Etiquette
Dear Mary: Must I have name badges for guests at my wedding?
Q. My husband-to-be and I both work full time. We are getting married from his family HQ and his kind…
Dear Mary: How can I escape the New Year party that just won’t give up?
Q. For the past two New Year’s Eves we have ducked an annual party given by some acquaintances, who are…
Dear Mary: My neighbour is planning a girls’ night in — how can I escape?
Q. Although I have met most of the fellow occupants of my building at residents’ meetings, we don’t socialise. However…
Dear Mary solves problems for Nicky Haslam, Nigel Slater, Professor Mary Beard and others
From Nicky Haslam Q. Being considered something of a guru on the subject of things common, can you advise me…
Dear Mary: How can I shut up business travel bores?
Q. I work in the London art market. Often, when I run into a fellow dealer and ask how they…
The secret brilliance of Prince Philip’s ‘gaffes’
I’ve just been on the receiving end of a Prince Philip gaffe, of sorts, and I loved it. It was…
Dear Mary: why are young women dyeing their hair grey?
Q. I have lunch once a month with an old university friend. Over the years we have both thickened out…
Dear Mary: How can I greet friends without clashing specs?
Q. As an old trout, large in height and breadth, I have taken a leaf out of the documentary Advanced…
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: How can I make visiting friends realise it is a burden to take them to see the sights?
Q. I am an impoverished artist living in a famously cheap European city, largely for reasons of economy. I love…
Dear Mary: A horrid woman accused me of hogging a spare train seat
Q. I regularly travel on the Ashford-St Pancras train and usually put my case on the seat next to me…
Dear Mary: how can I resist peer pressure to go nude swimming?
Q. I am going on a late holiday with a group of people who are keen on nude swimming, which…
Dear Mary: How do you persuade your drunk friend to leave a party when the taxi arrives?
Q. How do you persuade someone drunk to leave a party when it doesn’t make sense for them to stay?…
Dear Mary: Is there a tactful way to tell a dear cousin she needs a lump removed from her face?
Q. How can you tactfully tell someone that the large skin tag or blob they have grown in the centre…
Dear Mary: I don’t want perfumed people to hold my baby
Q. Is there a polite way of not letting someone hold your baby? I love giving mine to people to…
Dear Mary: I was at the dinner party when the text came disinviting me
Q. While renting in Rock last week, I ran into an acquaintance who invited me to join her large house…
Dear Mary: Dare I put my wife and three ex-mistresses all at the same table?
Q. I have learned that someone I much admired in youth is about to become single again. I only have…
Dear Mary: How can I flirt on the train when a man who knows my old habits is watching?
Q. Travelling on a train recently I happened to notice two former acquaintances, sitting together and very nearly opposite me,…
Dear Mary: unacceptable behaviour at a book signing
Q. At a recent literary festival I attended a talk with a high-profile octogenarian writer. I had already bought her…
Dear Mary: My husband has shaved his head for a newspaper feature
Q. My partner, a leading political commentator on a national newspaper, recently agreed to shave off his hair at the…
Dear Mary: Should I follow Cilla Black’s lead on disabled loos?
Q. I was at the theatre recently and bumped into a well-known Liverpudlian crooner coming out of the disabled lavatory.…
Dear Mary: What to do when an old friend snubs you
Q. What should I say the next time I run into a woman with whom I was at art school…
Dear Mary: What to do when a dinner guest won’t turn and chat
Q. I felt uncomfortable during a dinner for 20 in a private house. The young man on my left had…
The wonderful, vanishing world of the handwritten letter
Peter Oborne 4 July 2015 9:00 am
In praise of the old-fashioned letter-writer