Q. My godmother owns a house in a great part of London. She does not come up very often and she is very kindly allowing me to move in for a year with three university friends. I will be landlady and collect the very low rent she will charge us. It is amazingly kind of her so I am annoyed that one of my intended lodgers, who has never even met my godmother, but will benefit from her generosity just through being a friend of mine, refuses to contribute towards a cleaner. He says it will be a waste of money for us to spend, collectively, £120 a week (£30 each) on a cleaner, because we could spend that money giving two dinner parties a week instead. None of the rest of us wants to waste time cleaning and I know this friend to be a major slob, so how can I resolve this without falling out with him?
—Name and address withheld
A. Your mistake was to offer the slob a choice. First find a cleaner. Then announce to the others that your godmother has come back to you, very apologetically, with a rent rise. Say it was £400 a week before — it is now £520 but the good news is that she is throwing in a free cleaner for that. Secretly, you will pay the cleaner — ensuring that the cash is not left in a taunting pile, but hidden somewhere by arrangement.
Q. I suffer from a mild form of face blindness, so when I meet someone at a party who I should know very well, I have to talk to them for quite a while before I can remember who they are. People who realise that I am all at sea are often offended.
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