Q. We normally drive guests departing our house in France to our nearest station for trains connecting them to Eurostar. One departing guest, an attractive divorcee, had half an hour to kill, so I suggested a croissant and coffee, which meant lugging her very heavy case over to the café and back again to the station where, as I sank exhaustedly onto the bench with the case between us, my elbow activated a battery-driven item in the suitcase. Toothbrush? — I wondered — or something of a more intimate nature? Was it polite to ignore the buzzing, and feign deafness? Or should I have mentioned it, risking some embarrassed scrabbling in the case?
A.T., London SW3
A. On this occasion your silence will have spoken louder than words. When sudden onset vibrating of this sort occurs, the protocol is to draw attention to it, blinking blandly as you insist that a ‘toothbrush has gone off’. ‘That reminds me,’ you then gasp. ‘I must ring home and check that I turned the oven off.’ By moving away, you grant the owner of the case the privacy to remedy the situation unsupervised.
Q. My smart-alec phone autosigns my letters ‘Regards, Emma’ regardless of whether they are going to a very good friend or the bank manager. Several budding correspondents have suddenly become rather formal when I forget to write ‘X Emma’ and they are brought up short by the cold shower of ‘regards’. How can I stamp out Bilberry’s ghastly practice of depersonalising my letters without actually stamping on the phone itself, which has one year’s contract left to run?
E.H., London W11
A. No doubt this could be sorted out with an hour and a half on the phone to Bilberry Customer Service, but why not sidestep the annoyance altogether? Ignore the letter-composing facility of your phone and instead use email. This will allow you to personalise your sign-off, and copying yourself into the email will help with your record-keeping.
Q. Regarding unwanted phone calls — when I was young my parents answered the phone, and if it was for me they had some sort of interchange with the friend. These days our children’s friends ring their mobiles and we have no opportunity to judge who sounds dodgy and who perfectly nice. The other day a most depraved voice rang our landline to ask for our 17-year-old’s mobile number. I did not want to give it out so I said — and I thought this might be useful for people — ‘there’s no point my giving you her number as she has left her mobile here. She’s bound to ring in soon so why don’t you give me your number and I’ll pass it on.’ My daughter congratulated me on this ruse as she was trying to avoid the man.
A. How kind of you to share this tip with readers.
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