Dear Mary… Q. Our son and his fiancée are getting married in Pretoria, South Africa, later this year, although they both live in London, where they have their established home. They would prefer guests not to give them presents they would be unable to cope with in their small flat in Pretoria, and shipping gifts
Dear Mary… Q. My student stepson from my recent re-marriage and I are very different people. His mother worries that our relationship will suffer if I am too unkind to the boy, but he drives her crackers too! We have an excellent Italian restaurant locally which does a varied, fixed price, early-evening menu. Every time
Dear Mary… Q. The new fashion of women wearing pants (sic) that do not fit properly and reveal their underwear is in full flight here. There is no hope for the young, who will slavishly follow whatever is in fashion, regardless of how stupid it looks. However, we have a friend in her late thirties
Dear Mary… Q. Let me offer a variant on your wet towel advice (21 May). My partner and I were married for more than 60 years between us, but not to each other, so we came to this new and lovely relationship with many years’ experience of how not to do things. It became apparent
Dear Mary… Q. In the 28 May edition of The Spectator you state that ‘a rector enjoys superior rank to a vicar’. While this may be true in popular mythology, it is quite wrong as far as the Church of England is concerned. The different titles merely reflect the source of an incumbent’s income in
Q. I own a holiday cottage in Padstow in Cornwall. Sometimes I let the cottage, at other times I allow friends to stay there. I employ a local cleaning agency to come in on Monday mornings to clean up after each occupancy and get it ready for the incoming parties. My problem is that recently
Dear Mary… Q. I own a holiday cottage in Padstow in Cornwall. Sometimes I let the cottage, at other times I allow friends to stay there. I employ a local cleaning agency to come in on Monday mornings to clean up after each occupancy and get it ready for the incoming parties. My problem is
Dear Mary… My husband and I have been invited to stay for Royal Ascot-at-York this year with an old friend who lives close to the racecourse and with whom we have stayed many times before on non-racing occasions. The invitation was extended some months ago, but I have just received a letter from our hostess
Dear Mary… Q. A man I cannot avoid at drinks parties is now sixtysomething and, after years of having been highly sought after by women, now lives without a woman and so has lost it slightly in terms of his personal grooming. That does not bother me. What does bother me is that he has
Dear Mary… Q. My wife and I have been invited to an election-night party being given by neighbours of the opposite political persuasion to ourselves. We are very fond of these people but they are very much New Order and we are very much Old, so, to keep things harmonious, the subject of politics is
Dear Mary… Q. Further to your letter regarding the telephone habits of foreigners, would they by any chance be Greek? Married for 20 years to a Greek, I am aware that no convention attaches at all to what we consider to be good manners. Calls will be placed and accepted at any place and any
Dear Mary… Q. My sister-in-law, whom I am fond of and who is very generous, has an annoying habit of inviting herself to the house whenever she likes, usually at very short notice. Each summer there is a music festival in a village near me. She happened to call on me last year at that
Dear Mary… Q. I am a picture framer. The other day I drove up to London to drop off a picture at the house of a client. While I was there, I asked if I could use the loo. Once inside I saw that there were some fairly nasty ‘marks’ in the lavatory itself. For
Dear Mary… A number of correspondents wrote in regarding the problem (26 March) of what to call the unmarried mother of one’s son’s child. Here is a selection. Q. Oh Mary, I love it when you go all family values! Yes, yes, you are so right to stop the rot! Partners forsooth! Even worse are
Dear Mary… Q. As a single person I invite many people over for dinner. Invariably the numbers are not equal, but I go to immense pains to get a mixture of guests who will find each other interesting, and also try to cook something special and delicious. The return invitations are invariably of the ‘take-us-as-you-find-us’
Dear Mary… Q. I am 43. I am starting to develop terrible furrows on my forehead. I do not wish to go under the knife nor do I wish to have any more Botox because I do not like the ‘Botox delay’ effect. What do you recommend, Mary? S.F., Sunningdale, Berkshire A. Some readers may
Dear Mary… Q. May I humbly correct the advice you gave about the life-long friend who has developed an ‘unfortunate strain of body odour’? She is suffering from trimethylaminuria, a rare metabolic defect which causes a fish-like smell due to abnormal breakdown of choline. Simple blood and urine tests are available to confirm the diagnosis,
Dear Mary… Q. What can one give as a present to friends, in their fifties, who are getting married? Both have previously been married to other people and already have all the material goods they could possibly want. Like the Prince of Wales and Mrs Parker Bowles, the couple in question have been secretly in
Dear Mary… Q. My teenage daughter’s lifelong friend has over the years developed the most unfortunate strain of body odour, obviously unbeknown to her. It has become increasingly unbearable recently and presumably in her earlier years was either masked in infant fumes or more tolerable. Apparently the problem is widely discussed at school but no
Dear Mary… Q. My daughter, aged 19, is proposing to take out a student loan in order to have her teeth whitened. It is not the borrowing of money I object to so much as the fact that her own teeth are not in any way discoloured. Please help quickly, Mary, as I am certain