Dear Mary | 30 March 2017

Q. As an artist I’m indebted to my sponsor. I also like him, but not his habit of ringing me up when he has friends in the room, asking me to describe, for example, a party I’ve recently been to and then putting me on loudspeaker. It’s a good thing that he considers me to be entertaining, but I draw the line at being required to act the stand-up comic to an invisible (even if appreciative) audience. My mother says ‘he who pays the piper calls the tune’. Can you rule Mary?
— Name and address withheld

A. You are not a human jukebox available to churn out anecdotes on demand. Your sponsor is, at best, insensitive to require this. At worst, he’s not in tune with your artistic sensibility if he can’t see that with these phone calls he is devaluing the currency of your own intimacies and rendering your personal relationship impersonal.