Sometimes I look back nostalgically at the time when I ran a column called "Unasked For Advice". It was a terrific soap box from which to proclaim and there were a few genuine letters seriously requesting Asked For Advice. But not very many because, as one woman said, there's no point in asking Maeve whether you should wear a long or a short dress to something because she'd only say it didn't matter.
That's true: that's what I would say, and it doesn't matter.
Not to me.
But it might matter to other people, which is why there is always a huge market for books on etiquette. One of the most unusual of these manuals is published this week by Mary Killen, who writes a very funny column in the Spectator about ludicrous social dilemmas.
She seems to move in a bewildered world of house parties and titled county people, all of them unsure of how to avoid things like bores and tipping people and kissing strangers and being addressed by their first names. Sometimes her solutions are even more idiotic than the questions she is asked, but at other times she has really magic advice that really works - like what to do if people don't write to thank you for a gift you sent in honour of their wedding.
You think one of three things must have happened:
a) The gift didn't arrive.
b) The gift got separated from the card.
c) Sheer bad manners.
Mary Killen says that after a couple of weeks, you should write out another card with the kind of message you would have written on the first one, and send it off with a hastily written postcard saying you found this in the pocket of a jacket you were taking to the cleaners, and they must be wondering who sent them the six bone china plates?
Since the explanation is almost always sheer bad manners, then this will give them the nudge to write and they'll think they were let off the hook.
I wondered what kind of a person she was and asked her publishers if I could telephone her.
She seemed a very pleasant person. Irish, she said, from Larne originally, but living in England for a good while now.
And what sort of a class of an age would she be?
She never revealed her age to anyone, she said. First of all it was ageist even to ask, and also, as Marjorie Proops had discovered years ago, if you refused to tell people how old you are then they can't sack you, saying you're 60 or 65 or whatever, because they'll never know what age you are.
She said she wasn't upper class at all, having come from a small provincial town where her father had been a doctor, but the great thing about being Irish was that you could move among any class in England and they didn't seem to notice.
The English themselves are very confused by their own class system and think that if you are one thing then you must stay that thing, and that people are being uppity and having airs and taking liberties if they try to move upwards. Their class system is riddled with traps and pitfalls to catch usurpers and social climbers.
She believes it's a huge relief to be Irish or Scottish since you don't spend your time trying to place other people in some pecking order, and even with a fleet of detectives they can never place you at all so you are perfectly welcome everywhere. She thinks the huge success of Australian nannies among all the frightfully upper class people is due to the fact the Australians have no idea whatsoever these people believe themselves to be grand and terrifying and awesome and so they treat them as equals, which stuns them utterly. Mary Killen began in journalism by writing a horoscope page in the magazine Tatler. No, she didn't make it all up, she did considerable research - well, a little reading around star signs. But she decided to expand. She had this friend who was an only child whose parents were abroad a lot. This girl had been at a posh convent school but hadn't a penny and was always being invited to smart places and learned to survive by amazing tricks. For example she would pretend all her luggage had been lost on the train when she arrived with nothing at all, and everyone would lend her things. She was so highly successful that Mary Killen thought this would be very useful store of knowledge to explore and began her column, first in the Tatler and now in the Spectator.
At first she made up a few problems and then real ones started to come in. Her mother is astounded that people would have nothing better to do than consider these issues as "problems" and write in seriously about them. Mary Killen says a lot of them are jokes but many are tongue-in-cheek with a serious undertone.
In her new collection, a huge number of queries have to do with avoiding bores and how to get out of having conversations with people in trains or restaurants. It's as if the English had lost entirely the ability to control any kind of social situation. She thinks they are constantly terrified of giving offence and will go to any lengths to avoid doing so. One reader wrote in to say she had fallen into the habit of giving a smelly and unpunctual colleague a lift to work every morning - how could she possibly get out of this now?
We agreed that in hardly any other country in the world would this be classified as a problem, but Mary Killen gave it the serious response she thought it deserved. The car driver should pretend she had now got involved in a school run to help another neighbour, therefore the times of departure would be changed and the morning lift put on indefinite hold. This would extricate her without hurting anybody.
Some of the advice is amazingly devious - like what do you do if asked to give a friend's telephone number. You should give it but with some of the number transposed almost dyslexically. Then you ring the friend to know whether or not they mind the correct number being given out.
Most of it is are based on the fact that the people she is writing for and about are unable to get out of anything without an elaborate and complicated system of pretence. There is a recognition that the English, unlike their Celtic neighbours, are not masters of speedy small talk and pleasant, inoffensive self-extrication. One of her most successful hints has been how to avoid a long conversation with someone who is known to be a frightful bore.
The moment you spot this bore, bound straight up to him and say: "Hello my dear, I've been trying to get in touch with you. Can we have lunch tomorrow?" No doubt the bore will agree.
Then say: "Well, we can't go on talking to each other now, otherwise we'll have nothing to talk about at lunch."
The following morning, you simply ring up and cancel lunch.
Dear Mary: Your Social Dilemmas Solved, by Mary Killen is published by Constable, price £9.99 in UK