Etiquette
Dear Mary: Another way to deal with a maddening blackhead
Q. Might I suggest an alternative solution to E.B. of London’s problem (3 October) about the person sporting a ‘maddening’…
Dear Mary: How can girls avoid freezing in cold marquees?
Q. What do you do when you are so cold at a party that you cannot enjoy it? At a…
Dear Mary
Q. I am an impoverished artist living in a famously cheap European city, largely for reasons of economy. I love…
Dear Mary
Q. I regularly travel on the Ashford-St Pancras train and usually put my case on the seat next to me…
Dear Mary
Q. I am going on a late holiday with a group of people who are keen on nude swimming, which…
Your problems solved
Q. How do you persuade someone drunk to leave a party when it doesn’t make sense for them to stay?…
Your problems solved
Q. How can you tactfully tell someone that the large skin tag or blob they have grown in the centre…
Your problems solved
Q. Is there a polite way of not letting someone hold your baby? I love giving mine to people to…
Your problems solved
Q. While renting in Rock last week, I ran into an acquaintance who invited me to join her large house…
Your problems solved
Q. I have learned that someone I much admired in youth is about to become single again. I only have…
Your problems solved
Q. Travelling on a train recently I happened to notice two former acquaintances, sitting together and very nearly opposite me,…
Dear Mary
Q. At a recent literary festival I attended a talk with a high-profile octogenarian writer. I had already bought her…
Your problems solved
Q. My partner, a leading political commentator on a national newspaper, recently agreed to shave off his hair at the…
Your problems solved
Q. I was at the theatre recently and bumped into a well-known Liverpudlian crooner coming out of the disabled lavatory.…
Your problems solved
Q. What should I say the next time I run into a woman with whom I was at art school…
Dear Mary
Q. I felt uncomfortable during a dinner for 20 in a private house. The young man on my left had…
Your problems solved
Q. I have a friend who can be shy and inhibited. Recently, he was invited to stay on a Caribbean…
Your problems solved
Q. As a writer I find working at home too distracting. I am a longstanding member of the London Library…
Your problems solved
Q. I socialise in Shropshire every weekend and regularly give dinners which end at 2 a.m., but it’s a different matter…
Non-existent phrases
‘Ten Norwegian phrases that don’t exist in English but should,’ said the headline. So I had a little look, as…
Dear Mary
Q. I have moved from London to the centre of a historic market town, now becoming famous as a foodie…
Dear Mary
Q. For ten years, I have made a reasonable freelance income working from home. During this time my husband has…
Your problems solved
Q. Someone I was at university with but hadn’t seen much of over the ten years since invited me to…
Dear Mary
Q. When sending wedding invitations, does one put the full titles on the card, or can one just put, for…
Dear Sirs and Madams
Peter Oborne 4 July 2015 9:00 am
In praise of the old-fashioned letter-writer