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Dear Mary

Mary Killen

Wednesday, 21st May 2008

Your problems solved

Q. I treated four friends to a trip to the Far East. On the way back there was a
cock-up at the airport with an overbooked plane and our party had to be put up for the night in a (magnificent) hotel. As a stickler for standards I wrote to the airline to complain and was quite satisfied to receive flight vouchers for £500 in compensation. I was amazed when one of my guests boasted to me later that he had followed my lead and that he too had received £500 in flight vouchers. Do you agree, Mary, that it was incumbent on my guest to pass these vouchers on to me? It was no great hardship for him to spend the night in a five-star hotel — he was unemployed at the time. And he would not have been on the flight at all had it not been for my largesse. What was the etiquette in this situation? Would you rule, please, Mary?

Name and address withheld

A. You did not personally suffer five delays, you only suffered one delay. Your guest also suffered one delay and he was, theoretically, inconvenienced by it (even if he had nothing better to do than stay in a magnificent hotel for one extra night). In some ways it would have been rather insulting if he had offered you his vouchers with the suggestion that you would be small-time enough to accept them. Some people are more opportunistic than others and it is best to rise above these money matters. Having been so generous in the first place, don’t spoil your reputation by letting the grudge rankle now.

Q. I recently became involved with someone who is 15 years younger than I am. She is very beautiful and very charming but one thing is putting me quite seriously off her. Perhaps you could advise. I realise that her generation — early-twentysomethings — do do a lot of texting but we see each other about four nights per week and yet I am getting about ten texts a day from her. The content is almost always totally fatuous. I rarely reply to them but they keep coming in. I have told her that I am a busy man and these constant interruptions are making me feel slightly hounded but she just giggles and says she loves me so much she wants to share all her thoughts with me. How can I — without seeming pompous — let her see that for someone of my generation (fortysomething) this kind of thing is not just irritating. It is also something of a turn-off.

E.B., London NW5

A. Get a new cheap pay-as-you-go telephone and give your girlfriend the number explaining that you have mislaid your usual mobile. Leave the new mobile, switched off, down the back of a chair in her house. After a day ring up saying you have lost your new mobile as well but think it may be down the back of that chair. You are expecting an urgent text. Could she look through your inbox and see if it has arrived. As ten messages from her scroll down, ask her to read out each one — ‘in case it is something important that you may forget to tell me’. With her having been confronted this way with the full extent of her fatuousness, you will soon see an end to the nuisance.

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