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A. Never enter relationships with workers on a note of informality. Keep your distance until sure of being accorded the respect you deserve. You must now mutate this decorator’s passive aggression into sympathy for you by the following method. Give a friend a scripted message to leave on your answerphone. Pretend to gasp in horror as you listen to it then put it on loudspeaker for your builder to hear. The sternly voiced message should go along the following lines. ‘This is your publisher speaking. Your manuscript is very late. I hear you have builders in but you must not allow yourself to be distracted by them. I need hardly warn you that there will be financial consequences if your manuscript is not delivered this week.’ ‘That’s it. No more bantering,’ you can say anxiously. ‘I must sit down and work. Can you help me by trying really hard not to distract me?’
Q. May I pass on a tip to readers? During half-term my nine-year-old son made a present for his great-grandmother. A galanthophile, she always enjoys the Snowdrop Circuit at this time of year. My son used instructions in the Dangerous Book for Boys to make her a present of a sort of adapted periscope on a stick for viewing inside the flower heads from a standing position so that she will no longer have to get down on her hands and knees. Like many of the elderly, she abhors extravagance, and this handmade device, showing her great-grandson’s ingenuity and personal effort, was really one of the most successful gifts of all time. Other boys could easily copy it. There are also plenty of instructions on the internet.
Name and address withheld
A. How kind of you to share this idea with readers. Boys can knock them up for Christmas presents for granny in 2009.
Q. My uncle has a private dental practice. He has always treated me free of charge but I have just received a bill for my last visit. My uncle did not say he was going to start charging but obviously I cannot ring his secretary and ask if it is a mistake. Yet if it was a mistake he might never even know that I have paid the bill as the secretary does all the accounting. Suggestions, Mary?
Name withheld, Edinburgh
A. Send a cheque directly to your uncle in a handwritten envelope marked ‘personal’.
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