Yesterday, we had some friends over for lunch. We don’t know them particularly well but they are local friends. They were invited for 1pm. Lunch was lovely, and then, after coffee and chat I went to do some washing up and the woman joined me. 8 hrs later, they were still here. We had tried a couple of ploys- oh it was lovely of you to come etc etc, but they fell on stony ground. They very proudly told us early on that they’d been to a friends the night before and stayed up till 1am talking- they seemed proud of this fact which should have been a warning sign. A couple of times they said, ‘oh, when you want us to go, just let us know’, but I felt like, who does that?! It would be rude of me as host to tell you it’s time to go. Eventually I said I had to put our daughter to bed and even this didn’t trigger any movement. Eventually I said, it’s nearly my bedtime- I go to bed at 10- and they finally left. I just feel it was really rude to monopolise our entire day and that if you are invited for lunch, you should depart 2 or 3 hrs later. I must add that this wasn’t a boozy lunch- we all had one glass of wine with the meal and then moved to coffee. What do people think? Was the onus on me as host to ask them to leave?