In Competition No. 2883 you were invited to cast a well-known writer, living or dead, in the role of agony aunt or uncle and provide a problem of your invention and their solution. Mark Shelton’s Ted Hughes begins his reply to the question ‘how can I be more confident with girls?’ thus: ‘Stoat does not ask. Forefoot poised, he holds the crosshairs on his victim. The wicked waiting eyes glitter like wet berries. He is a cocked crossbow.’ I also liked Nicholas Holbrook’s Machiavelli putting Nick Clegg right on the hazards of power-sharing, and Jane Moth was good too. D.A. Prince takes £30, the rest get £25.

Q. Recently my wife has become lazy, lounging in bed all day; I suspect she may be having an affair. What can I do to rebuild our marriage?
 
A. Everyich marriage embraces its scrotumtightening patches of untrammelled boredom with coffined relish. Get you a breakfast first, kidney-wise, if she won’t shift for you, and run yourself through a day of belabouring joy, a walking-out and never passing a pub, giving your self to the ineluctable modality of the visible. Savour the legs of it, the diaphane stocking-tops, the love of its lost cause and corpus. There’s an apocrypha shamewound with our sins clinging like old lovers which carries the truth of it bound in its purlieus and manshape. Walk your day into all of life and death, facing down the lotteries and by nightfallness, the mummycase dark, you’ll be readied for the backward and she, the yes of her.
D.A. Prince/James Joyce
 
Q. On our wedding night, my wife confessed to having given birth to another man’s child. Can I still love her?
 
A. To blithely marry and then ascertain that your selection is other than the long looked-for ideal is an apprehension bitterer than the hyperborean wind that keens across the Heath in darkled winter. Present to the ear in this enquiry is the empiercing squeak of the unfortunate coney, narged in a carket-gin. Yet, wriggle as he will, the querier may do nothing: the event can never unbe, and is inconsequent, for marriage is anywise the beginning of the end of love. Those moments of sublime exhilaration when the twain are conjoined is an interval of joy in decades of agony. Despair has come early to this unhappy wight, yet it may better prepare him for a greater desolation which awaits him, and all of us, somewhen.
C.J. Gleed /Henry James
 
Q. I really like Ed Miliband. Am I normal?
 
A. My child, you are afeared of what you know not: for Edward is but Old English ead, ‘fortunate’, and wyrd, meaning ‘weird’, or ‘fate’ and, though the Teutonic Knights deny it to this day, Miliband is good Germano-Latin for ‘band of one thousand’ which, as my master Ambrosius discovered, refers to the Qian Nanren or Thousand Men of the Emperor Zhuanxu, those who fell sound asleep for 4,444 solar years and who, according to the Dialogues of the Cenobites of Aksum, will waken with a mighty cry when the Mead-Bearer of the Seven Oaks arises in fury, landing on the Isle of Thanet to challenge the Two-Headed King of Llogres, who, after a moment of stunned silence, shall skulk out like a banished cur, leaving Fortunate-Fate to cross swords with the Mead-Bearer. Embrace your destiny, chosen one!
Frank Upton/Dan Brown
 
Q. Madam, I am in an interesting condition and that for the first time. My husband, indifferent as to whether his heir be male or female, is insistent that, if a son he be Ulysses and, if a daughter, she be Proserpina. I would prefer to those Latin the less harsh and sweeter Greek sounds of Odysseus and Persephone. Pray, madam, advise me in my perplexity as to what I should do.

One on the brink of motherhood
 
A. Matron to be, If money be promised the child conditional upon it bearing harsh sounding Latin names, accede to your husband’s wishes. Else, stand firm. It benefits a husband to be bent, occasionally, to a wife’s will. Hint that, your wish not gratified, there may be no further worshippings in the temple of Aphrodite — or Venus.

I remain, with less fame, authority and ambiguity than my rival at Delphi, The Oracle
J. Seery/Jane Austen
 
Q. My wife and I have always been a sociable couple but straitened circumstances mean we must spend more time at home. Can you advise how we might best make our own entertainment?
 
A. Listen, chum; I’m going to give it to you straight. Both barrels. No soft soap, no advertisers copy, just truth, white as moonlight on rat gnawed bone. Next time you’re alone together with your wife, say something. Christ, say anything — a non-sequitur about pickled gherkins or Sidcup will do. Wait for her reply; don’t listen to it. After a pause, say something else, irrelevant to either foregoing statement. Perhaps rage against the appalling political situation in East Timor or the various excrescences constituting US foreign policy. Carry on like this for two hours or more. Perhaps one of you might stab the other with an avocado knife: it scarcely matters. That’s entertainment, chum.
Adrian Fry/Harold Pinter
 
Q. I stand in loco parentis for my nephew, an amiable enough young bumbler, varsity-educated but forever getting into footling scrapes and escapades. I’m concerned lest he drift aimlessly through life without achieving anything. All my efforts to get him to shape up have failed. What advice would you give for getting some starch into his sinews?
 
A. I admire your sense of responsibility but I think we should always beware of casting others in our own mould. Your nephew may be exasperating but he has his own dree to weird. If you feel you must tackle him I suggest you do so not head-on but from the side, as it were. For example, you might encourage him to record his little adventures for his own and others’ amusement. Then, who knows, it is entirely possible that a career of harmless drudgery as an author could open up before him.
W.J. Webster/P.G. Wodehouse

No. 2886: Londoner’s diary

You are invited to submit an extract from the diary of Samuel Pepys recording his impressions of modern life (150 words maximum). Please email entries to lucy@-spectator.co.uk by midday on 18 February.