Who gets to say no

Every household has a default, and most of the people living inside one could not tell you what it is.

Watch what happens in a family in Alexandria when somebody suggests something new. A different beach this summer. Friday lunch at the cousins' flat instead of at home. The younger daughter taking up a sport nobody in the family has ever played.

In some homes the answer is yes, unless someone can explain why not. The idea is assumed to go ahead. If the grandmother thinks it is a mistake, she has to make the case, and make it well.

In other homes the answer is no, unless someone argues hard enough for yes. Every person at the table holds a quiet veto. The idea only has to feel awkward to one of them, or a little risky, or inconvenient on a Friday, and it dies without anyone deciding to end it. Nobody is being difficult. It is simply how things go in that house, and how things go always favours whatever happened last year.

Neither is wrong in itself. A house that agrees to everything can wear its people out. A house that refuses everything can be very calm and very stuck.

The trouble is that the default is almost never chosen. It drifts in from a parent, or a hard year, or the one person who always had the loudest objection, and then it sets into the way this family is.

If the house feels alive and the people in it are content, leave it alone. If the same summer keeps repeating and the younger ones have stopped suggesting things, it is worth saying aloud which kind of house this has become. A default that has been named can be changed.