Mary Killen

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.

Q. I will be celebrating a ‘milestone’ birthday this summer and marking the event with a cocktail party for 60 one evening and a dinner for 100 on another. Having lived in various parts of the globe over the years (now New York), a large number of guests are flying in from far-flung lands to join in the celebrations. My dilemma, Mary, is how best to word my invitations regarding the delicate matter of gift-giving by well-meaning friends. Here are some of the concerns with which I’m presently struggling. At this point in my life I am fortunate enough to have all the material possessions one could reasonably want or hope for (with, I suppose, the exceptions of a helicopter, Bentley, etc).

Q. Over the past three years a small birthday lunch party has been given for me by the mother of my daughter’s best friend at school. She invites a handful of other school mothers, and as we leave for the school run she says, ‘Same time, same place, next year!’ It is so sweet of her. I do take her out to lunch but cannot return the birthday-party favour, as her birthday falls outside term time. My problem is that I fear the tradition has run its course. I do not like having to commit myself a year in advance, and neither, I sense, do the other mothers. Our hostess could not be kinder, but she has more time on her hands than we do.

Q. I have always had snaggle teeth but seem to have got away with it so far. They have given me no trouble and my husband says they are one of my most endearing features. Now, however, a new dentist has suggested that I have the whole lot straightened. This will involve months in braces and will cost £3,000. But is it worth it at my age? (I am 46.) It is so hard to get friends to give an honest answer when I press them. Name and address withheld A. Why not bring a photo to Snappy Snaps, the high-street photo and digital specialists, and have them straighten your teeth digitally? Their retouching services start at £10 and also include slimming or whatever else you can think of (www.snappysnaps.com).

Q. My best friend is widely admired by those few men who have the opportunity to meet her. She wants a boyfriend but her work brings her into contact with virtually no single heterosexual men and she has exhausted the potential in our social circle. Her brother and I want her to change her job so she comes into contact with more single men, but she is understandably reluctant to move away from her current office which offers idyllic surroundings in which to work, not least because she is allowed to bring her dog in. We are keen for her to try speed-dating but she has turned her nose up at this saying, ‘only desperate people do speed-dating’. The clock is ticking and we feel the situation is desperate.

Q. I have a close, dear girlfriend of many years standing. She is extremely glamorous and quite youthful but is nevertheless a Suffolk housewife, the mother of five children and the wife of an extremely conservative and highly respected member of White’s. My quandary is how to confront her about her reckless and inappropriate pursuit of ancient rock stars and her attempts to turn herself into a rock-chick diva. Wearing eye-wateringly tight crotch-skimming shorts with bovver boots, she ‘grooves and boogies’ in the VIP areas of rock concerts. Her uncoordinated arm waving and hip swivelling in ‘man in drag’ lip and eyeliner while shouting ‘yeah!’ throughout each set rather ruins things for some of us old-timers.

Q. A young man from Oz, the son of a friend of my wife, has been staying for several weeks. He walks into the house and helps himself to a beer or a banana or a toasted cheese sandwich. This is what they do in American soaps, opening the fridge without even saying hello, but it is slightly at odds with the upbringing of our children who are encouraged to ask before helping themselves. My wife believes this shows that he feels at home and that, if I disapprove, I should ask him next time to bring back some beer, bananas, bread or cheese. I prefer a different approach, making sure that we have no beer, bananas, bread or cheese in the house, so that he’ll learn from the consequences of his actions. Which is the correct response?Name and address withheld A.

Q. Please can you advise me? I am a bachelor living on my own and I have my shirts ironed by a very nice lady in the village. She does a great job, but I am getting increasingly annoyed as she leaves my shirts hanging in the kitchen and then proceeds to cook a roast dinner (or similar) before I can pick them up. She is incredibly friendly but very thin-skinned. How can I subtly suggest that she stores them somewhere else so I don’t smell of roast lamb when I wear my clothes? I did think about providing clothes covers but fear this might not have the desired effect, as she might only cover them immediately before I pick them up. Thank you.R.C., Chester. A.

Q. Several years ago I had a well-respected broadsheet editor to stay for the weekend. The house party included another friend who has since become a rising star in the world of politics. Last Sunday, as I leafed my way through the newspapers, I almost choked on my breakfast cereal when I saw a large photograph which included the editor, the politician, myself and assorted guests. I have since discovered that several other photographs, taken during this private house party, have appeared in the public domain. As I consider them to be friends, how should I express my disapproval to the former editor? And should I invite them back? R.D., County Antrim A. Mete out the following punishment.

Q. My son is on his gap year and travelling around India. While having lunch with a friend she showed me a website on to which her son has posted a blog of his gap year. By the looks of it virtually every 18–19-year-old public schoolchild in the country has done the same. Endless faces in various states of stupefaction leer out against tropical backgrounds accompanied by descriptions of how ‘chilled’ everyone is. I am only human so when she suggested typing my son’s name into the search box I naturally concurred. I was initially shocked to see that he too looked stupefied in his photographs and he too is boasting of being ‘chilled’ and describing how ‘wasted’ he feels each morning.

Q. I find myself constantly smarting — for want of a better phrase — from the presumptions of instant matey-ness one encounters in almost every human interchange in English day-to-day life. Why should someone I have never met before address me by my Christian name? Why should the youth from the local garage who has never clapped eyes on me let alone been introduced (but who knows full well that I am a Lord) telephone me saying, ‘Hi Alex, do you want to test drive the latest BMW we’ve got in?’ I am 33 and some of my friends say that I am being pompous, and that this epidemic of bogus familiarity is the modern way and I must go along with it. The problem is that because I am a viscount, people assume I am trying to pull rank. This is not the case.

Q. The tennis coach at our village club was recently coaching one of his young clients. On the next court, one of the club regulars and her new middle-aged male friend were completing a strenuous game. The man suddenly collapsed and the coach, a trained first-aider, identified the symptoms of cardiac arrest and applied the necessary heart massage and mouth-to-mouth. It took over half an hour for the ambulance to arrive, during which time the victim’s partner became increasingly hysterical and distressed, offering very little by way of practical support while the coach continued to alternate chest compressions with oral ventilation. The man fortunately survived, largely because of the cool head of the coach, and he can now be seen walking hand in hand with his partner in the village.

Q. I am on my gap year and looking for work as a tutor, which I understand is very well paid. The key months for Common Entrance, AS- and A-level revision are almost upon us and, although I have my details up on the noticeboards of various local schools, I have had no inquiries. I can’t afford to advertise and I do not want to sign up with an agency because I don’t want to give up half my wages on commission. Can you recommend an internet site where I can tout myself?B.W., London SW3 A. No. The following method will reap better results. Have some photo-cards printed up and, crucially, glued to flat magnetic disks as used in sewing — available from Peter Jones’s haberdashery department.