Modern manners
Dear Mary
Q. I am organising my 21st birthday party at our family house in Italy. It is a fantastic location, but…
Death to hipsters
Take heart: the age of the stupid beard is coming to an end
Dear Mary
Q. What can you do when disorganised friends say they would love to come to a concert with you but…
Everywhere should be more like Essex
Apart from the Wye Valley, where I grew up, there are only two places in Britain I’d consider living: Kent…
Dear Mary
Q. I have been trying to get an apprenticeship in fashion for over a year without success. I just had…
Diary
Last Tuesday I tried to sign up to a new life. My wife and I argued, slightly. ‘I don’t think…
Barometer
Paisley power Paisley pyjamas were in the news. While associated with the town in Renfrewshire, whose mills produced the patterns from 1805,…
Disney matter
The Disney Café is a gaudy hell on the fourth floor of Harrods, Knightsbridge. It is adjacent to the Harrods…
A slap in the Facebook
My female friends’ social media habits are too bitchy even for me
Off the telly
In the world of YouTube and Netflix, generations no longer share a culture
Dear Mary
Q. When someone gives you anti-ageing cream as a present, is that an insult or a compliment? — A.O., Provence…
You don’t have to be a left-wing think tank to believe the bosses’ pay boom is unhealthy
The FTSE100 index stands precisely where it did in the first week of December 1999. Whichever way you look at…
Dear Mary
Q. My neighbour is really lovely and always helps me chainsaw trees. He used to be the herdsman at the…
Dear Mary
Q. We have taken a flat in Edinburgh for a month and a young girl, temporarily homeless and a friend…
The case for being wed
I’m due to speak at an Intelligence Squared debate on Saturday and I’m worried that I might be on the…
Dear Mary
Q. A scholarly book of great importance to me appears to have gone missing from my library. It was heavily…
Porn-again parents
It’s not just the young whose expectations of sex are warped by dirty videos online
No tea or sympathy
Nurses might be overworked but they could still be kind
A noble tradition of benign neglect
I spent last weekend at Port Eliot in Cornwall. This is supposed to be a literary and music festival and…
Dear Mary
Q. At a drinks or a dinner party, when very attentive waiters are hovering, I tend to let them keep…
Dear Mary
Q. I live far away from my brother and his family, but went to stay with them recently for the…
Dear Mary
Q. My former cleaner has now retired and lives nearby. I visit her with clockwork regularity and always enjoy seeing…
Dear Mary
Q. My 16-year-old son, who has recently had his first experiences of Clubland, has observed to me, his mother, that…
Dear Mary
Q. A friend regularly hires a stall at a general neighbourhood market in order to sell surplus second-hand clothes and…
Why don’t any of my friends own holiday homes?
Hugo Rifkind 9 August 2014 9:00 am
This is to be one of those columns that makes the writer faintly wish there wasn’t an internet. It would…