Other people's children, like other people's pets, can be pests, but you can't expect the parents to share this point of view. Therefore excluding children without driving their parents away, too, requires skill, diplomacy, and ruthless cynicism.

For hosts and hostesses with children themselves, the standard ploy used to be to announce the presence in the home of an infectious illness such as measles or mumps. But trendy parents have rather short-circuited this one by announcing, 'Oh, that's good, we're very anxious that Joseph should catch it and get it out of the way once and for all.'

No one is queueing up to catch gastric 'flu, on the other hand, because no parent relishes the prospect of escorting their child to and from the loo at twenty-minute intervals for three consecutive nights. When your guests arrive childless, however, you should keep your own children out of the way - ostensibly to prevent them passing on gastric 'flu to your guests, but in reality to minimise the chances of them revealing that they are enjoying perfect health.

The child-free host and hostess have to find a different, no less compelling reason to keep other people's kids away. 'We're having some electrical work done in the house and the contractors have knocked off for the weekend leaving bare wires at child level' is an invitation to your friends to watch their children being plugged in to 240 volts AC. To corroborate your story you only have to poke some cable through a couple of holes in the floorboards or out of a gap under the skirting, leaving the stripped wires dangling menacingly at strategic points around the house. No one is going to touch the wires to find out whether or not they're connected to the mains.

Another line of defence is to organise some activity that no one would wish their children to be exposed to: a blue movie after lunch, perhaps; the promise of an exotic joint or hash cake. ('For the children's sake, perhaps it would be better ...')

My final suggestion is a rather wicked one, but its effectiveness puts it in the black plague league. All you need to say is, 'You will bring Toby, won't you, because we've got someone coming who is just going to love him. He's terribly gay and - so the story goes -a convicted child-molester, but we've never been convinced of his guilt because, frankly, he's so terribly amusing.'

When your friends arrive without the horrible little Toby, you tell them: 'How right you were not to bring him. Our friend won't be here today because the police picked him up last night approaching a small boy at Oxford Circus public conveniences.'

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