Q. My wife was a recovering alcoholic. Now she is a lapsed recovering alcoholic. After three years of sobriety she has taken up the bottle again. I feel that if only she could hear the foul-mouthed and irrational tirades she delivers when under the influence, she might go back onto the wagon. I have recorded several of the hideous conversations she and I have had late at night with the idea of playing them back to her in the morning. Do you think I should try it, Mary?
— Name and address withheld
A. Definitely not. Recording her in this way is a violation of the trust between you. Much better to let her inadvertently record herself while ranting. To this end, introduce her to the speech recognition facility on her laptop. Surprisingly few people are aware of this application, which is used by Philip Pullman’s wife to dictate his handwritten novels into print form. Once it’s activated, and it has become used to your speech, the results are excellent.
You have told me your wife’s profession and she is bound to find the service invaluable. Then all you need to do is to have a row with her in front of the laptop while speech recognition is turned on and to make sure she does not look at the results until the cold light of the following day. Don’t let on that you even know. For maximum effect, let her ponder on the print in privacy.
Q. We have three (completely unconnected) sets of friends who insist on guests holding hands and saying grace before eating lunch or dinner in their homes. The meals are always very casual — often a Sunday lunch or Friday evening supper — but they insist on this ritual irrespective of their guests’ religious beliefs, or lack thereof. I find it presumptuous that they take it for granted that their guests want to hold hands with total strangers and also assume that, if they are religious, they must belong to the same faith as the hosts. On one occasion I was asked by the host to say grace. As I never attend church I found this, at best, hypocritical. Not wanting to offend my hosts, on the spur of the moment I dredged up Robert Burns’s ‘Selkirk Grace’ from the depths of my memory. When we invite the friends to our home for a meal, it is obvious that a cheerful ‘Please start!’ from me makes them very uncomfortable. How can I tactfully make them realise that I feel just as uncomfortable in their homes?
— A.B., Johannesburg
A. Don’t bother. Instead why not go along with it? When having these friends back you could use a humanist version such as ‘remembering those who do not have enough to eat let us give thanks for the blessing before us’ (try to avoid the word ‘meal’). Rather than grumbling about them, why not celebrate the fact that you have good-natured friends who would help you out in emergencies?
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