Dear Mary | 5 April 2018

Q. Along with five of my favourite people, I’ve been invited again to what should be an idyllic house party in Scotland this summer. The house, the landscape, the food and the sport could not be better, and our mutual friend is a brilliant host capable of great empathy and wit — 99 per cent of the time. However it is the 1 per cent risk of a glitch that is making me, and the others, wary of accepting. We discover that each one of us has, while staying in this house party, incurred the anger of our host and received a humiliating dressing-down for a very minor misdemeanour. Examples include arriving five minutes late for dinner, leaving a piece of (one’s own) clothing by the riverbank, going into town (in one’s own vehicle) to collect necessary prescription medicine — all these have brought on explosions of wrath. It seems one guest always gets it in the neck.