Mary Killen

Q. My son was invited, both verbally and via Facebook, to a schoolfriend’s 16th birthday party. However, when I met the girl’s parents at school and thanked them they said, ‘Oh, doesn’t he know he’s been culled?’ They said they had to be away during that exeat, so they’d told the girl to cull the numbers right back and just have a dinner for ten with takeaway pizzas and Netflix. Now my son says the girl has told everyone (150 people) to come anyway. She says it’s the only date everyone’s free before exams start and it will ‘ruin her life’ if she can’t have it. Besides the parents won’t know. How can I alert them that their house is about to be trashed without my son being implicated as the grass?

Q. We have just moved into a charming little hamlet in Warwickshire and were delighted to find a bottle of wine and a friendly card to welcome us from the neighbours. I was a little bit dismayed to see that they had introduced themselves in their card as from the ‘Paddock’s’ (sic). Our problem is that the place is hard to find and we have agreed with these delightful neighbours that we should erect a sign listing the three dwellings in question at the end of the driveway that leads to our house and theirs and, without thinking, left it to them to organise the sign. How can we politely see that the aberrant apostrophe does not appear and that they don’t shove a further apostrophe in the name of our house? —J.P., Warks A.

Q. Our son, aged l6, has a medical condition which, although not life-threatening, requires surgery by a specialist to pre-empt it becoming lifestyle-threatening. The NHS waiting list is long. He has had private health insurance since birth and never yet used it but he refuses to jump the queue as he disapproves of ‘elitism and privilege’. We’ve explained that by taking up his right to go privately he would help another young man with the same condition move more quickly up the NHS list but to no avail. While we admire his ethical aspirations, my wife is having sleepless nights. — N.G., London SW1 A. First find a surgeon who performs the operation both privately and on the NHS.

Q. It’s only April and yet I am being emailed by parents who have already taken charge and are drumming up support for collective year presents for teachers at my children’s schools. I have one son and two daughters who are all leaving their respective schools and I would prefer to thank staff members on my own terms. Am I being petty? — H.K., Hampshire A. Many parents would be relieved that this organisational chore was taken off their hands but others would agree with your instinctive reaction. If you wish to distance yourself from the herd and the modern tyranny of present-giving, say, ‘Oh dear — for the first time ever we have been efficient and really thought ahead about what we want to give. I couldn’t disappoint the children now.’ Q.

Q. I have three spare bedrooms in London and I welcome friends to come and stay. Unfortunately, some of these frequent visitors seem never to have been taught how to wash up. They think they are being helpful by seizing on things that are too big for the machine, running the hot tap continuously over them without a plug in the sink, and then leaving these sudsy pans and serving dishes to dry on the draining board. I find the waste of water maddening, ditto the lack of rinsing. How do I get people to adopt the traditional two-sinks method without seeming queeny? — Name withheld, London SW3 A. Confuse the would-be helpers by stacking the washing up somewhere unexpected — on a trolley, for example. When they ask ‘Can I tackle this trolley-load?

Q. I am always making or receiving phone calls which get cut off. When I ring the person back their line is engaged as they are trying to ring me too. Mary, whose responsibility is it to ring back when a call has been disturbed in this way? Can you use your immense authority to rule, once and for all? — A.B., London W8 A. The person who initiated the call is duty bound to ring back. It was they who made the overture in the first place and they who presumably have something to say to you. There is no implied hostility in your failure to ring them back. Although you can assume it was convenient for them to make a call just a few moments beforehand, it may well, for every sort of reason, be inconvenient for them to receive one.

Q. Is there a tactful way to keep one social offer on hold while waiting to see if you have made the cut for something ‘better’ you know to be happening on the same date? It’s easy enough if the invitation comes in by email or letter, but not when you are put on the spot by someone ringing up. This happened the other day and the caller, a slightly bullying woman, sensed that I was prevaricating and said, ‘I don’t want you to feel ambushed. Take your time, think about it.’ Not wanting to be rude, I quickly accepted immediately. Inevitably the invitation for the preferred event came in by email a couple of hours later. — J.P., Herts A. The key thing is not to respond to a verbal invitation by saying ‘Help!

Q. My uncle, who is a brilliant dentist, has looked after my teeth since I was little. He also sees my children and although he runs a private practice, he has never charged me at all. I am now pregnant with my third child and told him this on my last visit. I wonder if this could be the reason why I received a bill in the post for the consultation — my first ever. He has a new secretary. How can I find out whether the secretary has sent me the bill by mistake, or indeed whether my uncle has decided that he has to draw the line somewhere and is now going to start charging? He did not mention anything to me. — Name withheld, Leeds A.

Q. One of my best friends, who knows I don’t have a great social life at university, has a brother in a band which is touring and will have five nights of gigs at my university town. He is offering me a free ticket for any night that week and to hang with the band backstage. But I cannot bear this artist’s music or voice, and couldn’t sit through a concert, let alone socialise with him. My friend knows very well I won’t have anything else on. Is there a tactful way to extricate myself? — Name and address withheld A. Yes, but it would do you no favours were I to reveal it.

Q. Recently a cousin and I gave a small drinks party in the USA. She had invited a very elegant older Hispanic woman. At the end of the party, my cousin was in a tête-à-tête with this woman on the sofa and I was left with two other (American) women at the table, one of whom was telling amusing anecdotes. I deliberately didn’t interrupt my cousin as I thought she wanted to be alone with her new friend. However later my cousin said that the woman, without any prompting, had started a long story of how she’d been abused by her stepfather as a child. My cousin was longing to get away but didn’t feel able. How could she have extricated herself? — E.S., London W11 A.

Q. Over New Year I stayed with a man who combines being a generous and exciting host with a punctilious need for swift, hand-written appreciation. I had every intention of writing as soon as I got home, but my parents said an email wouldn’t do. However, since we were collected from the airport I didn’t have the address and postcode (he lives abroad); also, I didn’t know what his correct title was for the envelope, and I didn’t know what stamp to put on. Then, when I finally had the information, I was told, ‘He gets even more enraged by late letters than by no letters at all.’ I am sure you will understand how the letter just didn’t get written. I am about to meet my host again at a dinner in London.

Q. At a private screening of a documentary about the artist David Bomberg, a woman sitting near me in the hand-picked audience carried on using her iPhone to send and receive messages. She had the phone on silent but was generating a rival source of light to the screen we were all supposed to be watching. Thus we could not fully concentrate. Was there an elegant way I might have put a stop to this insensitive behaviour? What would you have said, Mary? — S.H-H., London SW3 A. There is no need to say anything. Cinema usherettes of yore would curb rowdy or undesirable behaviour in the stalls by shining a torch onto the miscreants. You might replicate this practice by using the iTorch facility on your own iPhone to project onto the culprit an exposing pool of light.

Q. I have a tattoo the length of my forearm and am worried it will alienate my new boyfriend’s parents on a forthcoming beach holiday. There will be no way of covering it up in a very hot climate. My boyfriend says his parents are way too pompous and it will be good for them to have a tattooed guest ‘in their face’ every day for a week, but I have no wish to irritate people who have been kind enough to invite me to Barbados. How should I handle this? — Name and address withheld A. Visit the website www.veilcover.com and watch a video showing how to completely mask a tattoo with waterproof make up. Veil, which was invented for the medical profession to cover scars and moles, is now available to the general public as well. A complete masking kit costs £34.97.

Q. I have a problem with what might be called location blindness. I live in Balham, but when I arrange restaurant lunches with friends, most of whom live in west London, they tend to assume I will be happy to make three times as long a journey to meet up as they will have to make themselves. A good midpoint for me would be, for example, Green Park, which takes only 15 minutes by Tube from Clapham South, but often, when someone has agreed to meet there, they ring at the 11th hour to suggest Notting Hill instead (50 minutes by tube for me, ten minutes’ walk for them). Or else they say, ‘Let’s meet somewhere mutually convenient, like the British Museum.’ I feel like replying, ‘Or at Poundland on Balham Hill?

Q. We had our son’s fiancée and her family to stay recently. After dinner, expecting conversation, we were shocked to see them all slumped in our drawing room staring at their ‘tablets’ and, I presume, playing on the internet. What should my wife and I have done? I was tempted to do the crossword or read a book but this seemed rude. — C.T., Dorsoduro, Italy A. You would have done well to turn the discourtesy to your own advantage — namely to use it as a tool to find out more about your son’s prospective in-laws. Acting daft, you might have said, ‘Oh what fun! Are we all going to play some new-fangled game on the internet now? We don’t have tablets. May we be on your team?

Q. I travel internationally two or three times per month for work, often with one or two colleagues. While the working day and the evenings inevitably involve prolonged contact with these colleagues, at breakfast-time I wish for a little ‘alone time’ to eat and read the paper, without company, but also without remaining in my soulless hotel room. How can one most tactfully ensure that one is left alone, while still taking breakfast in the hotel dining room? — J.B., Earlsfield, London A. Why not sidestep the problem by asking your colleagues, the night before, what time they are planning to go down to breakfast. If they say seven, then you go at either six or eight. Later you can say, ‘Sorry, I was awake really early’, or ‘Sorry, I overslept’.

Once again Mary has invited some of her favourite figures in the public eye to submit personal queries for her attention. From Sir Les Patterson Q. I am a distinguished Australian diplomat and happily married man, and I recently had a discreet liaison with a lady of oriental descent who was married to a newspaper tycoon. They are splitting up and I’m worried my name could be dragged into the limelight. How can I keep this out of the press? Alternatively, if it hits the headlines, how do I keep Lady Patterson from reading about it?  A. Tongues are already wagging so it is too late for a cover-up, but fortunately the scandal will break at a time when most senior commentators and grand inquisitors will be on holiday.

Q. Six years ago a rather glamorous man bought the house opposite me. Although he always responds to requests for contributions to the residents’ committee, he has yet to attend a meeting or garden party. We know he lives alone and, according to his otherwise discreet servant, there are no other visitors to the house. How can I satisfy my curiosity and let him see that I am an affable sort of person with whom he would certainly like to be friends? — Name withheld, London SW3 A. Next time you know he is in the house, why not ‘accidentally’ damage the wing mirror of his car? Wing mirrors, like dislocated shoulders, can be easily relocated, but pretend you do not know this and turn up on his doorstep to apologise and offer to pay for the damage.

Q. My egregious mother-in-law turns 80 this December. She is not short of a bob but for one of my birthdays (the big one) she sent me a card with the equivalent of A$20 (£12). This is normally what your children receive from their grandparents, not what a mature adult expects. I normally do not send her anything for her birthday but what would be the best way to make a point for her 80th? Send her a card with the same amount of money? Or could you propose an alternative strategy to show her that her gesture was, to say the least, the action of a stingy and parsimonious women? — Name withheld, Canberra, Australia A. If you really wish to make your mother-in-law feel small, then turn the other cheek and send her cash to the value of ten or 20 times what she sent you.