You might as well print Fish Feckers Are Go on the end of your embossed invitation and have done with it. In spite of all your efforts to glean people's intentions ahead of your do, you understand that nobody will show their hand until the big day/night, when they will probably roll up, possibly drunk, or else they won't.

Lest there be any confusion about this, it is only us. In the UK, a gracefully italicised RSVP at the end of an invitation will be immediately acted upon. Smart notelets and cards will spill through the host's letterbox as invitees make their intentions plain from the off. We would be delighted to attend or we regret we cannot. Either way, the host can proceed with their plans, caterers can be notified of numbers, budgets can be tied up and everyone can look ahead with some sense of certainty about the event in prospect.

But Ireland is another country; we do things differently here. Or, to be more accurate, we don't do them at all. If RSVP stands for anything here, it is Refuse Sender Vital Plans or Render Sender Very Pissed-off. But actually, it just means nothing. Read the invitation, make a decision on whether or not to accept it, tell nobody. I have some authority on this, having married an Englishman. Half the people we invited to our wedding . . . the English ones . . . responded to their invitations. From the other half, nothing.

Even my closest friends and family didn't reply. "Sure you know I'm going, " was the stock response when we phoned them up to check. We had to phone them up. For some reason, this actually irritated a number of them. They still went though, which of course came as a complete surprise to us.

Another difference between the Irish and English guests at our wedding, while I'm there, was that the Irish chose to completely ignore our wedding list. All the English guests obediently trotted down to Marks & Spencer to choose from our wellappointed wish list; almost everyone in Ireland assumed what we really wanted was a lamp. We just didn't know it. I gather this has changed utterly now, which must be devastating to the lamp industry.

But back to the RSVP business. I must confess that I'm as culpable as anyone else in this regard. My fridge is regularly covered in small party people's invitations with detachable RSVP slips that never get detached and phone numbers that never get rung. When our own kids' birthdays roll around, I'm occasionally shocked to find a lone RSVP slip in the bottom of a schoolbag (usually weeks after the event).

Even when we get it right, it goes wrong.

If there is a way to break the RSVP silence, it is through email and text . . . even the laziest of us can surely rise to that, and since it doesn't involve speaking directly to anyone, it seems like a plan. I recently emailed an acceptance of an invitation to an opening night of a play. A few days later, I got another email, uninviting me. It turned out that they'd asked too many and, frankly, I wasn't famous enough. On the day of the premiere, the theatre phoned up to say they had tickets for me after all. Turned out that hardly anyone had RSVPed and they'd had to do a ring-around. And apparently, people don't like that. On which note, sorry I didn't make your do, Karl and Eileen. We had family over for the weekend. I'd have RSVPed but a dog ate the invitation. You know yourself. Hope it was a great night.

Tint of blue on green Watching the St Patrick's Day parade pass by on a freezing Dame Street last weekend, it occurred to me that if the founding fathers of our nation had anticipated that one day it would pass by a condom shop and a lap-dancing establishment, they'd have shot themselves rather than waiting for the Brits to do it. Mind you, I gather that it mustered up around Stringfellows, so by the time it curled down to Dame Street, the participants had seen everything. Come to think of it, a few of the more spangled boulevardiers looked like they'd actually escaped from Stringfellows, and that . . . subzero temperatures notwithstanding . . . it had been a happy release.

No plagiarism charge?

It's amazing what some people charge for these days. For example, some advertising agency has clearly had the nerve to charge Ulster Bank for those ads about paying a tenner to go on a slide . . . a novel idea not a million miles removed from an ad that has a hairdresser charging extra for drinking tea and reading the magazines. Are Ulster Bank lovin' that, I wonder? Or do none of their bean counters actually watch television?