Q. It is occasionally necessary for me to pretend to be asleep. What technique do actors use, when feigning death or sleep, to ensure their eyeballs are still and their eyelids do not flutter?
— Name withheld, Hampshire
A. To pre-empt fluttering, let the actual eyeballs look downwards behind the closed lids.
Q. Your correspondent in Bombay had trouble with teenage houseguests who were unaware of the convention of tipping. My recent problem was the reverse — my fellow guests and I wanted to tip after a long weekend abroad in which staff had done a lot of different things for us, but our female host refused to give us any guidance about the going rates in the country where we were staying. Instead she came over coy and said it was entirely up to us and she would not dream of telling us. As a result we overtipped (we found out once we had got home). How could we have forced an answer from our host?
— Name and address withheld
A. You could have assumed an urgent demeanour as you took her to one side and, waving a debit card hissed in panicky tones, ‘I have run out of cash so I must quickly rush to a cash machine for tips. Where is the nearest one and how much should I get out?’ Caught off guard like this, she would be more likely to speak her mind, at which point you could say, ‘Oh phew. I’ve got enough then, I won’t need to go out after all.’
Q. At university I began smoking, because all my friends did. I always planned to give it up but it has taken ten years for me to get over it. I now have tiny but observable lines in the space between nose and upper lip.
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