Dear Mary: How do I confront my husband without telling him I hacked his emails?

Q. The Queen had the knack of making you feel that you were the only person in the room. At parties I find a few friends are listening to other people’s conversations as they listen to you, and give themselves away by interjecting a sudden response to the other conversation. Mary, what could I say that is more tactful than: ‘Am I boring you?!’

– A.S., Petersfield

A. As an equalising strategy quip: ‘I must admit I was tempted to chip in to that conversation myself. I suppose we must have been boring each other!’

Q. I plan to travel from Gloucestershire to pay my respects to Queen Elizabeth, and I’m happy to stand in the queue for however long it takes. My husband is only free from work a little later, but is it OK for him to join me in the queue? Or will his cutting in attract hostility?

– Name and address withheld

A. It will be fine as long as you warn the immediate cluster around you to expect your husband at a later stage. Bear in mind that the prevailing atmosphere in this historic queue will be civilised, in keeping with the spirit of our former Queen, and that scuffling is unlikely to break out.

Q. A financially unchallenged friend invited me to be her guest at a spa retreat but I now regret accepting. I’ve spent a couple of weekends with her recently, and it is obvious that when she gets me to herself she will spend the whole week obsessing over her new love interest, asking me to interpret his mysterious behaviour and text messages. The retreat will be no destresser if this is all she talks about, but as she’s paying I’ll feel obliged to listen. Any suggestions, Mary?

– H.C., London E1

A. Declare that you intend to impose a compartmentalising strategy so that she can derive maximum benefit from the retreat. To this end you will insist she only thinks and talks about her love interest for one agreed hour per day. This discipline will allow her to develop a more benign perspective on the relationship and she will seem more mysterious and dignified to the enigmatic love interest when they resume their interaction.

Q. My elderly husband is fairly technically illiterate but he has started sending out emails. I happened to read some of them and found he’d passed on gossip he’d promised to keep private. I need to confront him, but don’t know how to do it without admitting I’ve been hacking into his emails. What should I do?

– S.B., Bristol

A. Go into his sent box again and forward the offending email to yourself. You can then challenge him, telling him that he must have sent you a copy of the email in error.