Dear Mary

23 May 2009

Your problems solved

Q. I am a widow with a 15-year-old daughter. I have been going out with someone for six months but he lives and works abroad and I usually go and see him. On the few occasions when he has come to stay with me and my daughter in England, she has been absolutely poisonous towards him. (She is just jealous. He is a very nice man.) Now he has invited us both to stay with him for a fortnight in the summer in his holiday house in Italy and I am at my wits’ end to know how I can get my daughter to behave on this holiday and prevent her from putting him off me because the ‘baggage’ is too difficult to handle. What can I do, Mary?

Name and address withheld

A. Why not find a gap-year student who can come on holiday with you to give, for example, part-time tennis coaching to you all? If you can find the right youth it will be well worth the investment, as your daughter will moderate her behaviour, cutting back on shrewishness in order to make herself more appealing to someone whose admiration she would probably wish to earn.

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Thomasina

May 22nd, 2009 4:22pm Report this comment

Although I do consider myself a feminist, I don't find it offensive when men stand up when I leave a restaurant table. I do find it unnecessary, impolite, and embarrassing, though, since it seems like he is trying to call attention to me and to announce to our table and the rest of the restaurant that I am about to go urinate.

Peter

May 24th, 2009 4:35am Report this comment

I was at a dinner when a particularly unpleasant woman walked in a. A friend had stood up as she approached the table and she made some remark about it being "entirely unnecessary", to which he quickly responded that indeed he hadn't stood up for her but to go off to the loo. It left her looking a little winded as most of us were pleased to witness. I have long hoped to do the same thing myself but no one has ever objected to my gallantry.

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