Q. My teenage son, who has started a new school, wants to bring some friends to stay over an exeat. He is keen not to alienate these new friends by appearing to have overly authoritarian parents, but I have reason to believe they will bring mobile telephones to the table and will assume they may make and receive calls during dinner. How can I impose the normal rule of any civilised household without embarrassing my son?
A.S., address withheld
A. Informants tell me your house is particularly grand. Where this is the case, the parent figure usually has no trouble. It has been observed that teenagers will rise to the occasion, just as created peers used to in the old House of Lords. In less grand houses the parent figure still has the option of the ‘mobile basket’, a concept familiar in all boarding schools. Pupils are used to having their mobiles taken from them at bedtime and stored in a multi-sectioned storage basket till morning. Before calling the teenagers to table, you should ask if any of them need to make a call before you sit down. Then you can simply flourish the collection basket as they enter the eating zone as though it were part of the established procedure. Get your child onside beforehand to avoid his blowing your cover.
Q. We have recently been to Turkey and my daughter brought her schoolfriend, who comes from a very well-off family. The girl’s mother told me before we left that, as a thank you to us, she was giving her daughter, let’s call her Susie, enough money to take us all out to a really spankingly good restaurant while we were there. However, no suggestion from Susie that we take up this option was forthcoming throughout the week. I suspect she spent it on handbags or clothes (the girls are 17). I think she also thought, rightly, that she would get away with it because I would be too embarrassed to say anything to the mother. Advice please?
H.S., Driffield
A. For training reasons, it is important that the mother be made cognisant of the facts. When you next interact with her, she is bound to thank you again for having taken Susie on holiday. At this point you can say, ‘Thank you for letting Susie come with us. Forgive me for not thanking you for the dinner but what with one thing and another, there never seemed to be a moment when we could have taken you up on the offer.’
Q. I have mistakenly sent a text to a man insulting his wife. The text was sent to a woman friend of mine but I must have mistakenly pressed the send button twice, and it reached this man, ‘A’, whose name is at the top of my mobile phone’s list. The text said ‘A’s wife is awful’. (The wife had just suggested that my small, well-behaved dog be tied up in her basement area during a two-hour dinner party, in bad weather.) Is there any way I can worm my way out?
E.S., London W11
A. Send the man another text saying ‘A’s wife is awfully kind’, followed by two or three half-formed messages. For example ‘I am going to the cric’, followed by ‘I am going to the cricket’. He will then realise you have probably got a new telephone whose keyboard you have not yet mastered. Then ring him to apologise for the misrouting of your messages.
If you have a problem write to Dear Mary, c/o The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP.
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