Q. Your correspondent (1 July), who was asked to pay towards a dinner to which he had been invited as a guest, has the opposite problem to my own. Whenever I have lunch with a much-loved friend, he pays for it. He is not wealthy and I would like to reciprocate his hospitality but he makes it impossible, either by insisting on going to venues where he can leave his credit card at the door or to his club where only he is allowed to pay. Although I crave this friend’s company, his reluctance to let me treat him, to say nothing of the guilt that I feel knowing his wife must find this reckless spending unsettling, means that I am seeing much less of him than I would like. How can I square things with my conscience so that I can see as much of him as possible?
Name and address withheld
A. It should not be difficult for you to acquire the sort code and number of this old friend’s bank account. Just read the details off his cheque book or, if necessary, say you have too much cash on your person and can you offload some onto him in exchange for a cheque. Having acquired the necessary details, lodge into that account — either as a named or anonymous contributor — cash to the value of the next lunch you would like to invite him to. Then ring and firm up the arrangement.
Q. I am eighty-plus and recently divorced. I am therefore enjoying a social renaissance and meeting a lot of people I don’t know. I have come to dread the prolonged interrogation to which I find myself subjected when placed between two ‘new’ women at luncheon or dinner. This always seems to revolve around the fact that I have a house in France. How far am I from the nearest airport? How much is petrol in France? How do I keep the pool clean while I am in England? I realise that this is now part of the social procedure — rather than just to be expected from people who work in the City and are trying to assess your ‘net worth’ — but when you are old you rather resent being questioned. To avoid having to twitter my way through the courses, would it be in order to have what’s called a fact sheet printed about myself and hand these to my interlocutors, suggesting they peruse them later at their leisure? This would then free us up to move straight on to more interesting subjects such as Wayne Rooney’s wife’s shopping habits or whether you can contract HIV through unprotected sex.
Name and address withheld
A. Such fact sheets would be unpopular. They would give similar offence to that given by the T-shirts worn by pregnant women saying, ‘Five months. It’s a boy. It’s my third.’ Rather than taking the wind out of friendly people’s sails in this way it is only civilised for you to play their game. You may hail from a generation which, until it reached fifty, only met people already known, among whom any sort of fact-establishing was unnecessary. Yet the days when people only met other people they already knew are long gone. Questioning is a form of phatic communication, to say nothing of the flirtation exchange. You must go along with it before you move on to the subject of Wayne Rooney and, much more to the point, you must do some questioning yourself.
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