Modern manners

Q. A newish friend who has very good manners lent me a DVD of his grandfather at the Olympics. I forgot to watch it. Now, a year later, he has asked for it back but I can’t find it! It is unique and irreplaceable. I feel rather guilty but did not ask to borrow the DVD and why on earth did he wait a year to ask for it back? — E.S., Sussex A. If the man is old enough to have a grandfather who performed at the Olympics then he is old enough to be able to judge a friend’s ability with chaos control. The fact that he foisted the DVD on you therefore almost amounts to entrapment.

Q. A well-known television mogul,whom I had met only once, came to dinner at my house. I was on good culinary form and though I say it myself, the food and wine were exceptional. For various reasons it turned into an almost bespoke dinner for the mogul, in that the other guests were all people he had been desperate to meet, and so one way or another he became the guest of honour. He even struck some sort of deal with one of them. In any case we had a great evening and he thanked me profusely as he left. The next day I opened the door to find someone with an unimpressive bunch of flowers together with a card from the mogul. They looked like the sort of flowers in cellophane that one might pick up at a petrol station.

Q. We have moved from London into a rural area where we are preparing for the first visit of a lifelong friend who has become a self-invented countryman. I know that he will insist on foraging for mushrooms, but none of my family wants to go on kidney dialysis machines as a result of being forced to eat them. None of us (including him) are mushroom experts. Much as we love our friend, he is something of a bully. What should we do Mary? — Name and address withheld A. Buy in a store cupboard supply of dried chanterelles, ceps etc, and rehydrate them prior to his visit. Feign enthusiasm for making a risotto or omelette using his foraged harvest. Knock this up while his back is turned and present it as a fait accompli, after hiding his foraged mushrooms.

Q. Last year my husband and I stayed with a much-loved, but slightly airy-fairy friend in her house in Tuscany. Flights, tips, presents, a hire car and house-sitters were already costing us rather a lot, but she insisted we went out to (quite expensive) local restaurants for lunch four days out of five to experience the regional cuisine. She let my husband pay each time. I felt this was overdoing it, especially as we had to pay for her, her husband and her three adult children, and they have had plenty of hospitality when staying with us in England. Mary, can you rule? Moreover how can we avoid it happening again when we join them later this year? — Name and address withheld. A. Your friends should have drawn the line at two lunches paid for by your husband.

Q. Some rather flashy new neighbours of ours — I won’t mention their names as his will be familiar to a lot of your readers — asked my wife and me to lunch last week in their new barn as a dummy run for the cook they’ve employed for the shooting season. They were very enthusiastic about her cooking, but the steak and kidney pie was served with a perfect circle of puff pastry beside the meat on our plates. We agreed once back in the car and alone again that this was not the form, as a proper shoot lunch would have had it all cooked together. Were we mean not to mention it to them? — Name and address withheld A.

Q. I am in my seventies and my husband is in his nineties. The other night we had two couples to dinner. However, when they arrived (separately), we both realised we had forgotten their names, so when I brought the second couple into the drawing room I was incapable of introducing everyone to each other — they were meeting for the first time. This set the evening off to a terrible start, but our memory failure was no reflection of our affection for our guests or of our general brain power. Mary, what would you have done in these circumstances? — Name and address withheld A.

Q. ‘Alfred’ is a friend of 30 years’ standing who has just married for the first time. Alfred retains all his charms but his wife is a horror show who carps and criticises our beloved friend in front of us. The only plus is that she is often away on business. Alfred has a country house to which he usually invites us over the summer. How can we tactfully arrange to be invited during one of his wife’s absences? — Name and address withheld A. Ring Alfred to synchronise diaries and find a time when they can come to stay with you. Keep saying the weekends he suggests are no good for you until you have compiled a list of dates when the wife is out of the country. Finally set a date for their visit.

Q. I import a range of very high-quality food products from Europe into the UK. They are regarded as the best in the market and have a well-proven record in European stores, but the buyer at a well-known ‘upmarket’ supermarket is elusive. When I try to get in touch, he claims to be busy and, in the last instance, dismissively advised me to send some samples with a business card. If I do that, I will have lost the opportunity for a meeting in which I could grab his attention. — G.L., address withheld A. Counter his mental laziness with a four-pronged attack. Let’s call your products the Coup de Gout range and the upmarket supermarket Primary Palate.