My partner thinks it is acceptable to scratch her back with kitchen utensils while cooking, especially skewers, wooden spoons and spaghetti servers. She has also been known to plunge her fork down the back of her shirt at the dinner table. Does anyone make an old-fashioned backscratcher any more? I can remember those horrible hand-shaped bamboo things, but I’m sure she’d like one in pink. I’d like to wean her off this habit by New Year with a thoughtful Christmas gift.
SH, Windsor
Hand-wielded backscratchers are so last century. Get with it and install a scratching post in your kitchen. All the best interior designers include them in kitchen layout as standard now. Of course, Philippe Starck has designed the most desirable one (it can also grate cheese, open wine and wipe out that smelly bit on the inside of the little toe). Habitat has a reasonable range, but the cheapest are from Ikea (though make sure you fix it to a wall rather than the side of the fridge, and although it says “use naked” in the instructions, assume that applies only to Swedes).
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Cross-dressing spouse
My darling husband has recently taken to wearing my tights under his trousers. I first caught a glimpse of the waistband and asked him why. He said it was because of the cold, but he later admitted he likes the feel. I don’t want to encourage him, as it is expensive — he ladders lots and I do not want him to start on my underwear. What should I do to finish his fetish?
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EM, by e-mail
When dealing with delicate, potentially embarrassing matters like this, it is always best to consider what his feelings are likely to be if anyone else found out — and therein lies your answer. Follow him to the pub, rugby/golf club (wherever he likes to hang out with boys) one night, and shout “He’s wearing my undies!” You will certainly cool his enthusiasm for slipping into your lingerie, although it might just end your marriage as well.
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Teen trauma
I wrote to you some seven months ago (April 2, 2006) telling you how I was an attractive girl of nearly 16 and that I had fallen in love with a boy who appeared to thoroughly dislike me. I asked you for any ideas in which I could end or develop the situation. You replied by telling me that my e-mail had arrived a couple of weeks ago and that I was probably in love with someone else by now. Seven months have elapsed, I am now 16 and I feel exactly the same. Do you have any further advice? (He still hates me, possibly even more than ever.)
HF, by e-mail
You might have to face the facts: you’re not exactly a pair of star-crossed lovers. Take a course in basket-weaving. It probably won’t improve your social life, but it will give you something to carry the potatoes home from the shops in.
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