Now making the Internet rounds: a set of obnoxious emails from a British mother sent to her future daughter-in-law. The subject of the correspondence: the bride-to-be's "staggering uncouthness and lack of grace."
According to the Evening Standard, Carolyn Bourne sent three harshly-worded missives in one day to Heidi Withers, who is engaged to marry Bourne's stepson Freddie, after the couple spent a weekend at the Bourne's family home.
Apparently the weekend did not go as well as Heidi might have hoped, as her future mother-in-law a.k.a. Emily Post Wannabe criticized her manners, her taste and her parents' finances.
Below is the email message that has been most widely circulated, as Heidi sent the email to a few of her own friends, who then sent it across the Internet.
We recommend reading this rude diatribe on rudeness in a British accent to get the full effect:
It is high time someone explained to you about good manners. Yours are obvious by their absence and I feel sorry for you.
Unfortunately for Freddie, he has fallen in love with you and Freddie being Freddie, I gather it is not easy to reason with him or yet encourage him to consider how he might be able to help you. It may just be possible to get through to you though. I do hope so.
If you want to be accepted by the wider Bourne family I suggest you take some guidance from experts with utmost haste. There are plenty of finishing schools around.
Please, for your own good, for Freddie's sake and for your future involvement with the Bourne family, do something as soon as possible.
Here are a few examples of your lack of manners:
When you are a guest in another's house, you do not declare what you will and will not eat - unless you are positively allergic to something. You do not remark that you do not have enough food. You do not start before everyone else.
You do not take additional helpings without being invited to by your host.
When a guest in another's house, you do not lie in bed until late morning in households that rise early - you fall in line with house norms.
You should never ever insult the family you are about to join at any time and most definitely not in public. I gather you passed this off as a joke but the reaction in the pub was one of shock, not laughter.
You should have hand-written a card to me. You have never written to thank me when you have stayed.
You regularly draw attention to yourself. Perhaps you should ask yourself why.
No one gets married in a castle unless they own it. It is brash, celebrity style behaviour.
I understand your parents are unable to contribute very much towards the cost of your wedding. (There is nothing wrong with that except that convention is such that one might presume they would have saved over the years for their daughters' marriages.)
If this is the case, it would be most ladylike and gracious to lower your sights and have a modest wedding as befits both your incomes.
Not one to be outdone, Heidi's father has now said that his future in-law, "has her head stuck so far up her own a*** she doesn't know whether to speak or f**t," the Daily Mail reports.
Needless to say, we're super-excited to hear how this wedding goes.