OK, our 'live blogging' begins now. Barb and I offer accounts of breaking news that unfold at our dinner scene. Between food bites, we report observations by our guests. Links are available to our sources (in italicized blue). You can click on the "Comments" button, and please do, leaving remarks that clue us in. That said, valued reader, welcome aboard!

Contrary to what he implied when we invited him by phone, Michael Jordan shows up first. No shock. For basketball practice, he hit the court first too.

Shortly after, I cram the coats of Margaret MacMillan and Tom Hodgkinson into our front closet. Right away, Tom acknowledges that he knows the other two guests are top-notch at their specializations -- yet he’s chosen “to be kind of average at lots of things." With nods and grunts at him, we others respond “Oh?”, “Hmmm!”, and “Is that so?” Within the in-between space of our tiny foyer, what else could we say? Not a promising space to linger and talk about niches of the vocational world.

I lead the group into our living room for appetizers.

Barb and I are uneasy over how the evening is going. Maybe after more of these brushes with greatness, we'll learn to relax.

Margaret and Michael appear approachable and self-assured. And Tom? Well, he's quick to subside into an easy chair, the cushiest one in the room.

This is my debut post. Scary.

Tonight we have taken pains to hide our TV, normally in that living room, out of sight in a downstairs back-closet. While our guests are often in the media, they also are activists, and so we fear aspersions will be cast, or will be thought, about people like Rick and I getting sucked into the media’s world of escape.

Tom Hodgkinson has brought some flowers. I put them in a vase near 'our' harpsichord.

Michael Jordan, the tall one with the shaved head, seems glad to have been invited.*

Outside our powder room, we've hung a glorious photo of our daughter and her family on a Florida beach. Margaret MacMillan doesn't have to comment kindly on it, but she does.

I congratulate her on her prestigious new posting at Oxford, while giving up her also-celebrated role as Provost at the University of Toronto’s Trinity College. “I was of two minds about it [the British job]. I hate moving. I thought, ‘Will I ever find a nice dry-cleaner?’ And then I told myself, ‘Don’t be so pathetic ’" [subscription required]. I certainly could identify with Margaret: Rick and I have our pitiful moments too.

I notice Margaret's red dress, efficiently dry-cleaned, is topped by a lovely pearl necklace.

Tom's firm British accent contrasts with Margaret's milder one. He has always resided in the UK and she did while doing her doctorate. Her mother was British-born and bred.

I hope they will get along...
________

* UPDATE: I do believe Michael was glad to be invited. He did not disengage, and when he left, he gave Rick a boisterous high five. He gave me a hearty kiss on the cheek.

Expecting a good deal of tonight’s conversation will focus on Margaret MacMillan's new book about Mao and Nixon’s diplomatic revolution in 1972, Barb and are ready to show off that we've read it.

Margaret says, yes, that bilateral meeting marked the end of one period and the opening of a new one. Glasses now off, she builds on that theme.

Barb also mentions, in passing, that one of her ex-suitors in Chicago, a Chinese man, was inspired by Chou-en-lai, a pivotal figure in 1972's normalizing of Chinese-US relations. That suitor now is back in Beijing, himself a hot shot in the Foreign Affairs Ministry. That thread of conversation goes nowhere. Just as well.

I ask Margaret to elaborate on her view of President Nixon. [Globe & Mail subscription required] "Such a complicated man…clever…in some ways a great statesman [but] he did some really stupid things." Tom Hodgkinson, pink of cheek, prompts Margaret to talk about some of Nixon's stupid things.

Our group of strangers continues breaking the ice with each other. Gingerly.

Suddenly, our downstairs powder room is getting compared to Chinese ones. Seems that Chinese authorities in 1972 were so keen to please western journalists accompanying the U.S. President that they lacquered the wooden toilet-seats at the Beijing hotel set aside for the press. That lacquer caused such painful red boils that afflicted journalists referred to their rear-ends as “baboon bottoms.”

Sorry, I don't see our downstairs bathroom as anyway comparable.

Barb tells everyone that Margaret's first book, Women of the Raj, also recounts funny tales.

Overall thus far, the undercurrent is awkward. The mood, unpromising. I'm not sure our guests will stay the course.

We head into the dining room.

We 'do' Rick's mushroom chowder and my seared scallops on mushroom risotto. Margaret MacMillan takes seconds on my cucumber salad.

With dessert, we take a trip back to the '70s with cherries jubilee, set ablaze table-side.

Later, I ask, “Who wants coffee? Who wants tea? I have both ready.”

Part of my offering elicits a scoff from Tom Hodgkinson. He pushes back his chair (which squeaks on our wood floor) and announces that coffee is for people who are impelled by ambition and wanting to 'do' things. It is guzzled by “lunch-cancellers, early-risers, guilt-ridden strivers, money-obsessives, and status-driven spiritually empty lunatics." For the sake of civility, thank goodness, Tom is not impelled to also call us "

When Michael Jordan cleared the table a while ago, he acted as if he was performing the ordinary task of a guest. And then when he poured the liqueur -- like he’s sinking a long shot which is no big deal. "I never wanted to step on anybody’s toes.” Yet, Michael said, “if you have an opportunity to score, you score. And we win.”

It’s not so much that Barb and I were sluggish in advancing the evening's momentum, or that Michael necessarily wanted to speed things along, so he can pick up and leave almost right away. No, Michael was just saying -- I’m speculating -- that he preferred to cover all bases so our evening's a winner: “You just start getting on a roll...You’re in tune with everything that’s going on, he says. "It's like you can do anything...Living the moment is something that I will continue to always understand and associate with my life."

On that, we all clinked glasses.

But you know, the more I keep obsessing about his removal of dessert dishes and his pouring of his liqueur a while ago, Michael has changed the evening's tempo. I wouldn't go so far, though, as to say that he's looking a little sheepish now for violating the expectation that guests should wait to be served. Rather, it's like he a grinning Type A personality who over-brims with energy. Michael says, "I've made mistakes before and I'm going to make mistakes now. It's just that the naysayer is going to look at that mistake and magnify it. As a person, I can't allow myself to do that. If I do, I'm doubting myself, and I should never do that."

Reflecting on all this now, Margaret MacMillan cheers Michael for exerting his conventional 110 percent. And she volunteers that she's cleared a fair number of dishes herself (experience), and that Barb and Rick should not have to do all the dinner's hustling. Margaret says she'll be happy to stack the evening's china into our dishwasher. Barb shakes her head 'No.' I, however, will not deny a guest that opportunity.

Tom Hodgkinson seems less eager to pitch in, cleaning up. He fears he'd not keep pace with Margaret and Michael's get-up-and-go. As an illustration of how laid-back he is, Tom boasts that he's recently given up e-mail. He does value Teamwork, he says. His Idler magazine couldn't survive without it. However, Tom thinks Margaret and Michael unintentionally have started a dangerous competition: Which guest can be most host-like.

Michael Jordan, who’s also known for putting-down team-mates who aren’t giving their best, tries to spur Tom Hodgkinson on towards more of “make the mental adjustments you have to go through” as a team player. He jests that Tom could help by assembling our left-overs into plastic containers for guests' take-aways.

Tom laughs. Assembling left-overs is “so not me,” he sighs, unwilling even to try out-doing anyone in cleaning up our dishes.

Reaching across to pat Tom on the back, Michael champions raw drive. He replies, "Competing is the biggest motivation in life.”

The gist of Tom’s calm rejoinder is that it's capitalism, big bad capitalism, that spurs us to compete. It forces us to always be under pressure and to grub for more. "I’m victimized by capitalism...anxiety and ego. I think everyone is.”

To which Michael replies, with a sharp look that endorses the opportunities of the free market, "Screw that."

Rick replays that last 'Screw' episode as more confrontational than it actually was. At present, Michael Jordan and Tom Hodgkinson are in our LR on our couch, the same couch, on different ends. They're laughing together at something. No problem.

Who really knows, though, if there's any hard feelings between them. Harking back to Michael’s days with the Chicago Bulls and Tom's distrust of big government, I attempt to introduce Margaret's Paris best-seller as a 'bridge' between our guests' interests.

Sometimes, as an eager or neurotic hostess, I feel this need to kick-start conversations. Who am I to behave like an orchestra conductor?

My ‘bridge'? First, I attempt to connect the give and take of basketball with the yin and yang of idlers' struggle to live free. Second, I hold that those situations have something in common with the hauling & pulling among World War I's victors at Margaret’s Versailles Conference. That's a feeble stretch, I know, I know.

Michael weighs in to question the stance of the peacemakers. He proposes that since they’d gone "through all of the disappointments that a relationship has to go through. It's almost like a marriage. You learn certain tendencies about each other [and] that you don't want to irritate each other, you only want to compliment each other."

No disagreement there.

Margaret doesn't find many compliments or complementaries at 1919's Versailles.
"The British and the French may have been enemies for a very long time and they may have been friends in 1919, but they didn't trust each other as far as they could see each other...The British just wanted to keep their empire. And the French want[ed] justice, a little revenge."

Michael isn't willing to let go, at least not just yet, of those leaders' misbehaviors. They transgressed his code, for "If you knock a person down on a hard foul, you pick that man up and say, 'Are you all right?'"

Paraphrasing a Reader's Digest version of Keynes that I bumped into once, I add that the Allies were more interested in victory than peace. Heavy reparations exacted on Germany kept that country poor for a decade and led to the tragedies of World War II. Margaret flatly disagrees: "Hitler did not set out to dominate Europe because of the Treaty of Versailles. Hitler wanted to dominate Europe because he thought the Germans were a master race and he wanted them to dominate Europe."

By that light, Hitler was using the Allies' demands for reparations as a propaganda ploy, a means to mobilize Germans against their alleged 'victimization' (that 'V' word again).

That interpretation of Versailles varies widely from Mr. Hoffman's. He was The Man, our beloved history teacher in high school, although when I see this surviving gentleman at reunions, I'm too inhibited by the past to call him 'Bob,' as some of my classmates do. Anyway, judging by the prolonged silence now, tonight others' understandings of Versailles are under review too.

But, tell me, how much prolonged silence do you really want at a dinner party? Don't you think that the tone could be more natural with a skirmish or two? Not emotionally exhausting skirmishes, but ones about ideas?...

I am especially interested in that portion of Paris that covers Margaret MacMillan’s great-grandfather, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, and his role in peace negotiations.

The story goes that one of my great-grandfathers was a peacemaker too -- within his extended family. My other great-grandfather was a married minister who ran off with his unmarried choir director. I don't mention either great-grandfather's story tonight.

In an aside now, Margaret mentions that once, during a conversation about Art, the graying French Premier Georges Clemenceau showed Margaret’s grandmother (then a young woman) a set of salacious French postcards. We assume the sexual content was slight and not gross, and so that story somehow helps all five of us diners to twig to the frisky Monsieur Clemenceau. He seems more sparky, frankly, than that Metro stop named for him on Paris's Line 1 between Concord and Franklin Roosevelt (Rick's favorite subway stop). (Actually, it's Champs Elysees-Clemenceau, but darn if I can find on this keyboard the accented 'e' for the second 'e' in Elysees.)

Margaret is reflective about U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, "the most complicated" member of the triumvirate crafting the peace. He was “in some ways I think a very good man” with his wildly idealistic 14 Points and his notion of a League of Nations that seemed to promise many people the fulfillment of their dreams. According to our historian, however, Wilson was “humorless, stubborn, and vindictive. If someone disagreed with him, he thought there was something wrong with that person, morally wrong, and it made him a bad politician and he was self-righteous and he had this assumption, which was absolutely foolish, that he understood the people of the world better than anyone else did. And so whenever someone disagreed, he said, 'Well, the people are with me.'"”

With opinion pollsters around these days, I say Presidents have to be a lot more prudent in staking that populist claim.

According to Margaret, with the final decisions for Europe, Wilson, Clemenceau, and Lloyd George did "almost as good as could be done because the conditions for peace just weren’t there. It was impossible to draw boundaries that would satisfy people in the middle of Europe.” In dismantling bankrupt empires and thus sketching a still-troubled part of our modern world, in creating new nations like Iraq and Yugoslavia, the Allies in 1919 strove for stability. Nonetheless, they did not really solve the ills of places that are still problematic.

Margaret does not present her ancestor, the P.M., as flawless. Nevertheless, I suppose she could apportion a tad more blame tonight for the current ferment in the Middle East to her wily great-grandfather. True, Lloyd George was impressive as a war leader. And true, he did mediate ably between fellow-mustachioed Clemenceau’s harsh demands and clean-shaved Wilson’s so-idealistic proposals. I suspect, however, that it is also true that Lloyd George pushed for his country's mandate over the new Iraq, the better to expand greedy British Empire interests there in petroleum and military bases.

Tomorrow I must buy and read Margaret's Paris. If I e-mailed her asking more about her great-grandfather, she'd probably tell me true because, well, because I don't believe she wrote that book as an act of family loyalty.

Frowning, Tom Hodgkinson remarks that President Wilson sounds like he was a "botherer" with an attitude problem in Paris. That depiction sparks Margaret into observing that Wilson compounded his cause back home in Washington D.C.: "Where he really fell down, and I think it was a character flaw, was in not getting congressional opinion behind him in the United States. In my view, he unnecessarily alienated the Republicans...He tended to treat his Republican critics as if they were traitors and fools -- which is no way to win people over."...

Michael Jordan's apricot liqueur is warming. It's a sweet variation of apricot brandy.

Tom Hodgkinson, who once made a few bucks importing absinthe into England during its revival in the '90s, might have preferred drinking that. I look over and see that he's fine with Michael's apricots. Cool. I don't have to mix any drinks.

By now, I would have thought our invited company would have moved on, theme-wise. Yet, curiously, everyone is still chewing the fat about the Allies "settling" the Great War. Talking about that past conflict seems one way to avoid arguing about the current one in Iraq. Or is it?

"Making peace is difficult," Margaret MacMillan judges. "It's hard to hold together coalitions. It's easy I think to get caught up and beguiled by your own power. You sit in a big place like Paris or Washington and you say we can arrange this. I think you sometimes underestimate, powerful people do, just how difficult it is to organize the world."

"That'd be a good course title," I say, grandiosely imagining myself someday taking or someday even leading a seminar on Organizing The World. "Probably, I continue, "there'd be a lot of disputatiousness throughout the class." The only person who reacts positively to my comment is Barb, ever loyal. She gives me a smile -- no, a half-smile.

Not to my credit, most of my historical sense of the Middle East is informed by a few segments of the movie Lawrence of Arabia. With her command of modern history and of contemporary international relations, Margaret easily transcends my feel for the region. Soon she has us geopolitical innocents eating figuratively out of her hands.

For instance, she posits that the major powers, as true "19th century imperialists," treated "the non-European parts of the world in a cavalier and off-hand way, and I think we're still paying for that." That thought leads us to our discussing colonial wars, past and present, Asian and African.

Another of Margaret's examples has the Treaty setting the groundwork for a Jewish homeland and independent state and thereby giving rise to some of today's Mid-East hostilities. Paris's peace-makers "thought the Arabs would give up, they'd move away, they didn't count. And I don't think they thought the Jewish presence in Palestine would develop as quickly as it did."

(To no one in particular, I quote a rabbi friend of mine, the late and much-valued Sol Tanenzapf, about how impoverished Jews in Poland and Russia, along with not-so-impoverished Jews in England, Canada, and the US donated money so land could be bought in Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine. There, after following the legal forms for those purchases, Jews could settle, farm, and build houses. Sol said that people forget that Jewish settlers did not take land from anyone. Rather, they purchased it from legitimate owners, albeit in swamps and desert areas that nobody else wanted.

(Barb, who also liked Sol, gives me a hard look. She's surprised by my tangent to the conversation. Or maybe she's surprised that Sol and I had once had that particular exchange since at times I've been empathetic to Palestinians. My understanding is that those Arabs, through Ishmael, also can lay holy claim to lands now occupied by Israelis. God apparently was not into real estate.)

Iraq was another misjudgment of the Versailles gang. Barb cites a recent Op-ed,
here [subscription required], that almost seemed to regret 1) the collapse, after World War I, of the Ottoman Empire and 2) Versailles' subsequent invention of Iraq. The encompassing Ottomans were "Muslim but tolerant with an array of different cultures."

Apparently, on their own without the Ottomans' reconciling routines and without a cohesive national identity, the Shites, Sunni, and Kurds of the new Iraq ultimately proved inept at coalition-building. Enter dictators, resolving by force the contradictions of warring sects -- until Saddam's fall.

Margaret remarks that Versailles peace-makers thought Iraq was filled with folk who didn't know their own minds. "I'm not surprised that Iraq never really worked as a country because it was made up of all these disparate pieces and people who'd never had any shared history. I mean, yeah, not surprisingly, they didn't hang together terribly well."

“The peacemakers should have known better than that,” I object. I go on to shift the topic to another hotspot, Sudan. Eventually Rick interjects a notion distilled from our second-born son who has worked for UNICEF there. To wit, Sudan’s crises stem in some part from British colonials, thinking that they knew best in 1946 when they decided to integrate Northern and Southern provinces under one government. Almost totally excluded by the British from the new government, political groupings from the South eventually took arms against Northern authorities in a bloody civil war, next a ten-year hiatus in that war, and then a deadly resumption for 21 years of hostilities. Only in the last couple of years has that conflict in the South staggered towards resolution.

Lately, as everyone well knows about Darfur's provinces, mass murders by some reckonings of far over 200,000 have been accompanied by displacements of well over 2,000,000. Big-time genocide and anarchy. Our main riff on those data tonight is the debate we have about numbers -- "The deaths have reached 400,000", somebody down-table maintains. Our group decides to stick closer to the lower, better-researched, still-ghastly 200,000 figure.

I am tickled to see Tom Hodgkinson finding common ground with Margaret MacMillan. As well, our anti-State, self-described anarchist is attentive to my little recital about Sudan's failed State and its current anarchy.

During his turn at conversation, Tom deplores “people who simply cannot help interfering in other people’s lives...They make perfect politicians, bureaucrats, and fat cats. They want to make something happen, but they don’t really care what it is."

Beyond questioning the role of government, Tom is questioning the belief that work is virtuous. I guess it depends on what type of work one is working.

A few twists, turns, and even some back-loops in our patter and it develops that Margaret began researching her Paris book more than a dozen years ago, and that she spent three intense years writing it up. Her work ethic is one that many in my generation somehow grew up with. Impressed by that dedication and talent and doubtless affected by Michael Jordan’s liqueur, Rick mutters at Margaret his favorite superlative -- and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s favorite too -- “Grand!!”.

Frankly, Rick overdoes these "Grands." I know he does not want to wallow second-hand in the glow of our important guests. But poor devil -- he is getting carried away.

Like Margaret's central subjects, the Presidents Wilson and Nixon, my husband is "complicated." Rather, it's Rick's plans that are complicated. There! I said it. But to keep the peace, I had better add that sometimes, somehow, his plans do work. More or less.

Rick is different than Tom. The younger man has this charming emphasis on serendipity. "I’ve found, Tom opines, "that there isn’t any correlation whatsoever between the hours put in and the quality of what comes out. Most of the Beatles’ songs probably originated in about five minutes. Often the things that a lot of work has gone into have been incredibly bad because they’re overworked...I like the idea that says ‘What a small amount of effort is required to produce a great work of art.’"

I want to question that provocative 'take' on the production of art. Before I can jump in, however, Tom is expostulating: "Like, there’s a Picasso piece, I don’t know what it’s called, where he basically turned a bicycle handlebar into a bull’s head. You know, it was just a matter of putting two different things together.”

Difference of opinion flare within our huddle. My Rick looks fidgety. He gives a good impression of wanting to challenge Tom.

Right now, Tom is approvingly quoting the French, "Travailler moins, produire plus," the less you work, the more you produce...

Tom Hodgkinson’s theme about investments of time and quality of art eventually motivates our group to move on. We chat about different kinds of jobs requiring differential expenditures of labor. “Surely,” Barb begins, and I’m proud as she starts to speak, and I sense that she is surprising herself too. “Surely, if a person enjoys producing something illuminating like Margaret MacMillan’s book or beautiful to behold like the Michael Jordan on the court, well...”

Here Barb quasi-winks at Michael and a catchphrase associated with the athlete, “they should Just Do It, Tom. You have got to recognize the long hard work behind their creativity.”

Every now and then, Barb tries to bring opposites together with sentences or paragraphs just like that one above. On occasion, I also attempt to encapsulate and array the essences of complex individuals. Sometimes my rear end is handed to me. Tonight though, the troops seem to take Barb's mesh in their stride.

More importantly, what is this “It” of “Just Do It”? My wife certainly does not mean one should abandon morality and capture whatever one wants? I’m surprised. Is it her liqueur that's speaking? And what's behind that quasi-wink at Michael?

Our Order of Canada lady agrees with Barb on the importance of diligence. Margaret, however, underplays the hard industry invested in her own scholarship. She says History is like a big ramshackle house where important people meet periodically. The rest of us are outside looking in, curious about particulars. She makes it seem like the writing of History is fun.

It turns out that Tom, our champion of idlers, has been a something of a funster since his university days in the '90s. My nickel summary: he agrees with Barb and Margaret that we do need to value labor -- still, “a lot of the stuff [that we do] is not stuff we’ve particularly chosen to do.” Tom says he supports less hierarchy, less hectic lifestyles, and "mucking about each day. His platform is that it’s important for folk to have the guts to limit themselves “to a 40-hour week, not working 50 hours or 60 or 70. It’s irresponsible to you and to your family and friends.” In a nutshell, “You hate being told what to do – you hate the presumption that someone else can tell you how to live.”

This time he winks, and there's no 'quasi' about it, at Barb. Like Jim Lehrer says on the PBS Newshour,What's going on here?

Ready agreement about the pleasures of certain work emanates from Michael, who speaks of his “first job as a hotel maintenance man. Cleaning out pools, painting rails, changing air-conditioner filters, and cleaning out the back room. I said, never again. I may be a wino first, but I [resolved that] I will not have a nine-to-five job. Me and working were never best friends. I enjoyed playing.” Which involved creating his own identity in his beloved basketball.

Seeming to draw pleasure from Michael's account, Tom takes us back to his special, if disputed, 'handle' on creativity: “Being idle is part of the creative process...Ideas happen when you’re idle. You can’t have ideas if you’re working all the time. They come when you’re lying in the bath or drinking…or bicycling along the streets and whistling and raising their hats to each other…or sleeping, day-dreaming, [having] long lunches with chums, taking sick days whether one is sick or not, learning to fish…even [doing] useless things like bird-watching, sketching flowers, playing guitar in the home…”

Tom pauses, giving me time to start to free-associate. Often in my free-associations, I'm self-involved. It's a character flaw.

Anyway, I entertain a series of images in my mind. They're not about my creative process but about how I too want to play guitar, and in the home. To myself, I recall once -- before life intervened -- hankering to play the harmonica too. My next flashback, from a decade ago, has Barb telling me that these two instruments aren't related, the skills of the guitar not easily transferable to harmonica, and vice-versa.

For several more interior minutes, my mind reconstructs that particular scene, only this time I'm refuting her, I'm saying that Bob Dylan handles both, I'm claiming those two instruments are compatible. So there Barb, so there.

OK, that rebuttal minimizes the genius of Dylan. (We should invite him to dinner sometime.)

That claim of the instruments' compatibility is one I never was able to voice. My comeback didn't dawn on me until several weeks after Barb's remark, too tardy for effective deployment.

Now Michael and Margaret are verbalizing more of their reactions to Tom's notions about creativity.

Tom is saying he's recently taken up ukulele.

I fade out from the word-flow again and focus on that harpsichord sitting in our living room. Friends of ours, not having space at their downsized place these days, gave or loaned us their harpsichord. (Hope it's a gift. You could say it completes the room.)

Pity is, I can't read music, hardly knowing the speed difference between a hollow note and a black one. Worse yet, I now lack the lifetime ahead for the practice that it'd take to become proficient at any musical instrument. But hold on, who says I have to be proficient?

Time to take up the ukulele.

Oh my, Tom Hodgkinson really lets the sunshine in, or is it the moonshine? Whatever, his pitch for perpetual idleness entices. Rick seems interested. Perhaps Tom's free-spirited vision also appeals to a side of Michael Jordan, super-affluent retiree. Margaret MacMillan, though, looks startled into skepticism. I feel wary too. Is Young Tom a role-model for doing nothing?

He takes cognizance of our reserve. Tom says that he has thought about a lot more than the idleness of, say, drunken sex. He says those last two words emphatically, like DRUNKEN SEX. Folding his hands casually (and defensively?), Tom claims that men are better idlers than women: it's an old story to say "that women's work is never done, but it's got some truth in it. Women tend to be thinking about a lot of different things at the same time whereas a man can work incredibly hard [on something he wants to do] and with great concentration on one thing, and then stop and do absolutely nothing. Women can't believe that we can just sit there doing nothing, when there's all this work to be done."

There's something to that. And when I bring up the transcendent gratification that comes with service and the use of one's talents to achieve goals, Tom springs forward: "What I've found in working less is you start to get a bit more involved...in your own community. Also, you have time to do things because they're fun and not because you get paid."

On the spot, shortly we all agree with Tom about what Society should do next. (By 'Society,' he seems to mean the big, bad Government he's dubious about.) Society should introduce four-day work-weeks. Hence Tom would bring back Saint Monday, a day off "widely honored throughout the 18th, 19th, and even the 20th centuries." In that spirit of fellowship that suffuses the dying moments of dinner parties, everyone promises to obey Tom's ultimate commandment, "Play." I'm thinking about playing with our grandchildren.

I am not sure if anyone at our party budged much from their pre-existing views on the apt balance between hard work and sheer idleness, between the State that does "most things badly" and the State that does yield benefits for its citizens.

Stand by, though: maybe Tom has had an effect. Rick is leering now, like he is more comfortable about becoming a libertarian or a hedonist. Or both...

A dinner is long enough for folk to decide if they ever want to see their fellow-diners again. One benchmark that our guests have 'clicked' is Michael Jordan telling Margaret MacMillan to call him "Mike," as his friends do. Good stuff.

Now as we stand waving 'Goodbye' from our front door -- it's chilly out there -- Barb and I tell ourselves that, by and large, the party has been a success. If our guests had a time-line for withdrawing, it was late in the evening.

Then we overhear an outdoor conversation among our guests: they're lingering by their cars on the street. We could well be mistaken, but Barb and I suspect Margaret is inviting Michael and Tom Hodgkinson to visit her. At her College in Oxford next summer. (She’ll be working there on her next history, on the high-level conference with Churchill, F.D. Roosevelt, and Stalin at Yalta towards the end of World War II.)

That rendezvous probably will happen, as Oxford's not far from Tom's seaside farm in Devon. Globe-trotting Michael, of course, gets to go wherever he wants.

We sense Margaret won’t be having Tom and Michael in for coffee, but for a 'proper' high tea (whatever that is). That occasion would unfold in her special quadrangle with its dreamy, soulful British spires.

Barb and I now brood that we too weren't issued that invitation, if such a tender was made. Barb says sometimes we mishear things.

Even so, postmortem questions nag. Perhaps Margaret’s invite will be in tomorrow's e-mail? Or perhaps she was put off by my continually imitating F.D. Roosevelt with my 'excessive' “Grands!!”? Did Margaret dislike Barb’s cooking? Barb directly offered her tonight's recipes -- but somehow, maybe in the bustle of leaving, Margaret didn’t remember to ask for them. Neither, for that matter, did Michael or Tom.

Could it also be that Margaret was irked by my sucking-up to Michael? True, I did flaunt by wearing his endorsed and pricey Air Jordan brand of Nike sneakers. (Those shoes had been left behind by one of our out-of-the-house sons.) Agreed, the aura around Air may be less today than a decade ago.

And it may just be the 16-year-old within me, but among the menfolk of my family, Michael remains a saint, more immediate than any Saint Monday. Even if Michael was invited to Oxford and we weren't.

No point, though, in us hosts beating ourselves up about not getting Margaret’s call. Margaret would be a wonderful hostess and fellow-diner anywhere, but Barb and I now realize that Oxford isn't really so pleasant a place anyhow.

Sure, punting in its river would have been interesting. Still, those muddy patches on that deep river could be arduous. Apparently the mud clings to the 16-ft. poles when the punter least expects it. What's more, the old/new town gets overrun with summer-time crowds. Too many damn pushy tourists jostling around all those intimidating buildings. Screw that.

Let younger bucks do the punting. It'll be Venice for us.

There's only a shrinking window of opportunity now, but Margaret might invite us yet.

Please do not be as dismissive of Oxford as Rick. The place has nurtured so much.

Besides, I have lined up a Great from there as one of next month's guests.

I am going to bed.