Q. What should I do if my housekeeper refuses to clean my nanny’s bedroom and bathroom? I am worried they will turn into a tip. – M.C., London A. Today’s competent London nannies are so highly paid that yours may have developed delusions of grandeur. Your housekeeper is quite right to refuse. Why not tell
Q. My husband and I have just been on a wonderful long weekend abroad to a friend’s 60th birthday. We met lots of lovely new people over the three days and we would really like to keep in touch, but it seemed a bit presumptuous to go around asking for everyone’s numbers. What should I
Q. I ride a bike from Chiswick to the City each morning. It is a ten-mile journey that takes 45 minutes and it is good for my weight and mental health. I lock my bike to a lamppost outside my semi-detached house as there is no room for it inside. Now an official-looking sign has
Q. We live in the countryside, where the door is always open. Last week when it was sunny we had a drinks party in the garden. Despite our leaving a notice on the front door saying ‘In the garden’, most people rang the doorbell (waking up our grandchild and making the dogs bark) and waited
Q. Often at parties strangers bear down on me looking excited and are then offended when I don’t recognise them. This is because I have never actually met them – they have just seen me on television and made the mistake of thinking we know each other. To say ‘I think you’re confused because you’ve
Q. I like and get on well with my sister-in-law. My problem is that she is incredibly nosy and I always feel she is itching for a chance to go through my private papers. I can hardly lock the room where they are kept, so it means I have to keep an eye on her
Q. My husband and I will shortly be having some South American friends to stay. They come most years and it’s always enjoyable to see them. Our problem is that they never divulge when they will be leaving – possibly because back home it doesn’t matter to them what time guests come and go; they
Q. Two American clients, with whom I have bonded on a personal level, rang me to say they were coming over to London for a few days. They asked me to book ‘somewhere really special’ so they could treat me and thank me for a particular thing I had done for them. They liked my
Q. I am on a long, jam-packed and much disrupted train journey to Scotland. In the carriage someone is working on their laptop. But it seems to be a noisy affair. Very aggressive and excited tapping on the keypad so we are all listening to what sounds like a very fast Morse code. But it’s
In the past I would have been interested in crafting plausible excuses for unforgivable social behaviour such as failing to turn up to events to which you had RSVP’d, missing a netjet or having said something genuinely appalling. One example: circa 1999, the late Rt Hon Alan Clark MP wrote to Dear Mary. He asked
Q. At the Ludlow Piano Festival, during a Tyler Hay concert, my husband and I spotted a fascinating-looking couple who were fellow members of the audience. We longed to know who they were and are kicking ourselves that we never found out the identity of this charismatic pair. During the interval we could have approached
Q. I have a friend whom I see quite often who keeps asking me if I will ‘get her invited’ for a weekend to the beautiful and luxurious country house of another friend. The country-house host is a long-standing friend and she barely knows the friend who wants to be invited. I wouldn’t dream of suggesting
Q. I left fashion school last year and since then I’ve spent most of my time applying for jobs and being rejected. (That’s only if they’re kind enough to send a rejection – most simply ghost me.) I finally have a job (the company does fast fashion) but when I tell my friends, who are
Q. On a recent short-haul flight, I had the misfortune to be seated next to a much older man who read, for the entirety of the flight, an erotic novel on his Kindle. I tried to avert my eyes but the bright screen and lewd language kept catching my eye. I was stunned into silence
Q. My husband and I (both in our eighties) recently visited a carpet shop with a view to replacing the stair carpet in our four-storey house. The salesman showed us various carpets and we discussed their relative merits. When I asked him how hard-wearing a particular carpet was, he looked at us carefully and said:
Q. My husband never wants to go out to lunch on a day when he could be gardening but he has grudgingly accepted a wonderful forthcoming local event that I’m very keen to attend myself. Now I find from a fellow guest that our host is planning on seating him next to a woman who
Q. For the past couple of years, many of my sons’ friends have been gamely running the London Marathon for good causes. I received more than 15 emails this year, all asking for sponsorship. As much as I’d like to respond in the affirmative, I am not in a financial position to sponsor more than
Q. Our son, 17, who is generally a credit to us, has started eating with his mouth open. It’s the only thing we don’t love about him. It’s not to do with sinuses and we don’t know if it’s a peer-pressure thing, but when we beg him to stop he always just laughs and insists
Q. My son-in-law is running the Paris marathon to raise money for cystic fibrosis research and has sent out a mail shot to friends and family asking to be sponsored via justgiving.com. He has had a fabulous response. Some people have posted supportive messages alongside their names but have chosen to conceal the amount of
Q. I have just returned from a holiday where I was the guest of someone extremely rich. She was emphatic that everything would be covered and I must not even think of bringing a present. However, after one lunch in a restaurant, I felt driven to make a gesture and quietly asked the waiter for
