Q. I have a close, dear girlfriend of many years standing. She is extremely glamorous and quite youthful but is nevertheless a Suffolk housewife, the mother of five children and the wife of an extremely conservative and highly respected member of White’s. My quandary is how to confront her about her reckless and inappropriate pursuit of ancient rock stars and her attempts to turn herself into a rock-chick diva. Wearing eye-wateringly tight crotch-skimming shorts with bovver boots, she ‘grooves and boogies’ in the VIP areas of rock concerts. Her uncoordinated arm waving and hip swivelling in ‘man in drag’ lip and eyeliner while shouting ‘yeah!’ throughout each set rather ruins things for some of us old-timers. For us it is enough to stand in black and perhaps quiver an eyebrow to Bob crooning ‘Thunder on the Mountain’. How can I face her with the bitter truth that she is a source of embarrassment to her husband, her friends, and her relentlessly cool children?
N.J.M., London SW11
A. You need not personally be the messenger who bears the bad news. A ‘lookalike’, preferably a slightly obese, out-of-work actress can he hired to dress up as a parodic version of your friend and groove alongside her at the next rock VIP enclosure. The apparent double act will be assumed by onlookers to be some sort of Spinal Tap-style display of irony. Many will innocently rush to congratulate the pair on their hilarious performance. There should be no need for you to take any further action.
Q. I am a tall, long-legged man who wears a size 13 shoe. I often feel that, when I am sitting down in a waiting-room situation, my feet stick out in an anti-social way. I tend to nervily withdraw them at the first sign of another person entering my ‘space’ but, alas, the other day on the Underground, I quite literally wrong-footed an elderly gent by over-rapidly withdrawing my feet. The man had already calculated his pathway, as it were, and then took a veritable tumble. How can I avoid a recurrence of this disaster?
A.B., London W8
A. Why not deal with this problem once and for all by investing in a pair of outsize co- respondent shoes? Then learn to keep your newly eye-catching feet rigidly in place. All human beings, like children, love to know their boundaries and will respect your feet far more if they remain static.
Q. My children were given a huge number of Easter eggs and I cannot see when any of us will have time to eat them. The ongoing spectacle of this excess is depressing. It seems wrong to throw away good ‘food’ well within its sell-by date, but presumably EU laws prevent one from leaving them at charity shops.
Name and address withheld
A. Your children could enjoy a satisfying and unwasteful method of reducing this egg mountain. Remove all the packaging and, placing the eggs into sealed freezerbags, tread them as though treading grapes. You will be surprised to see how manageably sized are the resultant flatpacks. Store these in your freezer for up to a year. At a moment’s notice you can then clatter the pieces into a heavy-bottomed saucepan and melt them with milk to create hot chocolate sauce for vanilla ice cream.
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