Q. I think I can offer you a solution to a problem which may plague others who spend intimate time with oenophiles and are driven to distraction by slurping. My brother is a mad wine-lover. He slurps his wine noisily. He is a physicist, and seems to be keen to prove that he can defy the laws of gravity by causing liquids to travel upwards rather than downwards. I have managed to persuade him of what I think is perfectly true: that in the case of an older vintage, one tottering on its last legs, the fact is that if it is slurped, the oxygenation caused by the slurping causes the delicate wine to lose its last grasp on life. Whereas, when sipped with great delicacy and minimal intake of air, as normal people drink anything, a great deal more of the wine’s flavour comes through.
B.T., California
A. Thank you for this tip. A variation of it can be applied to those who gobble food in an uncouth manner. ‘Excuse me if I am eating very slowly,’ you can tactfully tip them off at the table. ‘It’s just that I used to be the most terrible gobbler and slurper.’ The consequences, you can pleasantly point out, were that by introducing air, along with foodstuffs, to your digestive tract, you used to render yourself subject to hours of embarrassing burping and mini-burping. ‘Terribly unsexy,’ you can add. In this way you give offenders food for thought and often see an end to the nuisance.
Q. My teenage daughters have a very active social life but when they talk of people they have met outside school — for example ‘Freddie’ — and I ask, ‘What is Freddie’s surname?’ they shrug and say they do not know. I believe this is not an affectation. The young simply do not seem to use their surnames. What is going on, Mary?
P.T., Andover, Hants
A. This phenomenon is confined to public-school children who tire of the predictability of finding that every new person they meet already knows everyone else, or else that their parents are friends. In order to introduce a bit of mystery to their lives and make them feel less like clones, they prefer a burst of staged anonymity before the inevitable connections in their milieu are exposed when they have to book flights or hotel rooms.
Q. It is very difficult to get my beloved wife to leave a party. She does not wish to be rude to whomever she is talking and so just simply carries on — even when she has told me she definitely wants to go home or on to our next appointment. It even carries on outside on the pavements when she sees the smokers.
J.A., London W8
A. Carefully attach some metres of silken rope to your wife’s wrists as though she were a toddler. Such umbilical cords are not widely in social use but are likely to become fashionable as people are invited to more and more engagements. Having established her willingness to leave, make a steady progress towards the door, pulling on the rope as you go. Once your wife sees that other people are being inconvenienced by the tangled web you have woven, she will have the excuse she needs to pull herself away promptly.
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