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While I like her wife and I am trying to be sympathetic to the fact she may be jealous or something(?), I don’t see her as one of my friends especially. To be honest I really miss seeing my friend alone. It’s hard to share the same confidence we used to in company.
Name and address withheld
A. One way to counter this frustration would be for you to employ your friend. Your withheld name identifies you as a journalist, so why not give her two hours per week research work in your office at the close of day or on a weekend, and seat her next to your own desk? If she is so much on your wavelength, she will probably be of genuine use to you, and if you have to pay out of your own wage packet, so what? It will cost around the same as a dinner in a restaurant and you will achieve the intimacy you quite understandably have been missing.
Q. I happen to know the prolific poetess referred to in your column of 21 February and also her very good friend who wrote craving your sage advice. I know that he has already emailed her in the terms you suggested. While this will, it is to be hoped, stem the vast flow of verse he currently receives, it will not affect the poetess’s profuse productivity. She has an unfortunate propensity to feud, so does not have many friends. I very much fear that your advice will result in my becoming next in the firing line. I am not good at literary criticism or, especially, flattery, which is what her ever-expanding ego expects. Your apparently clever solution in fact simply risks transferring the problem from one person to another. Can you please advise how I can protect myself from being subjected to this dreadful e-deluge of verse from the other side of the Atlantic? (I don’t want to fall out with her or become the focus of a feud.)
Name and address withheld
A. Reply with excitement to the first bombardment. Announce your own recent delight in aleatoric poetry. You hope she will be as inspired as you are by its possibilities. Enclose a version of one of her own poems, subjected by you to the aleatoric technique. This will involve scissoring the poem into single words and reassembling them at random. With any luck she will be so dismayed by your lack of judgment that this will be the first and last time she seeks your opinion on her verse.
If you have a problem write to Dear Mary, c/o The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP.
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