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A. Your host breached etiquette by making you feel unwelcome in his home but, for long-term reasons, you should get over it. Steel yourself to write a brief, traditional bread and butter. Then ring up and ask him back to lunch with you. Laugh merrily as you add, ‘I’m afraid my new boyfriend will be present. Can you face it for my sake? I’d love you to try and see the point of him.’ This open attempt to bridge-build should disarm him and leave him more open to reassessing your new boyfriend with a kinder eye.
Q. We are having to open our house up to the public for a certain number of days per year. My wife and I are in dispute over whether the necessary facilities should be signposted as ‘Toilets’ or ‘Lavatories’. I personally do not wish to have to see the word ‘Toilets’ on my property but she says it would be pretentious/passive aggressive to call them ‘Lavatories’, since ‘Toilets’ is the word by which most punters will know them. Can you rule on this, Mary?
Name and address withheld
A. Why not take a tip from the long-established taste-broker Desmond MacCarthy, who has opened, for the summer months, a café within the walls of his Jacobean Wiveton Hall near Holt in North Norfolk. Here is dispensed produce grown on the home farm, such as asparagus with hollandaise and strawberry and mascarpone tart. The natural setting is flawless, as is all interference by human hand. MacCarthy has chosen to label the necessary facilities ‘Washroom’.
Q. I have a suggestion prompted by the accurate observation of A.G., London W8, in the 10 May issue, that people notice what one is looking at and naturally resent one looking at one’s watch. There is more than one solution to this problem. Instead of a watch, I use a multi-function mobile on which I can read the time after a little flip with a fingernail. The first time you say ‘Sorry’, as if it has vibrated and you are actually refusing to answer a call, and, on the second, you say ‘Oh b****r, I must learn to control this creature.’ Alternatively, you can learn to look at your timepiece while you are in mid-sentence.
J.G., Jolimont, East Melbourne
A. How kind of you to supplement the published solution with your useful suggestions.
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