Dear Mary | 8 September 2007

Q. I am shortly going to stay in a glamorous venue in Tuscany whose name I cannot reveal here as it would look like vulgar boasting. I have not been there before, and am extremely worried about the layout of the lavatories. Due to having had an extremely strict English nanny who would not let me, aged five or six, ‘spend a penny’ in the night — I was sometimes reduced to using a wastepaper basket — I suffer from abnormal anxiety about having to pee when away from home. I was recently a guest at a bohemian house party in the Isle of Wight. My first night there I only slept four hours due to a fellow guest telling me that we must be very careful not to wake the eminent social and military historian whose room was next to the loo, and who was a very light sleeper.