Mary Killen

Q. This summer I spent a couple of nights in an hotel in France. The friend I had been staying with suddenly had rather a lot of people so I volunteered to go to the hotel — quite a good holiday trick if there are a lot of children about. Usually when I check into an hotel room I never make use of the drawers or the wardrobe. I just scatter my things about the room so that when I leave I need only glance around to make sure I have not forgotten anything. This was quite a nice little hotel, (a favourite of the late Auberon Waugh)*, and on this occasion they had unpacked for me and hung up my clothes and effectively hid a suit which I did not notice was missing until I went on to stay with friends further north and wanted to wear it.

Q. I recently prayed to St Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, in the cause of a friend who was desperately ill. My prayers were answered. I have been told that it is protocol to acknowledge in writing favours received by St Jude. To where should I post the letter, Mary? I am confused. Name and address withheld A. You are not expected to write to St Jude himself. Instead, it is traditional to place a small ad in a publication with personal columns. Why not do this to coincide with 28 October, this saint’s feast day? Q. My wife and I are planning to visit the mediaeval countryside of the Saxon villages of southern Transylvania where one can observe the results of hundreds of years of traditional land management and non-intensive mixed farming.

Q. I have started to commute to London and although I do not travel in every day I find myself constantly wearing the wrong kit in the wrong place. A Barbour looks dreadful in London — equally a Crombie or a Chesterfield looks somehow provocative at Westbury station. I can’t be expected to carry two coats at all times. How do other commuters solve this conundrum? M.C., Somerset A. Head for Cordings at 19 Piccadilly, London W1 (www.cordings.co.uk). Your particular needs will be met by a classic ‘covert coat’ (£425) suitable for wear in both country and town and favoured by social types as diverse as the late Lord Deedes, Damien Hirst and Alex James.

Q. An elderly relative has developed the disgusting habit of licking her knife after using it for, say, jam, and then using it again to help herself to butter. It’s horrid having to take butter from a dish into which some one else’s saliva-strewn knife has been plunged. Any ideas? B.M, North Berwick A. Re-educate your relation by giving her tea at your own table. Serve scones from the oven, handing out the first one ‘to test’ by an accomplice who will have been primed to load it with butter, then lick his knife. As his knife-wielding hand now lunges for the jam, cry ‘Greystoke! Greystoke!’ and steer the hand towards the teaspoon he should use. ‘What does Greystoke mean?’ your relation is bound to ask as your accomplice apologises.

Q. What is the etiquette regarding bowing or curtseying to Prince and Princess Michael of Kent? Last week I attended the memorial for Isabella Blow in the Guards Chapel. It was a magnificent occasion, but emotionally draining, and I was just collecting myself when suddenly the royal couple passed by, leading the mourners out of the chapel. Had I known they were present at the service, I would have been prepared to follow the lead of others and do the correct thing, but I was in the very back row and looking in the wrong direction so it was too late to do anything at all. I would not wish to have given offence. Had I been prepared, what should I have done? I am a 31-year-old male. K.J., London W12 A.

I work in an office where the loo is shared by three separate professions — all rather civilised ones, at that. Q. I work in an office where the loo is shared by three separate professions — all rather civilised ones, at that. However, we are not money-makers, and therefore cannot afford a cleaner. And yet, despite my efforts to make people aware of the mess they create, I have found that again and again it is my office which buys the cleaning fluids, cleans the loo, empties the over-flowing bins and so on. How, Mary, can I make the others share the burden? Name and address withheld A. Start by researching a cleaning service which will perform this function for a fee. Ask for a written quotation.

During the summer I worked in my step-father’s office. I discovered that while he is generally well liked his (25) employees do have one gripe. Q. During the summer I worked in my step-father’s office. I discovered that while he is generally well liked his (25) employees do have one gripe. At Christmas he always arranges for each one of them to receive a present of a hamper of ‘luxury’ foods. These, apparently, often contain items such as olive paste, wild boar sausages, crystallised fruit and stem ginger which the recipients are none too keen on. One employee told me they have Googled the cost of these hampers and, frankly, most of them would prefer the cash. How can I tactfully persuade my stepfather to start giving cash instead without hurting his feelings?

Q. I am shortly going to stay in a glamorous venue in Tuscany whose name I cannot reveal here as it would look like vulgar boasting. I have not been there before, and am extremely worried about the layout of the lavatories. Due to having had an extremely strict English nanny who would not let me, aged five or six, ‘spend a penny’ in the night — I was sometimes reduced to using a wastepaper basket — I suffer from abnormal anxiety about having to pee when away from home. I was recently a guest at a bohemian house party in the Isle of Wight. My first night there I only slept four hours due to a fellow guest telling me that we must be very careful not to wake the eminent social and military historian whose room was next to the loo, and who was a very light sleeper.

Q. A very good and loyal friend of mine has just had two operations and recently she rang and asked if she could come and stay for the weekend. I immediately said yes. However, two days later, I opened an email from a boyfriend who lives abroad and saw that he would be visiting the UK that weekend (the first time for two years) and wanted to stay the weekend with me. For reasons I cannot go into here, there is no way that these two can meet. Do I have to bite the bullet and tell my gentleman friend that he cannot come? My woman friend does have a sibling in the area but she is extremely proud and would not take kindly to being told by me that she is to be ousted for a man. I hardly ever lie and cannot think what to do. E.S., London W11 A. You must stick to the original arrangement.

Q. I am going to stay with some grown-ups in a house next to the beach in Suffolk. I will be the only boy of eight who is staying. The other children are too old to play with me. There is no television and I have finished the Harry Potters. What can I do? L.B., Camden Town, London A. You might follow the example of Milo Rowse, aged eight, and his friend William Polito who staged a summer display outside Milo’s house in Thorpeness. The boys filled a disused aquarium with a selection of 20 or so insects and other wildlife ranging from beetles to woodlice to newts, all found within the Rowse’s own garden. Having identified the beasts, they dubbed their display ‘The Secrets of Sandy Lodge’ and invited passers-by to pay one pence each to examine its creepy contents.

Q. When staying with a friend some months ago, I foolishly dropped a small Clarice Cliff dish which broke into several pieces. Knowing his penurious state, one in which as a pensioner I share, I offered to pay for it. He accepted, telling me that he had paid $500 (approximately £200) for it. During a recent telephone conversation he casually mentioned that he’d been able to repair the dish with little evidence of the accident. Am I being unreasonable in wondering why he has neither given me the dish for which, after all, I’d paid, nor offered to refund at least part of the $500? M.H., NSW, Australia A. Even when invisibly mended, the overall integrity of the dish will have been compromised in the eyes of a collector.

Q. My future son-in-law likes nothing more than to tease me. He recently purchased a garden gnome for the garden at his country pile and when visitors look at it askance, he claims that I was the donor so he cannot remove it. Should I feel pleased to be the supposed donor of a retro chic item or should I seek revenge by giving the gnome a Facebook page where he tells tall tales from the garden? M d B., London SW11 A. This prank is too harmless to be viewed as passive-aggressive and it would be inappropriate to rise to the bait. Instead, tell commentators that you are delighted by the tease because you see it as the hallmark of a very healthy relationship between in-laws to be. ‘Isn’t it marvellous that he should want to tease me!’ you can gloat. Q.

Q. I was recently a weekend guest at a very large house. A series of unfortunate incidents meant I arrived at the house with no cash to leave for the cleaner at the end of the weekend. There were no cashpoints for miles around and to ask my host to drive me to one would have, I know, annoyed him. Although I stripped the bed myself and made sure the room was spotless, I fear it did not make up for the lack of wonga. Should I send the money now by post? Was there anything else I could have done at the time? E.W., Kensington A. You need not have dealt with the room yourself. Instead you should have asked for the name of the person who would be cleaning it. You could then have left, propped up on your dressing table, a sealed envelope addressed to her.

Q. A member of my social circle, a local celebrity of sorts, has created a Facebook group the title of which contains a glaring spelling error. I feel unable to accept her invitation to join, as doing so would generate notifications to my other ‘friends’, who no doubt would question my judgment. I now fear a froideur in my relations with said celebrity, who is sensitive to both slights and to any criticism of her work. Mary, what should I do? Name and address withheld A. Why not write on her message ‘wall’ that you are trying to join her group but the annoyingly overpedantic version of SpellCheck you have installed in your own computer will not let you do so as it does not recognise the spelling she has used for its title.

Q. My wife and I have just given a summer party to which we invited around 200 people. Correction — we posted invitations to 200, 20 of whom rang up on the day to say they had not received their invitation, but could they come anyway? Now that the party is over we wonder about 30 other people who neither RSVPd nor manifested on the night. How can we find out if we have been the victims of a mass snubbing or if, more likely, the inadequacies of the west London postal system has led to these friends mistakenly thinking that we have snubbed them? W.S., London W14 A. The postal service may well be to blame but the epidemic of discourtesy now raging means that serious hosts are having to employ chasers to solicit responses from ineffectual or inconsiderate invitees.

Q. Please can you enlighten me as to the difference between an actor’s agent, an actor’s manager and an actor manager? I recently met a famous actor at a party and was soon out of my depth.Name and address withheld A. An actor manager is now rather a thing of the past. Most actor managers tended to cast themselves in roles for which they were usually 20 or 30 years too old. One played Hamlet well into his sixties. An actor’s agent handles all the actor’s contracts and in the US a lot of actors have managers to look after their day-to-day living and talk to the agent if he is ignoring the actor. Agents usually have a long list of clients; managers tend to handle only a few people.

Q. My wife has always had a wide network of friends, many of whom she makes contact with each day as they bring her up to date with how things are going in their lives. She is a good listener and always sees the point of things. She very much enjoys being abreast of all gossip as it ‘breaks’. This would be fine but she is now on the telephone for, I estimate, around four hours a day, two of them with an earpiece while she is doing the school run. I would not mind if the emotional traffic were two-way but it always seems to be my wife who is consoling or congratulating some interlocutor and I never hear the favour being returned.

Q. One of the most characteristic aspects of being a member of the British middle class ‘nouveau pauvre’ is finding it embarrassing to take action when things we used to take for granted as a free service are now very expensive. I have paid over £3,000 to our (private) dentist for our younger son to be fitted with the new South African ‘train track’ mini-braces that are a status symbol at his school. After 18 months he admittedly does have a Hollywood smile, but all I have is a large bill and the recently removed set of perfectly fine braces. It seems a criminal waste of money to throw them away.

Q. I have had a boyfriend, of whom I am very fond, for some time now. There is, however, one slight problem. On special occasions when he comes to visit my family, he always dons his best pair of shoes of which he is extremely proud. Unfortunately these are not of the gentlemanly variety. They are of a particularly common style and colour and would perhaps better appeal to a Sicilian waiter out on a Sunday jaunt. I thought this would be a matter of little impediment but my boyfriend only has to enter the room for the eyes of all my family to become inexorably transfixed on his shoes. What should I do?Name and address withheld A.