YOUR PROBLEMS SOLVED
Dear Mary.. .
Q. My wife and I have been receiving a number of letters from the university-aged Children of our friends. The general tenor ,_of them is that the supplicant is off to some tropical clime to 'study the environ mental damage/build a dam/teach the natives/encourage international under- standing' etc. The bill is £3,000 and would We please 'sponsor' them. As these are the Jeunesse doree, I don't feel that charitable towards them but I do have to keep meet- ing their conniving parents. How should I reply?
Name and address withheld 1. Write your reply along the following lines: 'I will be happy to support your ven- ture and would sugget that we talk immi- nsntly to arrange a time when you can set a few days for me.' The baffled sup- plicants will then telephone you for clarifi- cation. You can explain that you have increasingly found that, of the numerous Young people whom you have sponsored in this Way, most now feel uncomfortable about accepting the money without making some small gesture in kind towards earning it and you had just presumed he/she would feel the same way. Say, 'Something which has worked rather well with six or seven other young people is that they have come over for a couple of days and chopped kin- dling, raked leaves, done a bit of white- washing or whatever else needs doing around the place and of course I pay them well in excess of what their work was "worth". They say that these days everyone is much happier with this arrangement and they certainly feel happier about accepting the money.' Some youths will be too lazy to take you up on your offer. Those who are not surely deserve a bit of subsidy for their proxy magnanimity.
Q. I was recently disturbed to read, in a memoir of the late Jock Murray, that for him 'stacking plates was an unforgivable crime'. I am an American and have been living in this country for nine years. During that time I have always tried to help out my hosts at dinner parties by clearing the table in this way when there are no staff present. It seems terribly unfair to learn now that by so doing I was committing an 'unforgivable crime'. Please enlighten me, Mary, on why plate-stacking should be such a gaffe in grand houses?
A.H., London SW3 A. It is nothing to do with grandness. The reasons are aesthetic rather than snobbish. Clattering is the least offensive of the sen- sory degradations that will ensue from plate-stacking at table. There is also the spectacle of a mounting graveyard of bones or the disagreeable sight of cutlery so recently in one's own mouth nestling up against the bacterial detritus of other guests. For these reasons both grandees and aesthetes alike will always mince out of dining-rooms with only two plates at a time and stacking will take place else- where.
Mary Killen
Dear Mary — The Spectator Book of Solu- tions, published by HarperCollins at 17.99, is now available.
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