Dear Mary: how can I cut chats short without being rude?

Q. I have been in the wine trade all my working life. This has its pros and cons – dining at friends’ houses, for example, they invariably try to catch me out by serving decanted wine which I have to try to identify.

My problem is that I am 50 this year and we have decided to celebrate with a large party. I realise, from comments made, that the pressure is on to serve top wines. I simply can’t afford these. How can I get round this without appearing stingy?

– Name and address withheld

A. Redirect the pressure by designing the party around wine discovery. Ask each guest to bring along their favourite best-value wine for under £20. You will judge and award a small prize to the ‘best in show’. Once opened, the bottles will be shared among the guests. This should cut costs considerably.

Q. Please advise on how to navigate what I see as the curse of the ‘seat nabbers’ at literary festivals. It seems it is now standard practice for the otherwise educated upper-middle classes to bung anything from dodgy-looking hankies to hair clips on to the better seats, before honking off in search of pre-lecture flat whites, in a desperate attempt to perpetuate ingrained assumptions of entitlement. Exasperated, I eventually just started to move the ghastly detritus and sit down, on the ‘first bum first served’ principle, but found myself almost in fisticuffs with a nice lady from Wells.

– N.C., by email

A. Seat-bagging is nothing to do with entitlement or being German – it is just endemic in human nature. Royal Ascot forbids seat-bagging but no one takes a blind bit of notice. The organisers of the 23rd Aldeburgh literary festival (29 February-3 March) have found that some of their regulars expect ‘their’ same seat and woe betide if a newcomer has the temerity to sit there. ‘We ask people not to bag seats,’ says co-organiser Mary James, ‘but it’s very hard for the ushers to enforce and we don’t want to make a hostile atmosphere by gathering up all the seat markers and bundling them into the lost property box, so we have learnt to tolerate it.’ While the ‘first bum first served’ principle is perfectly reasonable, somehow ‘who dares wins’ always trumps it.

Q. A friend who doesn’t work rings me each morning, even though she knows I am busy. How can I curtail the length of these chats without being rude?

– H.M., London W11

A. Announce that your telephone is being maddening and inexplicably cutting people off after four minutes – but how nice to hear from her and you can chat until you are disconnected.