Mil's Mailing List Mail #41

Rather like an accusation from Agent Smith, I am the owner of two lives. One is the life I live in reality and is, let me assure you, duller than Exmouth. The other is the life that, apparently, I live in my girlfriend's head: this is a Bruce Willis movie, scripted by Hunter S. Thompson and Anais Nin. The gulf between the two was illustrated twice this week.

Example One. I do Aikido. (I really don't want to discuss this, so I'll mention it here and then we'll never speak of it again, OK?) Anyway, a feature of Aikido is the occasional use of a sword stand-in: it's called a bokken, and is essentially a big wooden stick. An example exercise utilising this piece of equipment is to learn to defend against 'shomenuchi' - which is Japanese for 'being hit across the top of the head with a bloody great fence post'. Bad enough, you might think… but not as far as Margret is concerned. Thank God she doesn't run the classes. The other day she said, "So, you can cope with being attacked by a bazooka now, right?" Bokken/bazooka. This, I feel, is how accidents happen. Aikido: possibly helpful when encountering determined assassins wielding wooden swords; not so effective against your own girlfriend who's armed with a dodgy English-German vocab sheet she's not afraid to use and has, additionally, stepped straight out of Quake.

Example Two. The guy who's organising this year's Birmingham Literary Festival speculatively asked if I'd be interested in doing an unusual session. Basically, it'd be teaching a workshop about conveying a sense of place. To highlight this, the session would run from 10pm to 6am; the students and I would be put in a hotel room all night. Aside from the obvious thought that Agatha Christie would be rubbing her hands at the idea of such a set-up (I'll give it until midnight before the door is discovered to be locked from the outside and the first body is found), I happen to think it's a rather interesting notion. I mentioned it to Margret.
"What do you think?" I asked.
"Hmmm," she replied. That noise is always a good indication that I ought to stop the current conversation and, as quickly as possible, leave the country on a false passport. But how would you all fritter away your work hours if, one day, I lost my special capacity to Never Learn, eh?
"What?" I asked - the sound of the word mimicking the cocking of a gun being placed against my own temple.
"I suppose it's OK. If you don't have sex with all the students."
"Er... That's not in the session brief. I checked. Twice."
"You could have sex with at least one of them."
('At least.' Excellent. It's like reading one of my old school reports - 'Makes only the minimum effort necessary.' This always struck me as a less than well-thought-out criticism, by the way. "Millington - you must pass this maths test." "Pass it, sir? No, that'd be using nothing but the necessary effort. I insist I pass it while also carrying a ten-stone man up and down a ladder." But anyway, the 'at least' jibe rather stings here as I'm sure that I did put tremendous effort into sex education classes. Really - I can recall doing an awful lot of work in my own time.)
Let's replay Margret - you've probably forgotten who was speaking now, right?
"You could have sex with at least one of them."
"Sex? In Birmingham? With a room full of other people? In Birmingham?"
"You could pop out and have sex in the lift." (For Americans: lift = elevator - I've no idea what you have there instead of sex.) It's superficially tempting to think, 'Well, she's thought this through.' But, you soon realise that a normal person thinking it through would have ended with 'in another room in the hotel' or, at the very least, 'in the linen cupboard.' She's got me sneaking out to copulate - in Birmingham - and heading cunningly for the single most precarious place to perform the act, with the possible exception of 'across the reception desk.' That's not the point, though, is it? The point's before that. The point is that when, say, Tony Blair mentions, "I'm meeting the Israelis on Monday," I bet Cherie doesn't immediately reply, "Don't you go having sex with them all, then."

See what I mean? In my girlfriend's imagination, I pretty much pause from the endless sex only long enough to swat away rocket-propelled grenades. In reality, what am I doing? I'm sitting here writing to you, that's what. I mean, you're lovely, of course, but… Fff.

Right, a few quick technical matters before I mention something about going to the supermarket, and then leave to let you all drift back to sleep.

First, as spam and viruses continue to bloat the Internet with their putrid presence, please remember that only my Mailing Lists come from mil_admin@ntlworld.com, and all of these have the subject line 'Mil's Mailing List #(whatever the number is)'. Also, I never - never, ever, ever - send attachments or even HTML mails. They are all attachmentless, plain text things.

Second, as everyone knows, NTL is rubbish. So, I'll be moving from it round about soonish. This means that, in future, Mailing List Mails will not come from mil_admin@ntlworld.com. The above still applies, but from the next Mail onwards the From address will be mil_admin@theweekly.co.uk. You will likely need to amend your mail settings to receive these - see here
http://mil-millington.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/woes.htm#mails

In response to a few, "Why don't you tell us when..." emails, I repeat that I mention in the diary
http://microurl.com/mil/Diary
only things that I'm doing in a 'public' place - in case anyone wants to turn up and say, "Golly, how extraordinary. The Internet clearly distorts everything, because, in real life, you're actually hugely clever and so physically attractive that I could weep with aesthetic joy." I do not, and will not, list every time my stupid face happens to be on TV or my stupid voice is on the wireless. What kind of person would announce that stuff? 'Alert, everyone! Another wonderful chance to bask in Me!' Ugh.

What are we up to now? Three? Yes - three. Three: the chap who's arranging the Wenlock Readers' Day - which I happen to be doing with some other authors - asks I mention it on the TMGAIHAA webpage. I'm not going to do that, obviously, but I'll mention it here. Look:
http://microurl.com/mil/wenlock
And, lo, it was mentioned.

OK, now all that's out of the way, I can tell you about going to the supermarket.

Women feel marvellously empowered in supermarkets. The very act of setting foot in an aisle imbues them with a sense of authority and a directness of purpose. This is probably the reason - playing home advantage - that most mothers like to take their children to the supermarket to shout at them. Men, on the other hand, push the trolley. Slumped. It's a remarkably distinctive posture, this 'three steps behind his partner, shoulders dropped, trolley slump' - close your eyes and I bet you're able to see it perfectly now. One can attempt to claw back a little self-respect (behind a trolley, yes - but still all man) by getting up some speed and trying to do a bit of body-weight-steered cornering: Tokyo drift round the end of Frozen Vegetables. But this almost always ends with your hitting a careless toddler and the one-sided apportioning of blame. What often goes unnoticed, though, is the repeated behaviour of non-single men in supermarkets.

Single men in supermarkets generally have only a basket, containing a loaf, four microwave meals and a carton of milk. This is because that's the extent of their ability to see into the future - anything beyond a loaf, four microwave meals and a carton of milk would be blue-sky planning. Two single men in a supermarket doesn't happen. Because two single men cannot - due to the structure of the human brain - go into a supermarket together without being utterly, suffocatingly convinced that everyone is glancing at them and thinking, 'Gay couple.' Which, as I was saying, leaves us with non-single men in supermarkets - Men Who Have Been Given the Job of Shopping. They hold lists, constantly. Women don't hold lists - they don't need to, as they're getting whatever the hell they want: they haven't been Sent. The men hold lists in fearful hands, because they know if they don't come back with precisely what's on them, there'll be trouble - which also accounts for the plague of Men in Supermarket Standing by Shelves, Calling Home on their Mobiles. The precise thing specified isn't there, what do you do? Wing it? Make a decision yourself? Pff - only if you want to look at a nice 'What's this? You are the dimmest idiot in Stupid Town' expression when you get home. No: you phone to ask for specific instructions. 'I am a full-grown man and I teach post-graduate classes in comparative semiotics. Please tell me which shampoo to buy.' Now, knowing the pixyish nature of the women on this Mailing List, I'll wager my longest-surviving underpants that a goodly number of you are snorting, 'Bshh. It's because men have no initiative - that's the trouble. When they encounter a problem, they simply can't think logically and navigate around it in the obvious way.' I'm sure that this insight is entirely accurate and explains everything. I feel ashamed to have raised the subject now.

Anyway, on an unrelated point, Margret instructed me to get a "short-sleeved, white, boy's school shirt" from Asda for First Born. I went to Asda. Girls' short-sleeved, white school shirts. Boys' long-sleeved, white school shirts. Shirts of a different colour, or for someone other than First Born's age. All these options were there, but not precisely what I'd been ordered to get. What would you get, Oh-So-Clever Women Mailing Listers? What would your choice be? Come on - the clock's ticking.

I, of course, called home on my mobile.

"Margret? They have no short-sleeved, white, boy's school shirts."
"Right - get some cheese instead."

Mil.