To not want to go out to dinner on a week night?

[Anna8888]

We get endless invitations to dinner parties on a week night. While we manage to fend many of them off, some people are so persistent that we end up having to accept. I don't want to go out at 8.15 pm, eat dinner between 9.30 and 11 pm and not get to bed until half past midnight on a week night when we have to get up for work/school at 7 am. It KILLS me, and the dinners are unbelievably tedious.

AIBU?

Well CD, you and Anna are always sparring in that old movie with Katherine Hepburn / Taming of the Shrew kindof way...
Anna, that is why you must write a book

In answer to the OP, if we didn't socialise in the week, we'd rarely socialise, given that DH works shifts, including - shock, horror - le weekends.

In answer to the second quandary - who gives a flying? He's just another dad at the nursery/school/whatever where your dd attends, he's not likely to become a life-long friend, is he?

Either speak to him, or don't, why the fuss?

We ae never going to know who this French person is - will be French equivalent of Dermot Thing or Ross

hokey cokey being Scottish i would approach the dad and say "hope your wife and baby well"

easy peasy
no need for elaborate pretending to notice/or not him
not getting constipated about etiquette
not pontificating about one's alleged gaucheness

a warm spontaneous social interaction,as one parent to another

Is is Norman Wisdom?
He is revered as a god in Albania

would you really say
hope your wife and baby well

Threr is no mention of baby on any of the sleb gossip pages. Are you sure she has had it?

I would ask how she is?

Maybe he is known as Normy in france?

Could be Norme with an accent?

At ds's last school there was a couple who are (is? grammar) in some way integral to the west London trendy scene, though being your archetypal bas-bleu I had no idea who they were.

Once pottering along on the school walk with ds, we caught up with up with the husband, so I did my standard we're all in the same boat cordial schoolgate friendliness & I got a chill of You Ought To Know Who I Am, which (because this meant nothing to me) I completely ignored and went on being friendly on the basis of perfectly ordinary shared school stuff and then he thawed. (Silly man.)

It would have been even better if I'd done this in the full knowledge of Who He Was, of course. Go on Anna you know you can.

Nagui

Surely Anna wouldn't get so overawed by a game show host! Blimey I wouldn't think twice about chatting to Les Dennis in the playground

I must say Norman Wisdom would have been more exciting in fact

I think what drives Anna is the desire to be thought to be French by the French. She clearly doesn't want to reveal that she is actually English and, by acting in an English way (i.e. by walking up to a Celebrity and just starting to chat ), she would give herself away.

Naggy? He looks liek Gary LINEker doesn't he?

Well Anna don't fear. He is a nobody.

There we are
phew
prob solved
He is a nobody and you can talk to him without being ostracised

belgianchox I have asked mnhq to delete his name just in case...

(as Anna isn't around)

Les Dennis

His wife is American.

Has he made any risqué phone calls to septegenarians recently?
If not - he is personne.

Oh him. My cousin knows him (in Paris). She told me that he was complaining at the end of an incredibly late dinner party on a Tuesday that he couldn't understand why all the other parents at the school were such snobs and wouldn't talk to him just because he wasn't an intellectuel. But she did say he had had an awful lot of Absinthe at the time. Apparently he stinks of garlic too.

I was wrong then.

Never been much on celebrity trivia!