GETTING CAUGHT WITH YOUR HAND IN THE MERINGUE JAR
^{Feeling welcome in the “home”}




At some hour - no longer socially defensible, after spending the night staring into a fire, I and my confidants became extremely hungry.

My friend’s wonderfully British mother had made meringues. Small ones. There were at least sixty of them in the larder, which seemed at the time both an astonishing number of meringues and not quite enough to make one of them mine or ours. Abundance does not abolish ownership. It only made the obvious ownership more difficult to respect.

I sat there by the fire, considering whether to make the daring journey toward one.

What frightened me was not being shouted at. I could not imagine anyone shouting. What I imagined was worse: a sober adult appearing in the doorway and regarding me with a graceful, almost affectionate scorn. There would be a pause. I would be found in the blue light of her larder, feral, my hand extended towards a little white confection - over exposed against my grubby paws. Nothing would be said that could reasonably be called unkind. The incident would nevertheless be preserved.

Later, it might be brought up in front of her friends. It would be remembered for time to come. I would be preserved as an anecdote of a young adult committing their young adult faux pas - Years later, it might be mentioned to my detriment in order to prove my subsequent growth.

“Do you remember,” she would say, “when we found you in the middle of the night with your hand in the meringues?”
Everyone would laugh. I would laugh too. But an account of me would have been settled.
No one actually caught me. I did not get a meringue. This is almost the point.

I have often felt caught out in other people’s homes, although generally no one has caught me doing anything. The phrase “caught out” means more than being observed. It means being exposed in an error, a deception or some small unacceptable act. To be caught out is to discover that there was a rule and that everyone except you already knew it.

Other people’s homes are full of these rules.

Can I open the fridge? Can I take a glass without asking? Every house also has some sort of dangerous mug. It may look like all the other mugs, but it is not. It was made by a child, bought on a honeymoon or inherited from a dead aunt. May I lie on this sofa or only sit on it? May I bring this mug unto the sofa? Is the bathroom door difficult to lock, or am I operating it incorrectly? Is the expensive-looking soap decorative? When someone says to help myself, do they mean to water, to tea, to the contents of the fruit bowl, to the cheese wrapped at the back of the fridge? If I wake before everyone else, must I remain in the bedroom until I hear proof of life?

“Make yourself at home” is supposed to resolve these questions. It does not. If I were at home, I would not require the instruction.

What the phrase really means is: perform the appearance of ease while remaining alert to boundaries I may not explain.
A home is a private constitution. Its laws are rarely written because the people who live there have absorbed them into their bodies. They know which doors stick, which chair belongs to whom, how much noise is permissible in the morning and what kind of hunger may be answered without consultation. The guest, meanwhile, must infer the entire system from clues.

This is why guesthood can feel like a regression. One becomes suddenly childlike, needing permission to eat, bathe, leave the room or touch an object. The host has keys, habits and the authority to say of course. The guest has an overnight bag and an anxious relationship with the kettle. I cannot get ‘caught’ using a teabag. 

Hospitality has always contained this imbalance. Its oldest forms were not casual. They were highly regulated systems for dealing with a dangerous fact: a stranger has arrived at the door.

In The Odyssey, hospitality is procedurally sacred… When Telemachus sees Athena disguised as a stranger, he is ashamed that she has been left waiting at the threshold. He welcomes her, seats her, has water brought for her hands and gives her food. Only after she has eaten does he ask who she is and why she has come. The body of the guest is tended to neatly before the demand of biography or purpose. I would argue the great villains of the story are not inhospitable hosts but catastrophic guests. Penelope’s suitors occupy Odysseus’s house, slaughter his animals, drink his wine and consume his wealth without repayment. They behave as though welcome has erased ownership.

In the larder, faced with sixty small meringues, I was therefore in danger of becoming a very minor Homeric suitor.

Ancient hospitality did not mean that everyone could do whatever they liked. It created reciprocal obligations. A host offered food, shelter and protection; a guest accepted what was given, respected the household and did not become an invader. The arrangement protected both sides from the ambiguity of the stranger.

That ambiguity survives linguistically - Hospitality comes through the Latin hospes, a word that could mean host, guest or stranger. The related linguistic family also produced words associated with hostility. Host, guest, stranger and enemy remain crowded around the same ancient threshold, each waiting to see what the others will do.

This is perhaps why hosts remain the masters of even the most generous welcome. I can open my home to you only because I retain the power to decide that it is mine to open. I can tell you to take anything from the fridge because the fridge - and the authority to grant access to it - belongs to me.

Hospitality therefore contains a small contradiction. A host says, “This is your home,” while both people understand that it is not.

The Rule of Saint Benedict, written for monastic communities in late antiquity, instructed that arriving guests should be received as Christ. The stranger was to be met with humility, offered food and treated with particular care. Yet the travelling monk who wished to remain was also expected to be content with the customs he found and not disturb the monastery with excessive demands. The guest was sacred, but the house still had rules.

One imagines Christ - clutching his guest towel - balancing it atop his overnight bag. 

This is the point at which a thought about hospitality is expected to become instructive. “The host should make every boundary explicit. The host should point out the glasses, demonstrate the lock and provide several varieties of breakfast. Under no circumstances should the host own decorative soap that I cannot use.”

I enjoy this argument because I am usually the guest.

It has roughly the political sophistication of a mouse insisting that traps represent poor interior cupboard design.

Hosts cannot spend the evening dictating a complete code. Sometimes a meringue is only a meringue, and the guest bears some responsibility for not stealing it in the middle of the night. There was, after all, a straightforward solution available to me: I could have waited until morning and asked.

Still, to feel welcome is not quite to believe that everything belongs to you. It is to feel that an ordinary need will not become evidence against your character. All that I do feels to me like evidence of character, and this may be the larger problem.

Perhaps this was what I feared in the larder: not that I would be exposed as a thief, but that I would be exposed as a person with a body. A hungry person. A person insufficiently self-contained to survive until breakfast without wanting something. There is something peculiarly humiliating about appetite in another person’s home. Tiredness, cold, thirst, the need for privacy: these things make demands on a space over which the guest has no authority. Little mouse am I, sniffling around your drawers, tiptoeing between dangerous traps you have forgotten to change.

But a guest who costs nothing has not really been hosted. She has merely passed through, or developed the habits of a highly polite burglar.

A recent ethnographic study of women living in temporary refugee accommodation described a practice of “guesting”: the women took turns inviting one another into their rooms. Through these reciprocal invitations, institutional rooms became places of intimacy and community. Restrictions on their ability to host also restricted their ability to make a home.

This suggests that home is not simply where we are permitted to remain. It is where we are allowed to participate in the welcome. ‘Home’ is partly a place from which one can issue an invitation.

Community might be understood in the same way. It does not mean the absence of rules, privacy or ownership. It means that the rules are legible, that need is not automatically treated as trespass, in the possibility of crossing between boundaries. The guest enters; the guest makes some demand; the host survives it. Someone uses the dangerous mug. Someone is corrected without the correction becoming evidence.

I do not know whether my friend’s dear mother would really have minded about the meringue. Very likely she would not. The sober adult in the doorway was largely my own invention: a figure assembled from manners, shame, and every previous occasion on which I had misunderstood how welcome I was.

The host was asleep. I supplied the surveillance myself. 

As the night weakened into morning, my accomplices and I finally travelled up from the fire towards the main house. The sun had freshly risen, giving everything the unpleasant visibility of evidence. We had not slept in the tents. We had instead sat outside our host’s home all night, cultivating smoke inhalation and private revelation.

Outside, we discovered some gluten-free taco shells. Uncooked but intended for the night before. 

These had not been offered to us, hunger had simply eroded our ability to make legal distinctions, I cannot now remember how we’d decided these were morally grey. We carried them back to the fire and tossed them over the embers. They became barely warm in some places and totally charred in others. The edges caught first. The centres remained pale and faintly sad.

We ate them with great seriousness.

They were a far cry from the sweet treats in the larder. They were also, by then, more ours. We had ruined them ourselves.

This is how the home exercises its authority even when its owner has left the room. The guest begins to police herself. She sits outside burning tortillas while sixty meringues remain untouched within, and congratulates herself on having correctly located the border between appetite and entitlement.

I still fantasise about my own future home as the Guest’s sanctuary.

It will contain well made beds with sheets that are both spectacular for your nights sleep - and stained just enough to find solace in bringing your evenings tea toward your lips whilst open them, a free standing bath that is slightly grubby - so you need not fear if you accidentally leave a trace of your filth upon it. There will be chargers for obsolete telephones in a tat drawer that you are free to rummage inside and bowls of food positioned low enough to be reached without asking. Nothing will be overly decorative because nothing will be entirely intact. There will be no important mugs, because all mugs will be important and fixed and broken and chipped and dirty and clean. The ashtray will have a welcoming number of butts in it. Towels will have lost all jurisdiction - not mine or yours but ours and undesignated. Guests will be encouraged to lie down wherever they are overcome. The guest is home because the home is open! The home is mine and when you are there is a clear indication of welcome - because you are the guest and the guest is a vital member of the court.

“Eat anything,” I will say, gesturing expansively towards half a lemon, three condiments and something wrapped in foil whose provenance cannot be established. The food will be exciting and the guest is free to improve upon it. 

In my imagination, no one will ever feel caught out. Hunger will be answered before it is questioned, mistakes absorbed. The entire place will operate beyond embarrassment.
I know enough about myself to understand that this will not happen.

Within time I will have a particular chair - my upset invisible but apparent when you sit in it. There will be olives I am saving for something - or I just didn’t like you had eaten them all. I will develop strong, unspoken beliefs about the placement of wet things. A guest will innocently eat an ingredient I had privately assigned to a future dinner, and I will experience the first terrible stirrings of the sober adult in the doorway.

I may even tell the story later. Embarking on the same upset toward my child’s friends when they are coming of age. 

I have, after all, complained about guests. I have complained about the guest who broke my door, the guest who could not possibly have had worse-smelling feet, the guest who gave no thanks for supper, the guest who seemed to possess no gratitude for the offer of being a guest in my home.
My home.

I have said this with the conviction of a person who believes that ownership has made her reasonable. I have taken the small inconveniences of other people’s bodies - their smells, appetites, damages and failures of thanks - and entered them into evidence. I have done exactly what I feared would be done to me. I have converted the guest into an anecdote.

Perhaps I would even tell the meringue story later.

Even writing this, I am overcome again at the jar, questioning myself about whether I am allowed. Whether I am allowed to feel entitled to a better experience of guesthood. Whether I may say that I deserved to feel more at ease, when the meringues were not mine and the home was not mine and no one had, in fact, refused me anything.

I believe I am entitled.

Entitled because the world belongs to me. Not privately. Not as the larder belongs to the person whose hands made the meringues. The world belongs to me only in the ordinary animal sense that I have arrived in it and must sometimes be fed. I must sleep somewhere. I must occasionally need warmth, water, privacy, consolation. I must impose my body on the world to the limited extent required to remain inside it.

God, how I wish I had never become hungry at the wrong time.

I have been the guest much more often than I may ever be the host. Perhaps this is why the sting is so great. When guesthood is an interval, its uncertainties can be charming. When it becomes a condition, every towel and cup begins to carry too much meaning. Every borrowed bed becomes a referendum on whether one is permitted to remain.

Perhaps the stringency I feel around other people’s homes comes from the lack of one of my own. Perhaps when I can return to my sanctuary, the pang will lessen. The concept of belonging will belong to me once again, in a more cohesive and orderly form than it ever could before I had any real sense of ownership in my life.

Then perhaps a meringue will become a meringue again.

I have been in perfect homes. Not perfect because they were clean or beautiful or particularly large, but because in them you could wake, and you could cook, and you could take. I have been the guest who mends, who laughs, who washes up without making a performance of it, who becomes hungry at an appropriate hour and is welcome.

In such homes, welcome accumulates. You ask for one thing and receive it, and so you become brave enough to ask for another. You begin with the practical and move, almost without noticing, towards the impossible.

Can I eat this?
Can I have this?
Can I have a tea?
Can I have a bath?
Can I be bathed by you?
Can you rub my back?
Can I stay here for a few weeks?
Can you love me?
Can you love me?
Can I be loved by you in your home?
Can I - can I - can I?

There is no amount of hospitality that can finally answer this question. There is no pantry so open, no bed so freshly made, that it can prove a person will never again have to leave. Perhaps this is why the smallest permissions become so charged. We ask about the tea, the towel, the meringue, when what we want to know is whether our need itself is welcome.

No one caught me that morning. My friend’s mother remained asleep. My accomplices and I sat outside the house in the smoke and early light, eating gluten-free taco shells burnt black over the embers. The tents stood behind us, damp and unused. The meringues remained inside: white, orderly and imagined.

They have fed me for much longer than they would have.
Of course, all I needed to do was ask.

These homes are everywhere. I have been in them. 
All you need do is ask.