Q. Mary, please help urgently. We have friends to stay with us in Scotland every year at this time. This year I have an impressive quota of three single (heterosexual) men in their forties. I have identified one in particular as ideal for a singleton female friend who is also coming. How can I force
Q. I am in the middle of a second gap year some 33 years after the first (which was marred by menial work). The ‘Dear Mary’ item (8 August) about Justgiving charity requests prompted some thoughts since I have just been on the soliciting rather than receiving end of a fundraising drive. I fully share
Q. I was asked to review a collection of letters and did so, praising to the skies the late author’s wit, integrity and astute judgment of human character. News now reaches me that an old family friend, lampooned in these letters, has taken offence. She saw my ringing endorsement of these letters as a ringing
Q. I am feeling overwhelmed by the endless stream of sponsorship requests from friends, godchildren and relations, a lot of whom could write a cheque for ten times their target total without batting an eyelid. £15 — the most I could afford given the number of these demands on my overdraft — seems stingy especially
Q. I recently attended with my wife the summer party of a London literary society. The event offered wine and buffet supper between 6 and 9 p.m. Arriving at 6.50 we found the buffet table almost stripped bare, with guests seated around it, munching copiously, à la Babette’s Feast. Food stocks were not replenished. Therefore
Q. My husband has started working from home. The invasion of my privacy and the disruption of my peace is driving me almost mad. Now he has developed a habit of standing at the bottom of a staircase to the room where I myself work and yelling questions up it. He says he is too
Q. My host on a forthcoming holiday keeps his pool arctic cold so that it is not enjoyable for me to swim in it. I do not want to be a spoilsport. What should I do? Name and address withheld A. Bring a wet suit and swim in that, claiming you are extra sensitive to
Q. I was persuaded by my son to attend a lecture on astronomy. I was out of my depth within five minutes. Should I have interrupted the speaker, Mary, and asked for elucidation? I did not want to embarrass my son but through not so doing, the whole rest of the lecture went over my
Q. An old friend summoned me to a black-tie dinner at the Cambridge college of which he is master. On arrival I found I had forgotten cuff links so I threaded a shoelace through each cuff and tied them together that way. Knowing that I have about 20 pairs of cuff links at home, I
Q. Recently I was asked by friends to take a visitor from Germany on a game drive in the Chobe National Park. Unfortunately the visitor had unwisely lunched on some elephant meat from a recent cull and vomited in my new Range Rover, thus bringing the safari to an abrupt end for all concerned.
Q. Like many middle-aged, under-employed people, I have finally got round to finishing my novel. Being too self-regarding to vanity-publish and not, as some West Country nobody, seeing much other hope of publication, I scoured around for friends from university who in intervening decades have laboured their way to the top of the publishing world.
Q. My oldest school-friend, who moved to Paris, has recently been staying with me in London while visiting her sick mother. This was on my invitation. However I have noticed that she has been ringing her own family in Paris quite freely from our telephone and spending sometimes up to 40 minutes changing and rebooking
Q. I am trying to persuade my friends in the more fashionable areas of London that it is now not only socially acceptable but ‘all the rage’ to shop in Lidl, Asda and Netto, as opposed to Waitrose and Partridges in the King’s Road. Judging by the accents I heard on a recent trip, these
Q. I was at a private view the other night when a waiter dropped not just one glass but a whole tray of them. I was unsure what to do. Should I turn a blind eye while the waiter tackled the problem on his own or should I have lent a hand? I know that
Q. As a boy I was taught to stand up when a lady enters or leaves the room or indeed when she leaves and returns to the table in a restaurant. I have a new girlfriend and am moving in slightly different circles these days and wonder whether I might inadvertently be ‘giving offence’ to
Q. We have been trying to invite a very particular couple to supper for over a year and have finally broken down their resistance. Would it be better to have them alone, we asked ourselves, or should we play it safe and invite another couple? We decided on the latter, but late in the day,
Q. I am spending the weekend with an old friend. She has a policy of putting clean sheets on her spare beds on Mondays, ‘and I don’t change them again until the following week, whatever happens’. I happen to know that this week has been busy for her and I cannot face the idea of
Q. I was sitting in a South West train the other day. A woman across the aisle was making nonstop calls into her mobile phone, speaking very loudly in what sounded to me like Cantonese. I found it excruciating. I could not think, I could not read, I could not do anything. I did not
Q. Arriving for a weekend celebration, I was announced and entered a room in which everyone stood at once in a random formation to greet me. There was the couple who had invited me to mark their golden wedding, their daughter and son-in-law, in whose house I was now to be resident as a guest,
Q. Have you any ideas on how to deal with recurrent offenders in the party-present line? I have an old and intimate friend who always brings a present almost insultingly slight, but, more seriously, also invariably well past its sell-by date. One small jar of pickle was two years too old. Other old friends contributed