Dear Mary

Q. How, when you have asked people for drinks at seven, can you make sure that they do not stay all evening? We recently moved to the country at weekends and my husband has invited some neighbours to come up for a drink on Saturday night. It did not occur to him that, because they are the sort of people who have ‘tea’ at six, they may think they are invited to stay for the whole evening. — Name and address withheld A. It is too late now. Your husband should have made himself clear when issuing the invitation. The formula would have been, ‘We’re going out on Saturday at 8.15 but can you come for a drink beforehand? Come at seven.

Q. A friend gives regular dinner parties with all the potential to be brilliant events. She knows wonderful people and always has an interesting mix. She has a flat in Chelsea. She is a beautiful, stylish and generous woman but she rarely gets the food on the table before 10 p.m., by which time people are feeling a bit tired and irritable and also drunk and full of nuts and crisps. Our friend is a businesswoman and seems to be hard-wired to do everything at the last minute. She laughs when we tease her but nothing changes. She is giving another dinner soon but my husband is losing patience with her. How can I help her to mend her ways? — K.M.B., London SW3 A. Confide that your husband has a blood test the next morning and has to fast for 12 hours before it.

Q. A close friend has married, in later life, a very nosy and mischievous man. She adores him and keeps boasting about what a computer wizard he is. Unfortunately, I have sound reason to believe he has been hacking into my emails and reading them. It was pretty smart of him to work out my password but this he undoubtedly has done. I have nothing to hide but I resent the invasion of my privacy. I don’t want to embarrass my friend by confronting her husband directly. As my own husband says, ‘what grown man in his right mind would bother to hack into a Sloane Ranger’s email account?’ How can I let this man know that we know what he has been doing? — Name and address withheld. A. Let’s pretend the man’s name is John Smith. Change your password.

Q. Each year I send out about 130 Christmas cards and get back about 80. This year I received 40. I have no reason to think that I have become less popular. Can you shed any light on this disheartening development, Mary? — J.F., London SW12 A. Many people simply could not afford to send them, but there were other factors at play. Traditional scenes celebrating the birth of Christ were widely unavailable outside of galleries and museums (where they are costly). It seems pointless to send a Simpsons Christmas card. The Post Office, in a bid to avoid offending non-Christians, is issuing secular stamps one year and non-secular the next. This year only compulsory stamps of Wallace and Gromit were on offer. These did not seem to strike the right note.

From Craig Brown Q. As I get older I find myself more and more afflicted by dindinitis, which is probably best defined as a morbid dread of dinner parties. Within ten minutes of sitting down, I find that I am tongue-tied and so too is everyone else. Short of ‘You must give me the recipe’ or ‘we much prefer Waitrose’ or ‘Next time, you should try the B1033’, I can think of nothing to say. I don’t like to appear rude, Mary, but how can I refuse all further dinner parties without giving offence? A. Bad dinner parties are like bad flights: one is enough to put you off for ever and start to promote a phobia. And even a good dinner party with scintillating fellow guests can be arduous if your social phobia is advanced.

Q. Each year I help to organise a big Christmas event for charity. In October I write to all my rich friends inviting them to buy tickets. Some loyally do, others say they won’t be able to come but send donations anyway. A third lot don’t even bother to reply. Falling into this last category are three friends who, when I run into them, always insist that though they won’t be able to come they will definitely be sending a donation ‘because you are always so good at supporting my charity’. This is true. They do not realise that, as a trustee, I see the names of everyone who has donated and I know for a fact that these three have never given.

Q. I volunteer for a charity one morning a week. This happens on one of the mornings when my cleaner comes. I have a feeling that as soon as I have gone out she knocks off early, knowing I won’t be back, although she still has another 45 minutes to go. I cannot put my finger on why I think this; it is just instinct. She is generally reliable but I think this is a temptation too great for her to resist. As I pay her £12 an hour, I find it annoying. What can I do, Mary? —J.F., London SW12 A. Why not get into the habit of loading the oven with a cake just before you go out? This will give you licence to ask her to take it out of the oven just before she leaves. Q. The other day I was treated to a fantastic lunch by a restaurant-owning friend.

Q. The other day, when making a purchase in a rather poncy shop, I was taken aback when the assistant stared directly at the keypad while I was entering my PIN. Normally they make a point of rather ostentatiously looking away, but this one made a point of ostentatiously looking at the pad. I could not tell whether this was absent-mindedness, or to make the point that anyone working in the establishment must be above suspicion, or even some sort of double-bluff. I hesitated but then felt I had no option but to key the numbers in with him looking. Since then I have wondered how I might, without being rude, have asked him to look away. —C.B., Aldeburgh, Suffolk A. Perhaps he was innocently day-dreaming.

Q. When we lived in the country we had a close friend virtually next door. We always dropped in and out of each other’s houses without ringing first; one is always ‘ready’ for visitors in the country in a way one is not in London. The problem is that this man, who we absolutely adore, now drops in on us in London, still without ringing first. I don’t like to put pressure on him but even a few moments’ notice would be good. How should I tackle this, Mary? — A.L., London NW3 A. Next time you let him in cry ‘Thank goodness it’s you! We’ve got a terrible problem with people knocking and asking for money.

Q. I was waiting for the London train at my local railway station the other morning when I saw a neighbour whose business is doing spectacularly well at the moment. He came up grinning and announced that he had just been shooting in Suffolk on the estate my husband’s family used to own. He said, ‘I had no idea how grand you used to be. I must say, it’s more fun going up the ladder than going down.’ I was dumbfounded and could not think of a response before the train came and he headed for first class and I for second. Mary, what could I have said? — P.W., Marden, Wiltshire A. You should have been kind enough to point out to him that the reverse is the case. ‘On the contrary,’ you could have said.

Q. An old friend has been complaining to mutual other friends that I have dropped her because I have become ‘so grand’. The truth is that we are members of the same profession and currently I have to work incredibly long hours and travel a lot while she does not. But, to reassure her, I invited her to dinner on the first night I have free, which happens to be in early December. We arranged to meet at eight. Now, as luck would have it, I have been asked to something vital on the same night which I would not be able to leave till 9.15 at the earliest.

Q. I was staying recently with a very old girlfriend and her mother at her mother’s house in the country in England and was given my old girlfriend’s bedroom for the weekend on the upper attic floor. I suspect that the room had not been used for a long time. The house is not centrally heated and is rather musty. I came away from a wonderful weekend very badly bitten by bedbugs and the bites are still causing me discomfort three weeks later. What should I do? Should I tell her so she can throw away the old mattress and fumigate the room and prevent any other guests from suffering similarly? Will she take offence? — A.L.

Q. I recently spent three hours in the hairdresser undergoing an expensive hair straightening technique (£200) so that my hair now looks sleek, like Jennifer Aniston’s, rather than frizzy. I was delighted with the result, which is expected to last for three months — but as I walked into a party, on the first outing for this new look, an old family friend greeted me with the words, ‘What on earth have you done to your hair? For heaven’s sake see someone and do something about it! You can afford it.’ I was very hurt and just whimpered, but what should I have replied? This man is not a nasty person or a drunk and I know he has my best interests at heart.   —T.B., London SW6 A.

Q. I have noticed that, when you use the new type of tomato ketchup bottle, it makes a rude noise which can be embarrassing if you are eating alone with other couples behind you. I wondered how I could alert fellow diners to the noise having come from the bottle and not from me? — E.H., London N1 A. To draw any further attention to such an occurrence would only make matters worse. This product has been causing social discomfort for many decades and it is high time the manufacturers addressed the issue. Experienced ketchup consumers ask for it to be brought to the table pre-squirted into a side dish, so as not to offend. Q. My husband and I frequently have people to stay at weekends and love having them.

Q. A close friend is attractive and clever, but does not have a boyfriend and would be far too shy to try internet or speed dating. She lives, platonically, in London with a man who works with her but he does not have a wide circle of friends and has been no good at introducing her to anyone. There is no one suitable in her office. She cannot face looking desperate at a singles dinner party. What should she do, Mary? She is 32. — T.T., York A. It may seem 30 years too early for your friend to learn bridge, but with this skill under her belt, all sorts of doors will open with the minimum of pushing. Once inside, she will find a surprising number of people of her own age who have become bored by the zombie company of drinking and drug-taking contemporaries.

Q. How can I, before accepting an invitation to dinner, find out if the person issuing it has a sweep? The question seems so snobbish but the truth is that unless they have one, my husband and I can’t go. To explain: our normal car was in an accident and will take weeks to repair. In the meantime we can only drive the Maserati my husband bought during his midlife crisis. Having got it out of the garage we found the reverse gear was broken, and a replacement cannot be fitted for months. Now you will see, Mary, that we are not being pretentious. Since we can only drive forwards, we can only visit people with a sweep, which would allow us to drive in and then out again without having to reverse.

Your problems solved Q. I was recently at my local library with my two-year-old daughter. A woman sat next to me with a daughter of about the same age. In the spirit of polite conversation she asked me what my daughter was called. When I told her, she looked absolutely horrified and exclaimed loudly that it was her name and how she had always hated it and had been mocked at school because of it. Mary, we opted for a very traditional name (clearly in common usage) that we both love. I thought this woman’s comments extremely rude. There are many women with the same name as my daughter. If something similar should happen again, how should I respond? — C.H., London A. You do not mention the effect of this woman’s tactlessness on your little daughter.

Q. Friends have just moved into a new house — let’s call it Gamekeepers Folly. I am planning to give them a handmade visitors’ book as a present, but am in somewhat of a quandary as to what to tell the embosser to put on the front. Should I have the missing apostrophe inserted or not? The official records do not have it. My friends are well-educated people but I have not yet had their new notepaper so do not know if they have picked up the point. And if so, should I assume there was only one (‘Gamekeeper’), or several? — Name withheld, Shaftesbury A. If it really were called ‘Gamekeeper’s Folly’ then the apostrophe would go before the ‘s’. However you have not revealed the true name of the house.

Q. I recently rented a villa near Nice belonging to friends of a friend and did it without an agent, which was probably a mistake. A faulty pipe caused flooding on the lower ground floor. Four plumbers came in and out of the house over four days but still one of my sons had to sleep on the drawing room sofa for three nights; the bathroom of the main bedroom was out of action for two days, as were the pool loo and shower throughout our two week visit, during which time the whole of the house was pervaded with a pungent smell of damp. I had deposited £2,000 for breakages and a final clean, valued at £300.

Q. My teenage son, who has started a new school, wants to bring some friends to stay over an exeat. He is keen not to alienate these new friends by appearing to have overly authoritarian parents, but I have reason to believe they will bring mobile telephones to the table and will assume they may make and receive calls during dinner. How can I impose the normal rule of any civilised household without embarrassing my son? A.S., address withheld A. Informants tell me your house is particularly grand. Where this is the case, the parent figure usually has no trouble. It has been observed that teenagers will rise to the occasion, just as created peers used to in the old House of Lords.