Bad wedding etiquette has been the bane of many a party thrower, or guest, but Tilly Mannersworth has sage advice for dealing with the ‘Humungous Handbagger’, inappropriate attire and matrimonial missiles.

I think some people have mistaken weddings for mid-season berry picking. You may have noticed a special breed of wedding guest: the Humungous Handbagger. Often female, this guest sports an unusually large handbag. With their handbag strategically perched on one arm, the Humongous Handbagger niftily uses the other arm to reach for berries – read wedding catering – and quickly stow them away for, one assumes, the cold season. Shocking indeed.

For couples planning their wedding this summer I have a solution for bag-stuffing guests: liquid lunches. And by this I don’t mean soup. The rewards will be manifold, starting with the fact that your guests will be appropriately inebriated and forget the fact that food was never served.

Weddings are joyous occasions and it is lovely that we get to dress up.

The problem with wedding outfits is that people have forgotten colour etiquette. In my day, if anyone wore white it would appear they were trying to upstage the bridge – and out would come the broomstick. The same antidote would go for anyone who wore black. This is not a funeral.

I have not made a list of gifts for the bride as finding a gift to satisfy the endless wants of any reasonable lady should not pose too many problems. Men, to put this diplomatically, are different.

However, social customs having decreed that we give the bridegroom a gift, we must perforce rack our brains, unless we can send him a motorcar, a fishing rod, a fitted suitcase or a gun. While the latter will most definitely tickle his taste buds, I must warn you that there may be consequences to this.

Only the other day, I lost my friend Poppet Peninsula in a most devastating manner. Now, while she and her husband were not arguing – though temperatures were rising – in the heat of the moment, Manfred mistook his bedside bayonet for his, how can I put this, mating missile, and shot the poor woman in the head. Honestly, much as it pained me to do so, I have since moved Mr Mannersworth’s and my matrimonial machete out of arm’s reach. The world’s manners are still far too unrefined to lose someone like Mrs Tilly Mannersworth.

Mrs Tilly Mannersworth is a figment of Veronica Stivala’s imagination.