Dear Mary

Dear Mary: How can I get my cleaner to stop complaining?

Q. My cleaner is industrious and trustworthy but she doesn’t have many people to talk to and evidently looks forward to her shifts as social occasions. She loves having a captive audience (my brother and I are currently WFH) and her conversation consists mainly of complaints, so it’s never a fun chat. It’s generally a

Dear Mary: how can I get out of a Christmas party?

Q. I belong to a fairly intimate private club which is the one reliable oasis of calm and civility that I know of outside my own home. Now an old schoolfriend is pressuring me to propose him for membership (he needs the endorsement of a club member and I am the only one he knows).

Dear Mary: how can I learn to cope with my husband’s mess?

Q. My husband has fallen in love with ‘the country’ and retired to Exmoor while I maintain a presence in our Notting Hill residence for work. The problem is he has left his London study, carved from half our ground-floor sitting room, in its traditional disordered condition as if he has only popped out to

Dear Mary: How do I get my masseuse to stop talking?

Q. Our two daughters often bring friends down for the weekend. These friends are more than welcome; we enjoy their company and most have perfect manners — except they never leave a tip. Our daughters claim that no one of their age group (early twenties) carries cash and that even if they remind their guests

Dear Mary: How do I stop a dinner guest double-dipping?

Q. During lockdown I made good friends with a neighbour who I would never have met otherwise. This man lives so close that he now regularly comes to informal dinners at our house. Unfortunately he has a habit of ‘double dipping’ his used fork into jars of redcurrant jelly, mustard, whatever — even though I

Dear Mary: should I have asked out my rush-hour crush?

Q. On a train journey the other day I sat opposite someone I found immensely attractive. We struck up a conversation and talked for 40 minutes until he left the train, a few stops before my own destination. I am 90 per cent sure he returned my feelings, but he was rather a shy man

Dear Mary: How do I get rid of my terrible cleaner?

Q. I have recently become a widow. Since my son is away at university, I had the idea of charging a modest rate to informally rent out his bedroom to friends and friends of friends who happen to need a bed in the city for a night. I include dinner and breakfast in the rate