Etiquette

Q. We have a neighbour who always overfills my glass. I beg her not to. Even if I commit the solecism of holding my hand over the glass to stop her, she will wait and then sneak up behind me and pour more in. I like her but I always reel away from her house pie-eyed, and wake with a hangover. What do I do? – D.S., Delhi, Catskills, USA A. Punish your neighbour by stocking up on silicone stretch lids, as used by the fastidious to cover the likes of yoghurt pots in the fridge. Having extracted a promise from her that she will not sneak up to refill your glass, secrete a stretchable lid over it. Since these lids are invisible, she will have only herself to blame when she suffers the splash-back consequences. This should put a stop to her meddling in future. Q.

Q. When I have an arrangement to meet a certain friend for lunch she sometimes turns up with a streaming cold – and then I catch it. I would never dream of meeting a friend when I am ill; I would always say to them: ‘Do you want to meet me with a cold? It’s up to you.’ She’s a bit fragile, so how do I tell her off without causing any offence? – J.F., London SW12 A. An inoffensive but effective measure would be to update your WhatsApp profile picture to one of you holding a large handwritten sign saying: ‘No colds please!’ The repeat offender is bound to query the new profile photo and you can say: ‘Oh, I am just fed up with catching colds from friends who don’t mention that they have one when we arrange to meet.

Q. We are going to stay with some old friends who we haven’t seen for a couple of years as they have been working in the US. I happen to know that they now have widely different political views to my husband’s ‘far-right’ opinions. How I can stop any potential conversations getting out of hand, as my husband tends to dig his heels in? – B.D.V., Northants A. Collude with your husband to pre-empt possible catastrophes. Tell the couple that he has agreed to imminently take part in a village debate to raise funds for charity. Unfortunately he has been assigned the argument ‘President Trump is a good man’. He doesn’t want to let the charity down but cannot think of anything to say in Trump’s favour.

Q. I had the same Spanish housekeeper for 25 years and was devoted to her, and she to me. She was loyal, reliable, fastidious and an excellent cook. She died three years ago and I mourn her every day. I have often wondered how you would have dealt with the one aspect of our relationship which was unsatisfactory. Each morning she arrived at 8 a.m. and went straight into the flat’s guest lavatory, where she evacuated. The smell somehow permeated the whole flat for some time. I always wanted to suggest that she arrive at 8.10, having gone at home first, but couldn’t think of a way to say so without hurting her feelings. How would you have tackled this, Mary? – Name and address withheld A.

Q. My husband and I have recently made very good friends with some neighbours in France. They know I am having a 60th birthday party in London and have assumed they will be invited too. My problem is one of these new friends is a world-famous Hollywood actor and his wife is famous in her own right. I am worried about where I will seat them. I wouldn’t want to give the impression to a roomful of my oldest friends (none of whom is famous) that I think the ‘stars’ are more important than they are, but neither do I want to offend the stars, who I fear will expect to be next to us at the top table (and possibly even sitting side-by-side American style). What should I do? – Name and address withheld A.

Q. I recently attended an opera on a friend’s estate in Kent. It was a multi-generational, non-ticketed, invitation-only event. The setting was idyllic, but as night drew in and my party looked around for some sort of food van, we realised we hadn’t read the small print on the invitation: ‘Bring your own picnic.’ It was at least a 20-minute drive to the nearest village, which would mean us missing the opening aria, and we looked on in dismay as the older generation produced checked tablecloths, platters of barbecued chicken, sausages, artisan bread and hummus. I hovered near a platter of chicken thighs and stared longingly at it. Its procurer, a benevolent older lady, took pity on me. ‘Do have one,’ she said. Gratefully I took one for me and one for a starving friend.

Q. Everyone I know pretends to have neurodivergence to make themselves seem more unusual and so they can talk about themselves all the time. Is there a polite way of pointing out that this isn’t actually an interesting topic of conversation? – V.H., Herefordshire A. You might engage in a ‘bore off’. As soon as your interlocutor announces their diagnosis, retort that you too are quite convinced that you are suffering from a kind of rare condition. Launch into a list of your obscure symptoms. Enjoy letting your imagination roam. Brook no interruption. By the time you have paused to draw breath, they will think twice about resuming the neurodivergence topic in case it ‘triggers’ a flood of your own rival symptoms.

Q. I’m the author of 14 books, mostly historical fiction but a few children’s books, all published by a major firm. I find that I sometimes get invited to grand dinners in Notting Hill where I am often put next to a middle-aged banker’s wife. When I tell them about what I do and how hard it is to sell books, they start giving me their advice. It’s always the same: ‘You should really go on Instagram’ and ‘Have you tried TikTok?’. I feel my blood boiling because these are people who have never earned a penny or done anything, and I have no desire to submit myself to a Silicon Valley platform. What should I do? – S.P., London W12 A. The trouble with being too grand for TikTok/BookTok etc is that you may be missing a big trick.

I’ve always loved English swimming pools. I can’t help it – I am a pool-fancier. The lumpy feel of the blue lining beneath pale feet; the peculiar, chlorinated smell of the pool hut where you do the knicker trick; the scratchy pool towel, the near-collapsing deckchair by its side; the greying sky overhead. There’s the swimming, too, but that’s not what gets me. No, the English pool is a particular social idea, a knowing nod to vulgarity, a paradis artificiel in our rainy climes. Chips Channon, an early adopter, knew it when he insisted on putting in a pool at Kelvedon in 1937, as did Viscount Astor when he went against his mother Nancy’s wishes and did the same at Cliveden.

Q. I was caught off guard last week by a busybody mother at my son’s boarding school asking us to join them for their sports day picnic. I pretended we would have our son’s godparents with us but she just said words to the effect of ‘bring them, the more the merrier’. My son doesn’t even like their son. How can I get out of this without causing offence? Name and address withheld A. Tell the busybody you have thought through her kind invitation but, realistically, you want the godparents to concentrate on your son because ‘they see him so rarely’. At the event itself, the busybody may not notice in the mêlée who, if anyone, you are picnicking with but if queries arise, gush brightly: ‘Yes! We’re wondering where they are as well. They’re not picking up!’ Q.

Q. I find that when I go to mixed-age dinner parties the young all seem to be shouting. How can one tell them to pipe down without puncturing their ‘self esteem’? – N.H., London SW7 A. Young people’s voices have indeed become louder. The habit of wearing headphones and watching Netflix with subtitles so they can double-screen has compromised their ability to hear real-life voices and in response they shout. If, apart from the shouting, you still enjoy socialising with the young, you could equip yourself with noise sensitivity loop earbuds and use these in some capacity. Q. I am an artist and have started employing a neighbour who comes to my house two mornings a week to help with the compilation of a back catalogue of my work.

Q. My soon-to-be mother-in-law has started off-loading large amounts of her expensive but hideous cast-off clothes on to me. I don’t want them for many reasons, but we are moving into a much larger flat with lots of cupboards, so I can’t use limited space as a reason to reject them. She is not controlling, just tone-deaf. Can you help at all? — Name and address withheld A. Scroll through your contacts and source an impoverished and unchippy friend who would genuinely jump at the chance to refresh her wardrobe with these luxury cast-offs. Regale your mother-in-law with vivid hardship anecdotes about this friend, adding: ‘Incidentally, she is actually obsessed by you as a style model.

Q. I am a self-employed travel specialist, concentrating on holidays in Asia. Friends (and even friends of friends) plague me asking for tips on flights and itineraries. Then they go online and book direct instead of through me. Sometimes I have spent hours putting the holiday together for them. How can I politely say ‘no’ to people seeking such one-way favours? — M.B., London SW11 A. Clearly the petitioners do not realise that they will pay the same for the reservation either way, but that if you make it for them you will be rewarded with a small commission from the airline or hotel.

Q. An old friend who is extremely generous and loyal has the most infuriating habit. Despite being efficient in other ways, she doesn’t seem to have a functioning address book or contacts on her iPhone. She recently had a huge book launch and for weeks ahead was emailing me repeatedly for emails or mobile numbers. I responded patiently, sometimes even giving the same details three times. Recently I wondered if she actually does have the details but it was simpler to get me to look up things up. I want to put an end to it without being rude. What should I do? – E.S., London W11 A. Next time you could convey the nuisance impact of such serial badgering by gushing: ‘What fun!

Q. When hosting a dinner party, should one circulate the biographies/Wikipedia entries of your guests beforehand so that everyone arrives forearmed, as it were, and can therefore skip the small talk and the fishing around for information about one’s interlocutor? I am inviting eight to dinner, six of whom will have never met before, although I have chosen them carefully because they have good professional and social reasons to be interested in one another. – R.R., London W6 A. Michael Portillo said the other day that, when he was on the Moral Maze panel on Radio 4, he needed to know what the topics were in advance in order to work out what he thought. In the same way it is useful for people to know who else will be at a dinner party.

Q. I enjoy giving dinner parties and put a lot of effort into the preparations. However, recently I have noticed that much of the food I lovingly cook goes uneaten despite proclamations of how delicious it is. It has dawned on me that a large number of my friends are secretly on weight-reduction injections, and barely want to eat. I don’t like to ask beforehand about such a sensitive issue, yet neither do I want such waste, so how can I assess the right amount to make?  – M.B., Chelsea, London A. An extremely well-informed source calculates between 15 and 30 per cent of those in elite circles are currently self-dosing. For Cuisine Droguer you can adjust your quantities accordingly, without even asking, but still cook it lovingly. Q.