Q. What to do when you are an unwilling eavesdropper in a train carriage in which people you know assume they are alone and start talking very indiscreetly about someone else you know and you have left it too late to alert them to your presence?
— Name and address withheld
A. Ideally you will have access to earphones and some sort of electronic device and can walk through the carriage dopily, as though looking for a newspaper. Wrench out the headphones theatrically on seeing the talkers. In the absence of headphones, duck your head down, walk backwards to the nearest connecting doors and, when they wheeze open, walk through them with the momentum of someone who has just re-entered the carriage.
Q. Kind friends who visit know that I am a keen gardener and many assume I shall be the delighted recipient of an indoor pot plant.
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