Mary Killen

Q. A good friend and respected colleague, a QC who crossed into commerce, has of late enjoyed some success in that field, becoming chairman of two significant companies. This has buoyed his self-esteem which was not previously especially low in the water. Recently the FT saw fit to profile him in their ‘Power Player’ series, describing him as ‘a ferocious intellect’, among other things. He is now to be heard professing a lifelong admiration for the perspicacity of the FT editorial team. To date he has indeed been a clever, witty and immensely enjoyable colleague, but any objective survey would also report a lack of height and hair, along with a keen appetite for alcohol.

Q. At a party recently I was bearded by a woman who effectively pinned me against a wall while she lectured me about an aspect of my work that has just reached the public domain. No one came to rescue me for about 20 minutes. How can one get away from people in situations like this without causing offence? A.D., London SW1 A. Glance over the shoulder of the overbearing person as though your attention has been distracted by someone gesturing at you. Mouth ‘just coming’ to the imaginary person. Then say, ‘What a nightmare. I am being dragged away…’ Finish your sentence and move on, shaking your head reluctantly. Q. I own a house in Normandy.

Q. I am in the lower sixth at school. The following problem arises quite frequently and I would like your advice. When we pupils go to get our lunch it is self-service and by the time you have loaded your tray you are in no mood to hang around with it before sitting down. What happens to me is that I often can’t see any of the other guys in my house and then I will sit down with some of the girls in my year but I won’t really have anything to say to them and then suddenly I will see the people I was looking for in the first place sitting quite nearby. At that point I can’t get up and move because it would be too rude. Do you have any suggestions as to how I could move without being rude? Name withheld, Wiltshire A.

Q. The other night I met someone with whom I got on really well. Yet because I am a young journalist and she is an editor, I did not email her the next day, in the normal way, to say, ‘Let’s keep in touch’. I thought it might seem pushy and as though I was looking for work. Mary, was I right to hold back in this case, given the professional implications? Name withheld, London A. No. It is fine to email such people met socially. If they are at the top of their profession they will be pushy themselves and will welcome your initiative. They will also welcome having received your contact details in this easy way and being able to file them with just a click.

Q. I recently went to a birthday dinner. The tables were very big and round, meaning that conversation was only really possible with the people sitting on either side of you. The man on my right, however — someone I had never met before — had something very large nesting in the hair of his left nostril. With the best will in the world, I thought I might be sick if I were to turn, as I should have done, and so I hardly talked to him at all. I did not want to be rude and feel very guilty. Mary, how would you have tackled this problem? R.J., London W11 A. Readers will empathise with your revulsion. Yet the truth is that everyone would prefer to be told, even if it has to be by someone they have just met. You can break the news prettily by sourcing two tissues.

Q. We are in the habit of entertaining guests from overseas, including a countess, at a bush camp in one of the excellent KwaZulu Natal game reserves. Usually we go, in a group of up to eight, on game walks, which bring us up close to animals including rhinos. From time to time, when a rhino coughs or stomps or advances in our direction we have to scramble up into the branches of nearby (if we are lucky) trees. This is predictably wild and disorganised and less agile guests tend to clog up access to the branches. As a host I would like some advice on protocols please, Mary. Would it be correct for me to lead the scrambled retreat and be the first to leap into the branches — I am usually the fittest and most agile of the group — and pull the others up behind me?

Q. A close, though fairly new, friend of mine is an influential art critic. I suppose it is only natural that other friends should now be always asking me for his home address or to bring him along to their exhibition or to the exhibitions of their children. The problem is that they then send invitations which inevitably arrive with a mention of my name and so, even when the work is clearly bad, my friend feels he must attend the shows as a favour to me. I do not want to have all my own favours, as it were, used up on other people. Nor do I want to waste my friend’s time, but without being with him when he opens the invitations I can hardly reverse the endorsements. How can I stem this tide without seeming as though I am blocking people’s careers?

Q. Can you please advise. If you have been invited to meet someone at a club or a restaurant for a meeting or get-together, and you arrive before them (either because you are early or they are late for some reason), is it polite to accept the offer of a drink from the staff and make yourself comfortable? Or is it better manners to wait until your host arrives but then risk the embarrassment of their discomfort which has been added to by your own fastidious manners and patience? Assuming they are going to pick up the tab (it was definitely their invitation) one wouldn’t order a glass of champagne, but on the other hand one doesn’t want to sit there with a glass of water and the air of a nervous interviewee either. What would you recommend? P.R., London W11 A.

Q. Caught short by unexpected guests and an empty larder, in desperation I opened a can of high-end cat food (Fancy Feast brand — chicken, heart & liver flavour), mixed in a shot of brandy and served it as ‘pate’ with some water biscuits. It was delicious (the brandy cutting some of the natural gaminess of the product) — so popular in fact (I confess I repeated this performance with a subsequent group of expected guests) that now friends are asking for the recipe. I’m tempted to laugh it off and come clean — an economical tip for these straitened times, but my wife is mortified. What do you suggest? Name withheld, Port of Spain, Trinidad PS. Don’t try this with the fish flavour unless your guests have been drinking heavily. A.

Q. Last weekend we went abroad to a birthday party of great friends of ours. We often meet them when they come to London, and invite them to join us at my club. They are coming to visit London again, this time with another couple, whom we hardly know. Of course we would like to invite our friends to dine with us again, and are prepared to invite their friends too; however, I’m not keen to have to pay for them as well. What do you advise me to do? To say that we can only invite two guests at a time wouldn’t work, for our friends are too familiar with English methods to believe that. Your famous wisdom please! Name withheld, Norfolk A. There is no way around this. You will have to invite all four of them, and as the only member you will be the only one allowed to pay.

Q. My daughter will be studying Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde for English GCSE and my wife and I are at daggers drawn. I say that Jekyll should be pronounced ‘Jeekill’, as in Gertrude. My wife says that this is pretentious and we should stick to ‘Jeckill’, as in Hollywood. Please advise. A.D., Faringdon, Oxfordshire A. According to the Jekyll family, of whom there are not that many members, the correct pronunciation is ‘Jeekill’. Since Robert Louis Stevenson actually met Gertrude’s brother, Walter, when the latter was a priest in Bournemouth, it is likely that this was the pronunciation he had in mind when writing.

Q. Mary, please help urgently. We have friends to stay with us in Scotland every year at this time. This year I have an impressive quota of three single (heterosexual) men in their forties. I have identified one in particular as ideal for a singleton female friend who is also coming. How can I force them together, Mary? I may not be able to use the long walk/car-running-out-of-petrol ruse if the weather closes in. I know they would be happy together but obviously being in their forties both are a bit shy now about the ‘pass’. Name withheld A. People forget that for most of the last century, dancing, i.e. dancing with a partner, was the means by which the romantic spark could be lit and a liaison forced forward.

Q. I am in the middle of a second gap year some 33 years after the first (which was marred by menial work). The ‘Dear Mary’ item (8 August) about Justgiving charity requests prompted some thoughts since I have just been on the soliciting rather than receiving end of a fundraising drive. I fully share the exasperation of your correspondent who wants to know how to deal with a stream of sponsorship requests, but he should learn to distinguish between requests for funds which go directly to the nominated charity and those cheekily diverted to finance the cash-strapped adolescent gap year. My own was linked to a six-week Pyrenean walk from the Basque Atlantic to the Catalan Mediterranean coast. So far the walk has raised about £7,000 for Merlin, a medical relief charity.

Q. I was asked to review a collection of letters and did so, praising to the skies the late author’s wit, integrity and astute judgment of human character. News now reaches me that an old family friend, lampooned in these letters, has taken offence. She saw my ringing endorsement of these letters as a ringing endorsement of their author’s ‘attack’ on her. I did not refer to this woman in my review although I remember very much enjoying the references to her. It was clear that their author had never allowed her absurd side to stand in the way of his liking her very much. I feel the same way and my late parents would be horrified to think of any of us having hurt her feelings.

Q. I am feeling overwhelmed by the endless stream of sponsorship requests from friends, godchildren and relations, a lot of whom could write a cheque for ten times their target total without batting an eyelid. £15 — the most I could afford given the number of these demands on my overdraft — seems stingy especially when lists of donors and donations are published on the Just Giving website for all to see. I don’t want to watch their progress online as they train for their cycle ride to Bordeaux, I just want to be able to choose my own charities to give to. Is it acceptable to ignore some of these well-intentioned but almost bullying requests? Name and address withheld A. It is not acceptable to ignore them but you can field them pleasantly.

Q. I recently attended with my wife the summer party of a London literary society. The event offered wine and buffet supper between 6 and 9 p.m. Arriving at 6.50 we found the buffet table almost stripped bare, with guests seated around it, munching copiously, à la Babette’s Feast. Food stocks were not replenished. Therefore I ate nothing. For next time, should the organising committee be asked to delay food, or should one expect to join a hungry queue outside well before six o’clock? Name and address withheld A. No, let this party continue in the normal civilised manner without queuing or introducing elements of tension over inadequate suppliers. Perhaps this year, as a feature of the recession, the buffet was stripped bare by human locusts by 6.50 p.m.

Q. My husband has started working from home. The invasion of my privacy and the disruption of my peace is driving me almost mad. Now he has developed a habit of standing at the bottom of a staircase to the room where I myself work and yelling questions up it. He says he is too busy to come up the stairs and talk to me in a more civilised manner. I have tried to train him by not answering unless he comes upstairs, but then I can miss out if he assumes I am not in and he is calling to, for example, tell me something I really want to hear. I do not want to yell back, Mary, but neither do I want to have to get up from my desk, walk across the room and halfway down the staircase in order to answer him without having to shout myself. How can we move forward? Name and address withheld A.

Q. My host on a forthcoming holiday keeps his pool arctic cold so that it is not enjoyable for me to swim in it. I do not want to be a spoilsport. What should I do? Name and address withheld A. Bring a wet suit and swim in that, claiming you are extra sensitive to cold. Q. I recently attended the evening reception that followed the wedding of a male ex-colleague. On the way I picked up a bottle of champagne as a gift, but when I arrived I found that there was no obvious opportunity to present it. Both bride and groom were perpetually surrounded by well-wishers and, furthermore, everyone was already drinking champagne so my poor bottle seemed a bit pointless. I could only stay an hour, so I decided to take it away with me and give it to my friend after the honeymoon instead.

Q. I was persuaded by my son to attend a lecture on astronomy. I was out of my depth within five minutes. Should I have interrupted the speaker, Mary, and asked for elucidation? I did not want to embarrass my son but through not so doing, the whole rest of the lecture went over my head and, I would imagine, the heads of a large proportion of the audience. Secondly, a question-and-answer session followed in which those in the audience who had understood the talk posed questions. Can you explain why so many apparently able-bodied scientists seem to speak in staccato tones as though they were imitating Stephen Hawking? J.M., Salisbury A. In answer to your first question I am afraid a lecture hall is not a schoolroom.

Q. An old friend summoned me to a black-tie dinner at the Cambridge college of which he is master. On arrival I found I had forgotten cuff links so I threaded a shoelace through each cuff and tied them together that way. Knowing that I have about 20 pairs of cuff links at home, I could not bring myself, in the current financial climate, to go out and buy another pair. I felt my response was imaginative but my host raised his eyebrows in a pompous way and made me feel small. Who was right, Mary? C.S., Worcs A. It really depends on how the laces looked. Might they have looked a little bit Sir Les Patterson? Might your host have felt the omission was symptomatic of a general lack of respect for himself?