Q. A new neighbour (a weekender from London) asked me if I’d be prepared to pass on the contact details of my daily, which I was happy to do as I know she needs the money. That was about six months ago, and now the daily is asking if I could give her a pay rise because she’s not getting ‘the going rate’. She has never before complained about her salary. I suspect this new neighbour is overpaying. I don’t want to lose my daily, because she has been with us for years and, although she is rather hopeless, which is why we have never raised her salary, our dogs love her, but I don’t want to upgrade her pay to an unrealistic rate. What should I do?
– S.H., Towcester
A. Urban incomers are famous for upsetting the apple cart by overpaying rural workers. Your mistake was in not withholding the contact details until the incomer had agreed not to pay more than you. Your neck of the woods is known for having multiple big houses and very few small. For this reason you must now either pay your daily the going rate – or at least the rate she can achieve from rival employers – or let her go. Hopeless or not, faute de mieux, she will be happily snapped up by someone else and, as you say, she needs the money.
Q. A debate is currently raging in my household concerning the behaviour of a certain guest. This person, when staying, brings his own cocktail-making equipment, and, at drinks time, presents cocktails with a flourish. Some consider this an infringement of the host’s duties; others think it charming. We would welcome a judgment on this matter.
– Name and address withheld
A. The trouble with cocktails is that, although refreshing and innocuous-seeming, they are insidious stupefacients which disrupt the intended pace of the evening. To be fair, the cocktail-maker is probably trying to ‘give back’, so make it clear that the fact he has ‘brought himself’, as Dorothy Parker would have said, is more than enough. Deter the cocktail-making by saying: ‘Sweet of you to make cocktails for us last time you came. This time we have been given a case of exceptional wine so no pre-dinner drinks for fear of ruining our taste antennae.’
Q. The correspondent last week who found himself inconvenienced by a middle-seat passenger on a plane disturbing him each time he went to the loo, need not have gone to the trouble of pretending to be offended by being inappropriately touched. All he had to do was leave his table down with a cup of liquid on it. This would have encouraged the passenger to wake up his wife, who was in another aisle seat, instead.
– P.P., Bournemouth
A. Thank you for this much simpler solution.
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