Dear Mary

Q. My sister has married in later life and we all like her husband. They have moved nearby and now join us in a weekly pub quiz. I am not competitive but just enjoy taking part. My brother-in-law went to Harvard, and although I went to St Mary’s Wantage I seem to be able to hold my own when socialising with very bright people and have never felt ‘inadequate’. At the quiz, however, whenever there is a trivia question on pop or soap operas he looks at me and says, ‘Go on – you’ll know this one.’ I shouldn’t mind this but I find it maddening. – O.I., London SW13 A. Chippiness is the wrong response. Instead roll gracefully with the punches and each time there is a really difficult question, turn the spotlight on him saying, ‘Go on – you’ll know this one!

No matter how much you loved Boris you would find it maddening if he spilled red wine on your sofa.  And more so if he didn’t even make a gestural effort to clear it up. But, like us all, Boris would have known from experience of the futility of trying to get red wine stains out of ‘soft furnishings ‘ We’ve all seen fellow party guests being humiliated after such spillages as bossy people set to with theatrical paper towel mopping or the pantomime of pouring white wine or whole packets of sea salt onto the stains. And then we’ve seen that nothing seems to work. Boris may have felt why make a small red stain into a larger pink one? It’s in human nature to spill red wine.

The Government has announced that it will appoint a bureaucrat to spend three years writing a report on the desperate and urgent shortage of air transport capacity in the south east of England. Meanwhile, Heathrow will continue to operate at over 98 per cent of capacity with no spare runways to pick up the slack when something goes wrong; Britain will continue to lack direct flights to countless Chinese metropolises; and the Chinese economy will continue to boom, swelling by an estimated 25 per cent by the time Howard Davies has finished pondering the issues in 2015. We can’t wait that long and the solution is obvious. The immediate need for more capacity can only be met with a third runway at Heathrow.