All 29 notes, by section
Working notes, no dates. Every entry ends with the number, the constraint or the deadline that actually governs it.
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Eight tables, one aunt: the seating plan is a graph
Every 'cannot sit near' is a forbidden edge and every 'must sit together' is a required one. Written down that way the plan stops being taste and becomes a problem with a finite number of solutions — and usually one edge nothing satisfies.
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Connected components
Groups that must stay together set the minimum table size before anything else is decided.
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The unsatisfiable edge
Sometimes no arrangement works. Finding that out early is worth more than any seating software.
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Round or long
Table shape changes who can talk to whom. The conversational reach of a round eight versus a long twelve.
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The top table problem
One table with rules different from all the others, and the knock-on it causes in the rest of the room.
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Plan in pencil
The count moves after the plan is drawn. Every time.
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Where the hour goes missing
Photographs, the meal service and moving a room between uses. Three places the schedule quietly loses time, and how much.
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The turnaround
Clearing and resetting a room while everybody stands somewhere else. What it really takes.
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Photographs cost time
Group shots are the single most underestimated block on the sheet. The arithmetic of assembling people.
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Service is not instant
Plating and clearing for a hundred takes as long as it takes. Kitchen pace sets the afternoon.
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Buffer
Where slack should sit, and why putting it at the end does not work.
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What 'in season' is claiming
The phrase means grown near you now, flown in from a hemisphere where it is now, or held in a cold store. Three very different things.
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The cold chain
Cut flowers are a refrigerated product. Where the chain breaks and what it looks like when it has.
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Vase life
Spent at every warm point in the chain, not at the end of it. Why a warm van costs more than a warm room.
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Foliage does the work
Volume is cheaper and hardier than blooms, and reads better in photographs.
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Pressed and kept
The only reliable way a stem outlasts the day.
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How a printer actually wants the artwork
Bleed, trim and safety; outlined type; one ink named the same way twice. The five things that send a job back.
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Bleed, trim and safety
Three rectangles that are not the same rectangle, and what falls off when they are confused.
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Outline the type
A font the printer does not have is a font the printer will substitute.
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One ink, two names
The same colour specified twice in different systems becomes two plates and two invoices.
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Proof on the stock
Paper changes the colour. A proof on the wrong sheet has told you nothing.
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A sample size is a starting point with seam allowance
What a fitter can move, what they cannot, and why the hem is measured last and in the shoes.
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What cannot be moved
Shoulders and armholes set the garment. Almost everything else is negotiable.
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The order of fittings
Fit the body, then the length, then the detail. Out of order and the work is done twice.
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Hem in the shoes
The single most repeated instruction in the trade, and the one most often ignored.
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Guests, meals and chairs
Invitations, acceptances, meals ordered and chairs set are four numbers that are never the same. Only one of them feeds anyone.
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The drop-off
The gap between accepted and arrived is predictable enough to plan for.
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Children and suppliers
Two categories that eat but are not guests, and the two most common counting errors.
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The final number
Every caterer has a deadline after which the count is fixed. What that date actually commits you to.