Dear Mary | 18 August 2016

Q. My partner and I have been living together for 26 years, but now that he’s asked me to marry him, friends seem determined to give us a wedding present even though we wrote ‘no presents’ on the invitation. We had both been married before we met and already had more than enough ‘stuff’. Since then we have both inherited collections of furniture from our parents. Without wishing to seem ungrateful, we need to have a plan to prevent more belongings coming into the house. Since the one thing that would really improve our lives is if we could reduce our clutter, rather than add to it, we thought we might ask guests to ‘bless’ our marriage by each of them taking away something that they genuinely like from a collection that we would lay out in our barn. (I am talking high-quality things, for example Le Creuset casserole dishes, Royal Worcester tea services, not grot.)