Q. I live two hours from London so when friends invite me to their book launches it is quite enough of an effort to get up to the capital without then having to find my way to some ‘ironic’ party venue. I recently had to walk ten minutes from the Tube to attend a launch in the basement of a pub near Tower Bridge, for example. Another launch was held at ‘The Old Horse Hospital’, some sort of underground cavern built in 1797 for the stabling of cabbies’ horses and into which you descend via a ramp instead of stairs. What on earth is wrong with the Polish Hearth Club on Exhibition Road, which used to fit the bill for every party giver, whatever their pretensions?
— G.A.W., Pewsey, Wiltshire
A. Rumour had it that the Polish Hearth Club had closed down which turns out to be false. Today you would pay £2,400 to give a typical book launch there. This would include wine for 150, canapés for 120 and the service charge for the waiters. You can substitute their house wine for another at a corkage cost of £7 per bottle. Writers increasingly now pay for their own book launches and many favour the Georgian Society’s exquisite home at 6 Fitzroy Square, in London. You will pay between £800 and £1,200 to ‘dry hire’ two Adam rooms and a library and then supply your own wine, waiters and canapés, which would work out at roughly the same: £2,400.
Q. How can I convince my daughter and son to write thank you letters without a blazing stand up row?
— Name and address withheld
A. The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong. Explain that in 2012 you can stand out from your peers by doing the one thing they are not doing. Handwritten thank-you letters from teens and twentysomethings have such rarity value today that their senders automatically attract favourable reviews from grown-ups and consequently whatever few jobs are going. Old Salopian Jonathan Marland, born 1956, who was the only one of his generation not to take drugs, found the field open for him. While his peers were lying on their backs with life and all its potential passing them by, Marland was able to make fantastic progress resulting in a peerage, a manor house and a beautiful wife.
Q. May I pass on a tip to readers? My bad back prevents me from dusting behind a certain heavy mahoghany sideboard. The other night I dropped some dog biscuits behind it and sent my Irish wolfhound in. He came out wreathed in cobwebs and dust.
— Name and address withheld
A. Thank you for this tip, which recalls the Victorian practice of sending geese down chimneys which householders could not afford to have professionally swept.
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