YOUR PROBLEMS SOLVED I am a retired art director from
the Kodak Company, and if your correspondent with the embarrassing photograph (30 Novem- ber 1991) cares to borrow the picture for a week or two, I should be very pleased to help him out. You may quote my full name and address. I would retouch the area on the original photograph so that no one (excepting me, of course) would be likely to notice that anything had been done. Your Own advice is great, but with the folds on trousers at that point being many and var- ied, I think my retouching would be less likely to show. (I would first make a copy negative for safety.) This phenomenon seems to have dogged my days in art direc- tion! Once, millions of newly published advertising leaflets had to be withdrawn and destroyed when we noticed that the front colour photograph of a happy family running towards camera on the beach showed Dad wearing tan-coloured boxer shorts with a natural fold caused only by the flapping of the material itself that looked alarmingly like the real thing!.
Paul Wigmore, 87 Evelyn Drive, Pinner, Middlesex
Dear Mary.. .
Q. We live in London but have a house in the country. For some years now a couple of dear friends there have suggested we should join the local branch of a national conservation society. As nothing onerous beyond an annual subscription was involved and we thought the objectives of the society worthy, we finally joined. Our friends were delighted. To our horror, when we studied all the literature that flooded in, we found we did not agree with the policies or actions of the society. Worse, when we saw the list of members of the local branch, most of our local betes noires were among them. We are now being invited to attend meetings, rambles, ad nauseam. How do we resign from the society without hurting our friends?
Name and address withheld A. I presume that, like many Englishmen, you are reticent about your personal finances and that no one beyond your immediate family has any idea of precisely how much you are 'worth' or how much you might or might not have lost at Lloyd's. You might, therefore, confide to your friends in the country that you have just been rescued from what you should describe non-specifically as 'big trouble' thanks to a windfall of a portfolio of shares which has come to you in the will of a dis- tant relative. To your dismay, however, you find that the will has stipulated that you cannot move the shares into so-called con- science funds but must retain them in their existing companies. These are exclusively un-Green, being tobacco, defence, nuclear fuels and South Africa. Your friends are bound to understand that you must sadly tender your resignation from the society, as you cannot, in all conscience, continue to be a member in these new circumstances.
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