Mary Killen

Q. My husband worked in an office for 25 years and now works from home. As well as the interaction with colleagues, he clearly misses hearing the sound of his own voice. I sympathise, but during the day I obviously need to tell him various things, and almost as soon as I begin to speak

Q. My husband has been appointed to a post in Wales and we as a family have moved here for the foreseeable future. My daughter, who is 15, is very happy at her day school but there is a pervasive culture of ‘tweakments’ there and I am worried the pressure to begin having Botox, fillers

Q. I’m an artist and work from home painting people’s pets from photographs. While working I take a lot of FaceTime calls from friends, with my phone on a stand. My problem is that my husband is in the racing world, and when they glimpse him in the background they want to ask him for

Q. I went to a party last weekend and my father asked me to go and introduce myself if I saw a certain woman there. When I saw her I knew from my father’s description (unusual facial features) she was the person and I went to say hello. Embarrassingly she said something like: ‘You are

Q. Like many women of a certain age, I’m ‘on the pen’. I’ve lost about 20lb on Mounjaro, which I judge to be enough. However, the friend who urged me and many others to try it has lost more than 60lb. Not only does she have the dreaded Mounjaro face – deeply lined – but

Q. I have the sort of job that means I am regularly recruiting new young talent. Now when I go to parties I am besieged by friends, and friends of friends, looking for jobs for their graduate offspring. I am sympathetic but currently have no vacancies. How, without employing an equerry, can I discourage these

Q. I went to stay in the new house of a close, but not very close, friend. She put me in a charming room, but it was above a really noisy boiler that kept randomly firing up throughout the night. In the morning, when the husband asked me in front of the breakfast table if

Q. I have a meeting scheduled with a possible business associate who asked me to buy a certain book on financial management and read it beforehand. He made a voice call last week to check whether I had got the book and, because I was actually near a bookshop, I lied and said yes. I

Q. We have recently moved out of London and have met charming, married lesbians who are living locally. They are coming to supper next weekend for the first time. Also present will be two heterosexual couples, who will be staying with us. One of these lesbian ladies is quite clearly the ‘stud’ and my wife and I

Q. A new neighbour (a weekender from London) asked me if I’d be prepared to pass on the contact details of my daily, which I was happy to do as I know she needs the money. That was about six months ago, and now the daily is asking if I could give her a pay

Q. I have just got off a nine-hour overnight flight from Miami to Heathrow. I was in premium economy in the middle of the plane, an Airbus A330, sitting in the left aisle seat of a middle row of three. Beside me was another man and on his right, also in an aisle seat, was

Q. Our daughter is very keen on a young man from her office whom she has brought home to stay with us several times since Christmas. We can see his charm but one problem has come to light, which is that the trainers he wears leave the most awful and visible tread marks all over

Q. I run a busy company with a workforce of 150, where I need to have short, to-the-point discussions with staff. In order to move along quickly, I set my mobile timer to ring on repeat every seven minutes. This means I have the perfect excuse for cutting short an overrunning conversation. But I cannot

Q. My grandson has just failed his driving test for the fifth time and yet I know, from his chauffeuring me everywhere, that he is an excellent driver. He is strikingly handsome and tall and I am convinced this prejudices the examiners against him. What would you recommend, Mary? — E.G., Alton, Hants A. Your

Two years ago my quality of life began to go downhill. It happened when BT Openreach gave our old copper landline a compulsory upgrade to ‘Digital Voice’, meaning all calls would be made over wifi. A succession of visiting engineers failed to resolve the crackling and the cutting out on the new digital line or

Q. My daughter is temporarily living abroad and we communicate daily on WhatsApp. She’s always desperate for any local news/gossip and I try to send her what I know, so she doesn’t feel too far away from what’s going on. A fellow parent in the village has now told me that my daughter forwards these

Q. I went to a supper party and sat beside a man who seemed rather pleased with himself. He never once asked me a question about myself, but proceeded to tell me about his children. They seemed to all be super-successful in their fields… hedge-fund manager, top lawyer, etc. The problem was that he had

Q. Every so often we’re invited to our friends’ house for lunch or dinner. It’s close by and the house is beautiful, warm and comfortable. But whatever time we’re asked to arrive for dinner or lunch, we don’t sit down to eat until at least two hours later. The back door of the house enters