Dear Mary | 16 January 2010

Q. I was invited to a very informal kitchen supper by a friendly neighbour and his wife. It would be just the three of us, and I strolled round there in anticipation of an enjoyable few hours of exchanging indiscretions. My problem is that when I walked into the kitchen I saw an open laptop at one end of the table laid for three — in the fourth place as it were. The screen showed a man I had not met before waving, apparently at me, and raising a glass of wine in my direction. My host boasted that he had just got Skype which would enable us to ‘have dinner’ with this man, another great friend of his, who lives in Johannesburg but who could see us through a camera in the laptop at our end. I must admit I was disappointed by this virtual intrusion. Conversation was buoyant but somehow artificial and we could not gossip.