Q. Somewhat fortuitously I was recently a guest of an eminent London picture dealer in an excellent restaurant in the West End. Among the assembled were various racehorse owners and trainers. I happened to be sitting next to a lord whose family are members of the Beerage. I could not help but notice that the
Q. I share a student house with three others. My room is next to the kitchen and one of my housemates often eats lunch while surfing the net on my MacBook. Some of the keys have been gunked up with the effluent and spores from his meals but he is the landlord and I don’t
Q. I suffer from a form of visual Spoonerism (in New College chapel Warden Spooner concluded, ‘in the sermon which I have just been preaching, wherever I have said Aristotle I have meant St Paul’). I often recognise a person as somebody completely different. The other day I went to a private view at a
Q. I am approaching my 50th birthday and I want to have a party for around 100 people. There is an ideal space near where we live in London. It belongs to a friend, who has kindly offered it to us free, but is only really suitable for 100 people. Since we cannot afford to
Q. I am currently living, with two others, in a ‘high end’ house in an elegant garden square in Chelsea. We are all friends of, and pay rent in some form to, our absentee landlord, an old-school landowner and pig breeder who, when not charming the birds from the trees, is generally blasting the life
Q. We are lucky enough to be lent a chalet in Verbier. My wife invited her niece and boyfriend who is showing signs of becoming a fixture. He is not blessed with a great intellect and has been brought up in a household where shared meals are a rarity. He has little in the way
Q. I wonder if you can give me some advice. My parents have agreed I can have 20 people to a party in our house in Balham. I am 16 but very responsible so they agreed to go out between 7 p.m. and 11 when the party is taking place, though they would only go
Q. Now that eco-issues are so fashionable my husband has come out as a militant meanie on energy conservation. Meanwhile our three teenage daughters use absurd amounts of hot water each day and leave their laptops and televisions on. They also prance about in the skimpiest clothes imaginable, which means they always want the heating
Q. My brother-in-law, of whom my wife and I are very fond, is an admirable man and rightly proud of the ordinary background from which he has risen to a leading position in his company. However his rise (without trace, as they say) means that all he knows about food and wine is what he
From Edward McMillan-Scott, European Parliament vice-president Q. The problem of the universal greeting has become an obsession. As you may imagine, the European Parliament is a meeting place for people from all the EU’s 27 countries to those from Asia, America and all the continents. So from Borat-style hugs, to Muslim delicacy about human contact,
Q. Although I consider my dog Claude to have been born without a brain, he miraculously remembers that Wednesday is the day for his extra-long walkies and sits by the front door, thereby allowing no one to exit without his being in tow. So it was that this Wednesday Claude took up his position, collar
Q. My very nice Polish cleaner wants my husband and I [sic] to come to her house for dinner one evening and, to be brutally frank, we don’t want to. Her English is very limited, my Polish non-existent, and I think it would be a night of sheer hell for all of us. Please can
Q. I am a fan of The Archers but my listening pleasure always dips whenever one of the villagers makes the offer of ‘a coffee’ to another Ambridge resident. I feel the producers of the soap are failing to serve their loyal audience as it deserves, and are also missing an audio trick, in that
Q. A dinner-party guest rang me three hours before the dinner for ten I was giving as a thank-you to her and her husband to say that as soon as she arrived at my flat, at 8.30, she would have to use my computer to bid for some curtains on eBay. How should I have
Q. Two years ago I purchased a pair of Beretta shotguns which are ‘over and under’. In the shooting field this caused others to peer suspiciously down their noses at my gleaming new barrels. Generally it is only acceptable to arrive at a shoot with antique guns and when asked about your weapons’ provenance to
Q. We live in a small flat and when we have visitors for a weekend or a few days we arrange for them to sleep in a spacious bedroom made available by a neighbour, who is also a good friend. She charges only a nominal amount, which so far we have preferred not to mention
Q. This summer I spent a couple of nights in an hotel in France. The friend I had been staying with suddenly had rather a lot of people so I volunteered to go to the hotel — quite a good holiday trick if there are a lot of children about. Usually when I check into
Q. I recently prayed to St Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, in the cause of a friend who was desperately ill. My prayers were answered. I have been told that it is protocol to acknowledge in writing favours received by St Jude. To where should I post the letter, Mary? I am confused.
Q. I have started to commute to London and although I do not travel in every day I find myself constantly wearing the wrong kit in the wrong place. A Barbour looks dreadful in London — equally a Crombie or a Chesterfield looks somehow provocative at Westbury station. I can’t be expected to carry two
Q. An elderly relative has developed the disgusting habit of licking her knife after using it for, say, jam, and then using it again to help herself to butter. It’s horrid having to take butter from a dish into which some one else’s saliva-strewn knife has been plunged. Any ideas? B.M, North Berwick A. Re-educate