Your flowers scented my room for ages! You do spoil me.” And what about the Beckhams? “Can they write?” he said. “Flowers, I should think – with a card written by the florist.”

Times recommends

• The Boxing Day tsunami: five years on
• What took place in 2010...
• Can you really cure a hangover?