Every person we asked said a single table would never fit the glasshouse, and every one of them said it kindly, which made it harder to argue with.
The round tables were the sensible plan. Ten of them, twelve chairs each, numbered cards and a seating chart pinned to an easel by the door. We had it drawn up by the end of March and then spent a week not liking it. Round tables make small islands, and the whole point of the day is that nobody should be on one.
So we went back to Fernwater with a tape measure borrowed from Gerald and measured the glasshouse. Then we measured it again, and once more with Ellis holding the far end of the tape. The floor runs thirty two metres between the vines and the doors, which is enough for one table, a hundred and twenty chairs and a little room left over for a string trio.
How the plan changed
Long tables ask for different rules. There is no head and no back, so nobody is placed at the end of anything. Families sit across from each other rather than side by side, the way they would at a Sunday lunch that has gone on too long. We wrote the plan as a line of names instead of a grid, and the whole seating chart now fits on one strip of paper.
A long table has no head and no back, so nobody is left at the end of anything.
What it cost us
Two things. The florist had to rethink the centre runs, because eight small arrangements do not read from the far end of a long room, and the caterer asked for a second serving door so plates could travel in both directions. Both were solved with a conversation and a slightly larger bill, which is the pattern for most decisions in this journal.
If you are weighing one table against several, measure the room yourself and measure it twice. Allow about sixty centimetres a head, and more walkway behind the chairs than feels reasonable. Ours, measured for the fourth time on a wet Tuesday, still had a hand's width to spare.
