Dear Mary | 11 April 2013

Q. How to stop parents chatting throughout school chapel services? Your advice to the organist at the leading public school will not work. I know because my son attends just such a school and services like confirmations and carol concerts are recorded. The parents are reminded that this will be happening but it does not stop them from chatting with gay abandon all the way through. Can’t you come up with something better?
— L.P., Basingstoke, Hampshire

A. Feedback from other schools suggests the problem is indeed widespread, but not universal. One way of controlling it is to give false deadlines for service starts. Hence the parents are all assembled in chapel at the correct time but find they have ten to 15 minutes of unexpected social networking opportunities before proceedings commence. This tends to be sufficient to render them happy to self-gag for the duration of the service — especially when they know it will be followed by a reception back at their child’s house at which further social and conversational reassurance will be available. No one can blame them for being tempted by the payload of so many potential friends or allies. As long as chapel is not seen as a forum for social frustration but as an antechamber to fulfilment, then all will be well.

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Q. Like F.N. of Stoke Abbott, I have suffered embarrassment when sitting at a table where two people have not turned. Your suggestion that another guest should break the spell by calling for silence and then raising a glass to the host is good — but what if you are the host?
—Name and address withheld

A. There is a very useful all-purpose phrase for defusing social embarrassment — ‘Now what would you like to drink?’ Even if guests have been fully furnished with every type of liquid refreshment they could possibly want, there is no harm in a host touring the table with two bottles in hand and coming up behind each guest to offer more.