One seasonal difficulty that doesn't get enough attention is meeting people with foreign names at parties. You're in a crowded room, there's a background hubbub of conversation about house prices, a good deal shriller this year than normal, possibly the clatter of crockery, possibly some music too. The odds are already stacked against you.

You get talking to someone, and after a while you say: “I'm Robert by the way, nice to meet you” and extend your hand, and they shake, and say their name, a name you have never heard before. It's quite likely in the circumstances that they have a foreign accent, but even if they haven't, whatever they've just said remains a mystery. Troubadour? Crubadoor? Crudite? Gruyère? Gouda? Emmenthal? Who knows?

Never mind. You're a practised party operator, you know that to ask for one repetition is legitimate. It's noisy, after all, and there's a wry acknowledgement from your interlocutor that, in the context of their host country, their name is unfamiliar, it's good of you to want to get it right. Given the peculiarities of manners in Britain, to ask for confirmation is more polite than nailing the pronunciation straight off, which would seem almost boastful, rather like those people who insist on calling the famously extensive mountain range in Nepal and Tibet “the HimAHHliAR”, which may be correct, but makes them sound like a berk.

So you smile the helpless, hopeless smile of the confused Englishman, incline your head, cock your ear, and fight against whatever alcohol is already in your system to shut out all external interference, to concentrate, to get this right, as if someone had just asked you a tricky but gettable quiz question.

And here it comes again, the exotic mixture of syllables, too many or too few, consonants and vowels in the wrong places, sibilance either everywhere or nowhere. And it still sounds like a cheese. Or, shifting the point of origin farther east, a motorbike, or a film director, or a popular leisure activity, or a suicide attack on an American aircraft carrier. Kawasaki? Kurosawa? Karaoke? Kamikaze? Anyone's guess.

To ask again would be eccentric, verging on the rude, maybe just about permissible in a particularly noisy room. But to ask a third time, or a fourth, or a fifth, which is what I, and I suspect many others, would have to do fully to satisfy ourselves that we'd cracked it, appears as a calculated act of xenophobia. So instead you smile and nod and have another drink and muddle through.

Buzz off

To Soho for a screening of The Reader, around which much Oscar buzz is gathering. Ben, or rather Sir Ben, Kingsley is in attendance, wearing a shiny leather jacket and rubbing the small of other people's backs in a special actorly fashion. Kate Winslet, the star of the show, is here too, working the room and looking skinny. If Hollywood regards Winslet as the feisty flagbearer for normal-shaped women, what must stars such as Keira Knightley and Angelina Jolie look like in what little flesh they can muster?

In The Reader, Winslet plays a former SS guard, thus fulfilling her prediction in Ricky Gervais's Extras that she would have to make a Holocaust movie to win the elusive statuette. Winslet being such a palpably decent person, and also such a fine actress, she seems to have got away with what might have been seen as a lapse of taste. Indeed, I'm sure that her choice of script was coincidental. Yet that doesn't mean that she deserves an award, not for this anyway. Whenever I see an artfully distressed Central European apartment with big windows on screen, I smell a rat. Leaving that aside, the trouble with The Reader is that it is one of those stories premised on a supposedly complex question to which the answer is actually “no”.

Shouldn't we sympathise with, or at least feel some moral confusion over, a woman who in her youth joined the SS, became a concentration camp guard and colluded in the murder of 300 non-combatants, seeing as she was unable to read or write and was embarrassed about it? And also because she looks good in the bath? As I said: a simple “no” would suffice.

Driven to distraction

Once the film finishes, the audience must negotiate the usual interminable closing credits before being allowed out in search of a drink. I've warned the film business, sorry motion picture industry, about this before, but it hasn't taken any notice. The amusing thing is, in trying to be egalitarian and include every man and his dog, this most hierarchical of industries cannot help letting the pecking order peek through.

Thus, after a roll call of names equivalent to the population of a medium-sized town, the identities of the “Drivers to Ms Winslet and Mr Fiennes” are revealed to the fidgeting, thirsty throng. That is, “Drivers to Ms Winslet and Mr Fiennes” as opposed to plain old “Drivers”, who come next. Because that's an important distinction, right? Presumably Sir Ben approved.

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