Dear Mary

Dear Mary | 17 November 2016

Q. Following a lavish house party I received a flood of effusive thank-you letters, the bulk of which praised the impeccable service, the luxurious treats laid on nightly, and my attentiveness to my guests’ every whim. One letter, however, commenced in a fairly complimentary vein but soon devolved into a letter of complaint about a

Dear Mary | 10 November 2016

Q. A man I know (but not very well) has invited me and another girl to stay in a villa he’s been loaned. He says the only thing I’ll have to pay for is my flight but I suspect that though we’ll probably have picnics on the beach each day for lunch, we’ll go to

Dear Mary | 3 November 2016

Q. Some elderly friends of mine love to entertain in their London club on their visits, but a problem arises when their London friends want to reciprocate. Recently one of these gave a special dinner for them in her flat, taking enormous trouble with the food. However, the stress of getting there — they are both

Dear Mary | 27 October 2016

Q. We hired a villa in the Camargue through the so-called ‘Sloane web’. You either know the uber-Sloane who runs it or you don’t. All his properties are in perfect taste and located in idyllic spots. No one is ripped off. However, we have just returned from a villa whose (Sloane) owner stayed on in

Dear Mary | 20 October 2016

Q. Next month, four of us from university are going up on a wildfowling trip north of Inverness. We are catching the night sleeper from Euston and I have been charged with booking the berths. Two of the team are in a heterosexual relationship whilst the fourth, a man I have met just once, is

Dear Mary | 13 October 2016

Q. My father has been on the warpath to eradicate Tineola bisselliella, the common clothes moth. He told me to sort through my dressing room and administer sprays and pheromone strips. He’s finally eradicated them, or at least that’s what he thinks. In truth, I never bothered to go through my own clothes back in

Dear Mary: Your problems solved | 6 October 2016

Q. A family of five from Brazil who are close friends of mine are visiting London next week. They have been kind and generous to me in the past so we arranged to take them to lunch at a Michelin starred restaurant. However since this plan was made, in true Latino fashion they have invited

Dear Mary | 29 September 2016

Q. When an invitation to shoot arrives in the autumn, I have a sense of both excitement and dread. The dread is because at the end of the day, metropolitans request that the guns must each tip to the gamekeeper a sum far higher than would be the norm for traditional country folk. Indeed, in

Dear Mary | 22 September 2016

Q. How can I tactfully request that well-meaning old friends stop toasting my (new) husband’s hospitality? It seems ungrateful but, during a week’s stay at our new house in France, these much loved friends did it at least once a day, to the point that the other members of the house-party became irritated. I admit

Dear Mary | 15 September 2016

Q. At a recent party I was delighted to find my hosts had put me next to one of their most high-profile guests. We had never met before but they knew how much I had to say to this excellent woman. I was consequently dismayed when she failed to — or rather, was unable to

Dear Mary | 8 September 2016

Q. We recently stayed for a Saturday night with an old friend and were warned before we arrived that my husband’s carer would not be able to join us for dinner as that would make us 13 around the table. We are devoted to our carer and feel that his exclusion was much more to

Dear Mary | 1 September 2016

Q. We have a heavenly house in Corfu where we go as often as possible. The best thing about it is the intelligent Corfiot couple who look after it for us. Everything is spotless, the cooking is perfect, and their competence make us the envy of all our local expat friends. Now someone has told

Dear Mary | 25 August 2016

  Q. We have been invited to stay with a generous friend in Greece. Now we hear from other (slightly closer) friends that they will be staying very nearby. They have been emailing to say that the two house parties must get together. We know the last thing our host will want is to see

Dear Mary | 18 August 2016

Q. My partner and I have been living together for 26 years, but now that he’s asked me to marry him, friends seem determined to give us a wedding present even though we wrote ‘no presents’ on the invitation. We had both been married before we met and already had more than enough ‘stuff’. Since

Dear Mary | 11 August 2016

Q. I live in Balham but work in Mayfair. Twice recently I have had to take whole days off work to wait in for deliveries of online purchases that could only be scheduled for ‘some time between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m.’ My son says this is the hidden price I must pay for shopping

Dear Mary | 4 August 2016

Q. David and Samantha Cameron, their family and two armed policemen have moved to the house opposite us. Do you think we should organise a small drinks party to introduce them to the neighbours — or just pretend that we haven’t noticed their arrival? My son has promised to remove his ‘Leave’ poster before we

Dear Mary | 28 July 2016

Q. Every summer, just when England is at its loveliest, we have to pack everything up and make a stressy journey to go and stay with someone who has a house abroad. I can understand people wanting to repay hospitality, but we really don’t care about cutlet for cutlet. More to the point, we have

Dear Mary | 21 July 2016

Q. Since my husband began to appear in the Rich List he has become much more popular with ‘artists’ in our wider circle and we receive enough private view invitations per year to last us a lifetime. My husband is a kind man and will often buy something he doesn’t particularly want just to be

Dear Mary | 14 July 2016

Q. My wife and I are enthusiastic dancers so when we heard that people we know through mutual friends were giving a party on a sprung floor at Cecil Sharp House in Regent’s Park with ceilidh dancing and a caller, we were desperate to go. The trouble was, we hadn’t been invited. We knew there

Dear Mary | 7 July 2016

Q. My son goes into his final year at school this September and I would like him to be able to duck out of next summer’s leavers’ bonding trip. This seems to have become a compulsory fixture despite the school abdicating all responsibility for planning it to the inexperienced upper-sixth-formers. Some of this year’s leavers