YOUR PROBLEMS SOLVED
Dear Mary. .
Q. Despite 30 years of experience as a senior diplomat, I was recently confronted with a social dilemma to which I could think of no solution. Please tell me what you would have done in my place, Mary. Left without a seat on a crowded train to Penzance, I was lucky to find a space between the coaches to stand up in. As I wedged myself into this corner a woman standing about three feet away, whose face I recognised, smiled at me and said, 'Hello.' I returned the greeting and let off a bit of steam about the general nuisance of events, to which she responded by smiling sweetly but saying nothing. I had no idea who this woman was though I knew her face as well as my own, so after about ten minutes I was forced to say, 'Please forgive me, I have the most terrible memory. Would you remind Tile of your name and how we know one another?"Well, my name's X,' she replied, and I work as a waitress in the café you come into occasionally.' What could I have done, Mary, to prevent myself from being obliged to chat on for the rest of the five- hour journey? It was not that I did not want to speak to a waitress but what could we have spoken about?
• Name and address withheld A. The answer to your problem was obvi- ous. The links between two coaches on a train are usually adjacent to a lavatory. After turning on the charm for a few min- utes, you could have asked to be excused while you went into the lavatory. Having stayed there for 12 minutes issuing a variety of audible grunts and splutterings, you would certainly have found on your re- emergence that the waitress had tactfully vanished.
Q. I have a friend who some years ago was honoured with a CBE of which he is rightly proud. He is neither vain nor boastful about it — he wears it well, as they say. However, being somewhat sensitive by nature, he has become not a little agitated by a dilemma he faces over the title. For some time now another long-standing friend of his has always, whenever he has written to him, affixed the title OBE instead of CBE. Should he tell his friend that he does, in fact, have a CBE and run the risk of being thought vain and boastful? Or should he leave it as a sort of nagging sore in their relationship?
R T., The City A. Next time he talks to this friend he should casually steer the conversation towards insults. 'Now tell me,' he can say, `would you say this was a compliment or an insult? Someone asked me to go hill- walking with him. He said, "I'd like you to come because, as your gong rightly recog- nises, you're not a good member, and you're not a good officer, but you are a good companion!" Following this discus- sion he will be unable to make the mistake again without exposing himself as a provo- If you have a problem write to Dear Mary, clo The Spectator, 56 Doughty Street, London WC1N 2LL.
Previous page
