The bill arrives

You're at a restaurant with five friends. You had a main course and a glass of wine. Someone at the far end had a starter, two cocktails and the fish, and someone else ordered a second bottle for the table, and when the bill comes, someone says "shall we just split it?" and everyone says yes, and your share is sixty-eight pounds. You pay it. You'd have paid thirty-five for what you ate. You don't mention it, because mentioning it would make you the person who mentions it.

In the group chat there's a hen weekend in Lisbon. Flights, two nights, a boat trip, a dinner, matching outfits. Nobody has said a number. You've said "count me in", because everyone else has, and the number will arrive later, in pieces. Next door has a new kitchen, and yours is fine, and you've started looking. A colleague has a new car on the drive at work, and yours is fine, and you've noticed it's seven years old. The school has sent a letter about a ski trip, and the other parents in the class are going, and you've said yes to that too.

These are invented, but I'd guess most of them are close. None of these is a problem on its own. The sixty-eight pounds is a nice evening. The hen weekend is a friend's wedding. The kitchen and the car and the trip are ordinary things that ordinary people buy. The habit isn't any of them. It's that in each case the decision was made by the table and not by you, that the price was never asked, and that you have no idea what the month came to.

Some words. I'll call the habit keeping up. Whichever group is setting the pace, friends, neighbours, colleagues, the school gate, I'll call the table. The question this book is named for is the price of the evening, and the number it produces is the price. Dividing a bill equally is the split, and turn-taking spending, in a pub or its equivalents, is the round. The people the table is itself keeping up with, who I'll come to in chapter 3, are the group above. The sum of everything you spent this month to keep up is the month's total, and you don't know it. Declining without a speech is the quiet no. Suggesting the cheaper version of the same evening is the counter-offer. And the organiser is whoever set the plan, who is the person to ask.

Before you go on, do one thing. For a month, keep a list. Every time you spend money on something because the table was, write down what it was and the price. The split, the round, the weekend, the gift you matched, the thing for the children that the other children have. Don't change anything. At the end of the month, add it up. Most people who do this find the total is a number they'd have said was impossible, made entirely of items they'd have said were fine.