Q. During a lavish lunch party last month, our host was insulting about my new boyfriend, whom I had brought along with his permission. His actual words were, ‘He’s not my particular cup of tea, darling.’ He said this privately to me, not to the whole table. At the time I laughed it off and
Q. Later this summer my boyfriend and I are flying out to the Aegean. Our hostess emailed to say we can get a lift from the airport with another couple who are coming for the same week on the same flight and who have already booked a hire car. She says she only needs one
Q. I treated four friends to a trip to the Far East. On the way back there was a cock-up at the airport with an overbooked plane and our party had to be put up for the night in a (magnificent) hotel. As a stickler for standards I wrote to the airline to complain and
Q. I have caught a cold from a senior member of the royal family. I feel sure there must be ways in which I can turn this to my social and/or financial advantage and I admit that I have deliberately been sleeping in a draught in order to prolong the symptoms. What do you suggest,
Q. Please advise me. I have a friend whose mobile has no signal when she is at home. When I ring her landline her father always says he will pass the message on that I have rung but he often forgets. She does not call me back and I do not like to annoy her
Q. Since I now live alone and have spare bedrooms my house in London has become something of a destination for old friends who want to stay overnight. I love seeing them. I love making them welcome and giving them drinks and food if they want it but the one thing I have to admit
Q. A very dear friend has lugged back a present from China. It is the most hideously frightful, huge, garish, golden ‘money’ cat with a waving paw which he has specifically asked me to put in ‘my’ drawing room (along with the Meissen and Chippendale). My problems are fourfold; I do not want to upset
Q. Whenever I have my friends round for dinner, someone’s mobile phone will always ring and they will always answer it at the table. When I extend my next invitation, how do I request that they turn their phones off on arrival? I do find such behaviour at the dinner table unacceptable but many treat
In Competition No. 2539 you were invited to submit a problem in verse form to The Spectator’s agony aunt in the style of a poet of your choice. The assignment was inspired by James Michie’s poem ‘Dear Mary’, which appears in his superb posthumously published collection Last Poems and which brims with wit and humanity,
Q. Our 16-year-old son is having 30 friends to a party. For obvious security reasons my husband and I will not go out but have agreed not to show our faces downstairs. This raises a problem with food. Our son refuses to have any, complaining that pizza, sausages, baked potatoes, chicken legs in barbecue sauce,
Q. While on holiday in the Middle East I contracted amoebic dysentery. Although it is an unpleasant condition, I am a bit overweight and the pounds have been dropping off. Do I go to the doctor or should I let the illness run its course and take advantage of the benefits that have arisen from
Q. I am dreading Easter as my children are always given so many eggs by their various godparents and grandparents. This is to say nothing of those they bring home from hunts. I consider it terribly bad for them to eat so much chocolate but since each egg has been effectively endorsed by the grown-up
Q. Somewhat fortuitously I was recently a guest of an eminent London picture dealer in an excellent restaurant in the West End. Among the assembled were various racehorse owners and trainers. I happened to be sitting next to a lord whose family are members of the Beerage. I could not help but notice that the
Q. I share a student house with three others. My room is next to the kitchen and one of my housemates often eats lunch while surfing the net on my MacBook. Some of the keys have been gunked up with the effluent and spores from his meals but he is the landlord and I don’t
Q. I suffer from a form of visual Spoonerism (in New College chapel Warden Spooner concluded, ‘in the sermon which I have just been preaching, wherever I have said Aristotle I have meant St Paul’). I often recognise a person as somebody completely different. The other day I went to a private view at a
Q. I am approaching my 50th birthday and I want to have a party for around 100 people. There is an ideal space near where we live in London. It belongs to a friend, who has kindly offered it to us free, but is only really suitable for 100 people. Since we cannot afford to
Q. I am currently living, with two others, in a ‘high end’ house in an elegant garden square in Chelsea. We are all friends of, and pay rent in some form to, our absentee landlord, an old-school landowner and pig breeder who, when not charming the birds from the trees, is generally blasting the life
Q. We are lucky enough to be lent a chalet in Verbier. My wife invited her niece and boyfriend who is showing signs of becoming a fixture. He is not blessed with a great intellect and has been brought up in a household where shared meals are a rarity. He has little in the way
Q. I wonder if you can give me some advice. My parents have agreed I can have 20 people to a party in our house in Balham. I am 16 but very responsible so they agreed to go out between 7 p.m. and 11 when the party is taking place, though they would only go
Q. Now that eco-issues are so fashionable my husband has come out as a militant meanie on energy conservation. Meanwhile our three teenage daughters use absurd amounts of hot water each day and leave their laptops and televisions on. They also prance about in the skimpiest clothes imaginable, which means they always want the heating