Q. My husband and I like to go to concerts and recitals but he is an artist with a very annoying habit of sketching the musicians in performance. The scratch of the pencil and his hand movements are distracting and I worry about his annoying other people nearby. Sometimes it is too dark for him
Q. A (very attractive) man I knew at university invited me to a party given by him and his girlfriend. When I got there I found the girlfriend has reinvented herself as a hat designer and there was a pop-up shop at the party. I was bullied into buying one even though, patently, none of
Q. My granddaughter has asked to use our barn for her 21st birthday dance in June. We can only sleep 30 in the house, but she won’t let me arrange billets with neighbours for the other 70, saying ‘everyone will sleep in their cars’. This seems short-sighted. It goes against the grain not to offer
Q. I recently made an arrangement with a flaky friend from university to go to my gym together. Half an hour after we were supposed to meet she called saying she was at the cash machine looking at her bank balance and she didn’t think she could afford the £20 guest entry fee. She suggested
Q. At a drinks party at Christie’s this evening my face was splattered with flecks of spit from the guest I was talking to. I desperately wanted to wipe them off but felt that would have been impolite (and in fact I had no handkerchief anyway). What is the top way to deal with this
Q. My son decided to go straight into work and has got a job. The problem is that it is in central London and none of his friends are available to share accommodation since they are all either on gap years or, if in London, in university halls. He’s been lucky enough to find a
Q. I have bought a second-floor flat which comes with a bow-shaped balcony which overlooks a communal garden. My problem is that I will want to go on to the balcony to smoke but I won’t want my neighbours to see me doing this. Nor will I want them to be able to see who
Q. Our first Christmas card arrived on 2 December and it was a lovely thing — a Burne-Jones angel musician, finely printed, paper inner lining and sent first-class in a franked envelope with an immaculate printed label.Unfortunately, the signature was just a large and meaningless felt-tip flourish; no address, no other clue except ‘Season’s Greetings’,
From Rt Hon Gisela Stuart MP Q. I keep getting into arguments with people about what being a Labour MP is all about. I used to think that being in government was better than being in opposition. They now tell me I’m wrong and that the years since 2010 have been better and purer than
Q. I don’t go to my club that often but the other day I found a letter there waiting for me from an elderly cousin, also a member, whose home is in Scotland where he lives alone. The letter announces that he is down south until January and asks whether he might spend Christmas with
Last week I went for an interview with the Irish Guards. My father and his father were both in this regiment. I put on my smartest suit and grabbed a tie from my dad’s dressing room. The interview went well but when I got home my father was absolutely horrified, exclaiming that I was wearing
Q. Following a lavish house party I received a flood of effusive thank-you letters, the bulk of which praised the impeccable service, the luxurious treats laid on nightly, and my attentiveness to my guests’ every whim. One letter, however, commenced in a fairly complimentary vein but soon devolved into a letter of complaint about a
Q. A man I know (but not very well) has invited me and another girl to stay in a villa he’s been loaned. He says the only thing I’ll have to pay for is my flight but I suspect that though we’ll probably have picnics on the beach each day for lunch, we’ll go to
Q. Some elderly friends of mine love to entertain in their London club on their visits, but a problem arises when their London friends want to reciprocate. Recently one of these gave a special dinner for them in her flat, taking enormous trouble with the food. However, the stress of getting there — they are both
Q. We hired a villa in the Camargue through the so-called ‘Sloane web’. You either know the uber-Sloane who runs it or you don’t. All his properties are in perfect taste and located in idyllic spots. No one is ripped off. However, we have just returned from a villa whose (Sloane) owner stayed on in
Q. Next month, four of us from university are going up on a wildfowling trip north of Inverness. We are catching the night sleeper from Euston and I have been charged with booking the berths. Two of the team are in a heterosexual relationship whilst the fourth, a man I have met just once, is
Q. My father has been on the warpath to eradicate Tineola bisselliella, the common clothes moth. He told me to sort through my dressing room and administer sprays and pheromone strips. He’s finally eradicated them, or at least that’s what he thinks. In truth, I never bothered to go through my own clothes back in
Q. A family of five from Brazil who are close friends of mine are visiting London next week. They have been kind and generous to me in the past so we arranged to take them to lunch at a Michelin starred restaurant. However since this plan was made, in true Latino fashion they have invited
Q. When an invitation to shoot arrives in the autumn, I have a sense of both excitement and dread. The dread is because at the end of the day, metropolitans request that the guns must each tip to the gamekeeper a sum far higher than would be the norm for traditional country folk. Indeed, in
Q. How can I tactfully request that well-meaning old friends stop toasting my (new) husband’s hospitality? It seems ungrateful but, during a week’s stay at our new house in France, these much loved friends did it at least once a day, to the point that the other members of the house-party became irritated. I admit