Q. For her wedding present I gave my 28-year-old goddaughter a cheque, about five times the value that I would give to a mere family friend. I have now received a note from her which reads, ‘Thank you for the generous present. I hope you enjoyed the wedding…’ For some reason I feel that not enough gratitude has been expressed. How do I convey this without causing offence to her or to her parents, who are still my very close friends?
Name and address withheld
A. Some readers will be impressed that you received a letter at all, since so many twenty-somethings suffer from ‘entitlement syndrome’. All that will change, of course, in forthcoming months. In the meantime — ring your friends and say your book-keeper says there is some confusion over your bank account and since you stupidly failed to fill out the amount on the stub of the cheque you wrote to your goddaughter, could they remind you how much it was for? You were certain you knew how much, but then thinking back on her thank-you letter, you may have been wrong. Leave it at that.
Q. Close friends have made a ‘Sound of Music’ type recording for their home answerphone. Their four small children take turns to trill out lines like ‘No! Our parents aren’t at home’ and ‘Please leave a mess-ess-age!’ The 45-second performance is charming the first and possibly only time you hear it, but not the subsequent times. How can we tactfully convey to our friends that, while we too think their children adorable, we are busy people and cannot waste this amount of time when we need to leave messages for them. More to the point, we also worry that the husband — who works freelance — may lose potential clients who are irritated by the wait.
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