Things my girlfriend and I have argued about

Margret
(from the German
"M' Argr et" meaning 'to be dangerously insane').

Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About

Nothing keeps a relationship on its toes so much as lively debate. Fortunate, then, that my girlfriend and I agree on absolutely nothing. At all.

Combine utter, polar disagreement on everything, ever, with the fact that I am a text-book Only Child, and she is a violent psychopath, and we're warming up. Then factor in my being English while she is German, which not only makes each one of us personally and absolutely responsible for the history, and the social and cultural mores of our respective countries, but also opens up a whole field of sub-arguments grounded in grammatical and semantic disputes and, well, just try saying anything and walking away.

Examples? Okey-dokey. We have argued about:

Ahhhhhhhh

The way one should cut a Kiwi Fruit in half (along its length or across the middle).
Leaving the kitchen door open (three times a day that one, minimum).
The best way to hang up washing.
Those little toothpaste speckles you make when you brush your teeth in front of the mirror.
I eat two-fingered Kit-Kats like I'd eat any other chocolate bars of that size, i.e., without feeling the need to snap them into two individual fingers first. Margret accused me of doing this, 'deliberately to annoy her'.
Which way - the distances were identical - to drive round a circular bypass (this resulted in her kicking me in the head from the back seat as I drove along).
The amount of time I spend on the computer. (OK, fair enough.)
First Born's name (Jonathan). Then, when that was settled...
How to pronounce First Born's name.
Our telephone number.
Which type of iron to buy (price wasn't an issue, it was the principle, damnit).
Where to sit in the cinema. On those occasions when we a) manage to agree to go to the cinema together and, b) go to see the same film once we're there. (No, really).
Whether her cutting our son's hair comes under 'money-saving skill' or 'therapy in the making'.
Shortly after every single time Margret touches my computer, for any reason whatsoever, I have to spend twenty minutes trying to fix crashes, locked systems, data loses, jammed drives, bizarre re-configurations and things stuck in the keyboard. There then follows a free and frank exchange of views with, in my corner, 'It's your fault,' and, in hers, 'It's a curious statistical anomaly.'
Margret enters the room. The television is showing Baywatch. Margret says, 'Uh-huh, you're watching Baywatch again.' I say, 'I'm not watching, it's just on.' Repeat. For the duration of the programme.
She wants to paint the living room yellow. I have not the words.
Margret doesn't like to watch films on the TV. No, hold on - let me make sure you've got the inflection here: Margret doesn't like to watch films on the TV. She says she does, but years of bitter experience have proven that what she actually wants is to sit by me while I narrate the entire bleeding film to her. 'Who's she?', 'Why did he get shot?', 'I thought that one was on their side?', 'Is that a bomb' - 'JUST WATCH IT! IN THE NAME OF GOD, JUST WATCH IT!' The hellish mirror-image of this is when she furnishes me, deaf to my pleading, with her commentary. Chair-clawing suspense being assaulted mercilessly from behind by such interjections as, 'Hey! Look! They're the cushions we've got.', 'Isn't she the one who does that tampon advert?' and, on one famous occasion, 'Oh, I've seen this - he gets killed at the end.'
Margret thinks I'm vain because... I use a mirror when I shave. During this argument in the bathroom - our fourth most popular location for arguments, it will delight and charm you to learn - Margret proved that shaving with a mirror could only be seen as outrageous narcissism by saying, 'None of the other men I've been with,' (my, but it's all I can do to stop myself hugging her when she begins sentences like that) 'None of the other men I've been with used a mirror to shave.'
'Ha! Difficult to check up on that, isn't it? As all the other men you've been with can now only communicate by blinking their eyes!' I said. Much later. When Margret had left the house.
The TV Remote. It is only by epic self-discipline on both our parts that we don't argue about the TV Remote to the exclusion of all else. It does the TV Remote a disservice to suggest that it is only the cause of four types of argument, but space, you will understand, is limited so I must concentrate on the main ones.
1) Ownership of the TV Remote: this is signified by its being on the arm of the chair/sofa closest to you - it is more important than life itself.
2) On those blood-freezing occasions when you look up from your seat to discover that the TV Remote is still lying on top of the TV, then one of you must retrieve it; who shall it be? And how will this affect (1)?
3) Disappearance of the TV Remote. Precisely who had it last will be hotly disputed, witnesses may be called. Things can turn very nasty indeed when the person who isn't looking for it is revealed to be unknowingly sitting on it.
4) The TV Remote is a natural nomad and sometimes, may the Lord protect us, it goes missing for whole days. During these dark times, someone must actually, in an entirely literal sense, get up to change the channel; International Law decrees that this, "will not be the person who did it last" - but can this be ascertained? Without the police becoming involved?
We're staying at a German friend's flat in Berlin and he brings out the photo album, as people do when conversational desperation has set in. It's largely pictures of a holiday he went on with Margret and a few friends several years previously. And consists pretty much entirely of shots of Margret naked. 'Hah! So, here's another photo of your girlfriend nude! Good breasts, no?' I sat on the sofa for hours of this - I think I actually bit through my tongue at one point. Fortunately, though, everything turned out all right because Margret, me and one careful and considered exchange of views revealed it was, '...just (my) hang-up.' Great. I'm sooooo English, apparently.
See if you can spot the difference between these two statements:
(a) "Those trousers make your backside look fat."
(b) "You're a repellently obese old hag upon whom I am compelled to heap insults and derision - depressingly far removed from the, 'stupid, squeaky, pocket-sized English women,' who make up my vast catalogue of former lovers and to whom I might as well return right now as I hate everything about you."
Maybe the acoustics were really bad in the dining room, or something.
She keeps making me carry tampons around - 'Here, have these, just in case.'
'Oooooooh, why can't you carry them?'
'I've got no pockets.'
Then, of course, I forget about them. And the next time I'm meeting The Duchess of Kent or someone I pull a handkerchief out of my pocket and shower feminine hygiene products everywhere.
She really over-reacts whenever she catches me wearing her underwear.
Now, what you have to realise is that this was from nowhere, OK? Don't think there were previous conversations or situations that put this in context. Oh no. Just imagine the, 'What the f...?' moment you'd have been standing in if your partner had said this to you, because you'd have had as much preparation as I did. So, it's just after Christmas and Margret's moaning about her present (I forget what it was, a Ferrari, I think - but in the wrong colour or something), um, actually, let me come back to this, that reminds me...
Presents. Before every birthday, Christmas or whatever I'll say, 'What do you want?' And Margret will say, 'Surprise me.' And I'll reply, 'Noooooo, just tell me what you want. If I guess it'll be the wrong thing, it's always the wrong thing.' And then she'll come out with that, 'No, it won't. It'll be what you chose, and a surprise, that's what's important,' nonsense. And I'll say, 'Sweetest, you say that now, but come Christmas morning it'll be, "What the hell were you thinking?" again, won't it?' And she replies, 'No. It. Won't.' And I say, 'Yes, it will.' And she says, 'Don't patronise me.' And the neighbours freeze in their seats for a moment next door, before jumping up and removing anything they have on the shelves on the adjoining wall. And, in the end, Margret gets her way. And I hunt around in utter desperation for two months for something before finally finding the one item that will work at 7.30pm on Christmas Eve for a cost of twenty-three-and-a-half thousands pounds. And on Christmas morning it's, 'What the hell were you thinking?' But anyway.
Back at the previous item, it's just after Christmas and Margret's going on about her present, which was, you'll recall, a necklace of a single diamond suspended on a delicate chain of white gold and sapphires. And this is what I hear come out of her mouth - 'Why didn't you get me a wormery, I dropped enough hints?' You what?
I get accused of hoarding things by Margret. Now, this is entirely unfair - electrical items never die, you see, I am merely unable to revive them with today's technology. In the future new techniques will emerge and, combined with the inevitably approaching shortage of AC adapters and personal cassette players, my foresight will pay off and the grateful peoples of the Earth will make me their God. Anyway, never mind that now, because the real point is that it's Margret who fills our house with crap. And I'm not talking about doing so by the omission of crap-throwing-away here, but by insane design. While sorting out the stuff in the boxes, these are some of the things I've discovered that Margret actually packed away at our last house and brought to our new one:
- A dentist's cast of her teeth circa 1984.
- Empty Pringles tubes.
- Rocks (not 'special ornamental rocks', you understand, just 'rocks' from our previous garden).
- Old telephone directories.
- Two carrier bags full of scraps of material.
- Those little sachets of salt and sugar you get with your meal on planes.
- Some wooden sticks.
- Last year's calendar.
And yet, were I to throw her from a train, they'd call me the criminal.
Look, if you don't understand the rules of Robot Wars by now then I'm just not going to continue the conversation, OK?
Damn, damn, damn washing up. Now, in the normal course of things I do all the cooking and washing up. (This is partly due to a tactical error I made in an argument many years ago. You know when you're so angry you start blurring the line between masochistic hyperbole and usefully hissing threat? 'Well, maybe I'll just microwave all my CDs - look, look, there goes my Tom Robinson Band - feel better now?' Been there? Splendid. So, several years ago we're having this argument and somehow I found myself inhabiting a place where saying, 'OK, OK, OK - I'll do all the cooking and all the washing up all the time, then!' seemed like a hugely cunning gambit. In fact, though, this is not too bad a deal. You see, if Margret is cooking turkey (unstuffed, three-and-a-half-hours) and oven chips (20 minutes, turn once), then she'll begin putting them in the oven at precisely the same time. If Margret's preparing tea, then its style will be her variation on Sweet 'n' Sour that runs Burnt Beyond Recognition 'n' Potentially Fatal.) Can you remember what I was saying before I opened those brackets? Hold on... ah, right - washing up. Now, the thing is, if you're an English male, what you do when you leave home is go to the shop nearest to your new place, buy a Pot Noodle (Chicken and Mushroom), feast on its delights slumped on the sofa in front of the TV, swill out the plastic carton it came in, then use this carton for all your subsequent meals until you get married. There's a beauty of economy to it. Thus, when I cook a meal for four, the aftermath left in the sink as I carry the gently steaming plates to the table is a single saucepan and, if I've pulled out the all stops to dazzle visiting Royalty, perhaps a spoon. Margret cannot make cheese on toast without using every single saucepan, wok, tureen and colander in the house. Post-Margret-meal, I walk into the kitchen to discover a sink teetering with utensils holding off gravity only by the sly use of a sp�tzle glue.
'How the hell did you use all these to make that?'
'It's just what I needed.'
'What? Where did the lawnmower fit in?'
Arguments. There are many arguments we have over arguments. 'Who started argument x', for example, is a old favourite that has not had its vigour dimmed by age nor its edge blunted through use. Another dependable companion is, 'I'm not arguing, I'm just talking - you're arguing,' along with its more stage-struck (in the sense that it relishes an audience - parties, visiting relatives, Parent's Evenings at school, in shops, etc.) sibling, 'Right, so we're going to get into this argument here are we?' An especially frequent argument argument, however, is the result of Margret NOT STICKING TO THE DAMN ARGUMENT, FOR CHRIST'S SAKE. Margret jack-knifes from argument to argument, jigs direction randomly and erratically like a shoal of Argument Fish being followed by a Truth Shark. It's fearsomely difficult to land a blow because by the time you've let fly with the logic she's not there anymore. A row about vacuuming gets shifted to the cost of a computer upgrade, from there to who got up early with the kids most this week and then to the greater interest rates of German banks via the noisome sexual keenness of some former girlfriend, those-are-hair-scissors-don't-use-them-for-paper and, 'When was the last time you bought me flowers?' all in the space of about seven exchanges. 'Arrrrrrgggh! What are we arguing about? Can you just decide what it is and stick to it?'
The key to a successful relationship is communication. That's the First Rule. Margret's corollary to the First Rule is the Timing clause. This states that the best time to initiate a complex and lengthy talk about, say, exactly how we should go about a loft conversion is (in reverse order of preference):
- When you see that Mil is playing a game online and is one point away from becoming Champion Of The World, Mil is racing out of the house to catch a train, Mil is in the middle of trying to put out a kitchen fire, etc.
- During the final minutes of a tense thriller Mil has been watching for the past two hours. Ideally at the precise point when someone has begun to say, 'Good Lord! Then the murderer must be...'
- Just at the moment, late at night, when Mil has finally managed to fall asleep.
- In the middle of having sex.
When Margret used to go shopping and she'd see, for example, a pair of jeans in a department store, do you know what she used to do? Try them on. I think you're all with me here, but just for anyone who's joined us late, I don't mean she'd go to the changing rooms and try them on. That would be a preposterous idea wouldn't it? No, she'd just get undressed there in the middle of the sales floor to try them on. It took me some considerable time to persuade her that this wasn't normal behaviour in Britain, despite what she might have seen on Benny Hill. Even then, she only stopped - amid much eye-rolling and, 'You and your silly social conventions,' head shaking - to humour me. It rubs a tiny circle from the misted-up window through which you can view the tormented, horizonless landscape that is My World to mention that I'd entirely forgotten about all this until someone sent me a email yesterday that accidentally exhumed the memory. With Margret this kind of thing just gets drowned out by the general noise. I wouldn't be surprised if, a few months from now, I'm here writing, 'Ahhh - that reminds me of Margret's role in the John Lennon shooting...'
Wherever I'm standing is where Margret needs to be standing, and vice versa. Doesn't matter where we are - the kitchen, the bathroom, Scotland - we each infuriatingly occupy the space where the other one wants to be, urgently. Over the years we've developed signals for this situation. Mine is to stand behind her and mutter under my breath. Margret's is to shoulder-charge me out of the way.
Margret flooded the kitchen last week. Turned the taps on, put the plug in the sink, and utterly forgot about it (because she'd come upstairs and we'd got involved in an unrelated argument). She goes back downstairs, opens the door and - whoosh - it's Sea World. The interesting thing about this is, if I'd flooded the kitchen, it would have been a bellowing, 'You've flooded the kitchen, you idiot!' and then she'd have done that thing where I curl up in a ball, trying to protect my head, and she kicks me repeatedly in the kidneys. As it was, however, there's a shout, I run downstairs and stand for a beat in the doorway - taking in the scene, waves lapping gently at my ankles - and she turns round and roars, 'Well, help me then - can't you see I've flooded the kitchen, you idiot?'
There are certain verbal shortcuts to a lot of our arguments. Sure, we could ease into things, build up momentum slowly, but that's so wasteful when you can fit in three arguments in the time the slow-burn approach would take to brew only one. So, we often favour more of a dragster-style, zero-to-argument in 1 second approach. Thus, over the years, ways of ensuring a spitting, scratching row with just one sentence have been polished to a high shine.
For example, Margret once said to me, 'Am I your favourite woman in the world?' The world? I mean, really.
Other times she'll lay mines so we can explode into an argument later with the minimum amount of run-up. She'll go out and, over her shoulder as she closes the door, call, 'You can vacuum the house if you want.' I'll settle down on the computer for a couple of hours. When she returns she'll stomp up the stairs, crash open the door and growl, 'Why didn't you vacuum the house?' I, naturally, will reply, 'You said I could if I wanted to. And, after thinking about it, I decided I didn't. Obviously, it wasn't a decision I took lightly...' and we're already there.
Another dead cert is when I can't find something - the TV Guide, a shirt, my elastic band rifle, whatever, it doesn't matter - and the exchange goes:
'Gretch? Have you seen my sunglasses?'
'Have you looked for them?'
(Oooooooo, I, it, when, argggh! My teeth are gritted just typing that.)
Margret, of course, has done the ultimate and discovered a way of ensuring an argument using no words at all. The technique is this:
She'll have one of her friends round and they'll be chatting away animatedly in the living room - until I happen to walk in, at which point Margret will abruptly and conspicuously stop what she's saying, mid-sentence... Yep, one of us is going to be sleeping in the spare room tonight.
Margret's four-hundred-and-fifty-second most annoying habit is to stealthily turn off the central heating (then light the gas fire in the room she's in, natch). I'll suddenly notice that, sitting typing at the keyboard, I can see my own breath while from the bedroom one of the kids will call out, 'Papa, I can't feel my legs...' And I'll shiver down the stairs to find the central heating set to 'Summer/Hypothermia/Cryogenic Suspension,' and Margret in the living room watching the TV in a door frame warping furnace.
A Few Concepts Margret Continues To Have Trouble Assimilating:

It's possible to stop buying plants.

Can you please leave me alone, I'm on the lavatory.

Ikea is just another shop.

I asked you if you wanted any, I asked you - now stop eating it off my plate.

One may have a thought and not say it. This does not make me insular, it merely separates me from you and that mad woman who's always shouting at the pigeons outside the supermarket.

They're just nail clippings. Nail clippings must be the most inert thing on the planet, how can anyone seriously have a problem with nail clippings? You might as well freak out with, 'Bleuuuurrggh - helium!' Really - just get a hold of yourself. So you've walked barefoot across the bathroom and you find this has resulted in a nail clipping or two sticking to the bottom of your foot; well, simply brush them off into the bin - they're just nail clippings.

Just for reference; if Margret returns from having her hair cut and says, 'What do you think?' and you reply, 'I'd love you whatever your hair was like,' well, that's very much The Wrong Answer, OK?
'Get your hands off me - you're freezing.'

A thing happened at this point that nearly stopped me ever updating this page again. You can read about it by clicking your mouse on the words you are now reading. Yes, these words, you fool.

You may remember that one of the manifestations of Margret's basket of madnesses is an urge to fill our house with an internal Vietnam of plants. A compulsive disorder whose origins I can't even guess at.
On an unrelated note, we just got back from staying with Margret's folks in Germany. This is a picture I took, representatively, of the top of the stairs at their house.
Yes. It. Is.
If you've clicked on the 'Why I nearly stopped updating' link above, you'll know who Hannah is. But, of course, you won't have clicked on it because you felt it was too much of an effort, you Child Of The Internet, you. So, let me tell you Hannah is someone with whom I recently started to work - remotely, I've met her in person once, for about ninety minutes. You now have all the information you need. Phone me, I'll come round and scroll for you too, OK?

Margret and I are going up a mountain, side by side, on a drag lift in Germany. The white noise of the snow under our skis is the only sound until Margret begins to speak.
Margret - 'This woman - "Hannah", is it? - what's she like?'
Mil - 'She seems OK.'
Margret - 'How old is she.'
Mil - 'About thirty, I think.'
Margret - 'What colour is her hair?'
Mil - 'Black.'
Margret - 'Does she smoke?'
Mil - 'Yes.'
Margret - 'YOU WANT TO SLEEP WITH HER, DON'T YOU?'

Perfectly put into practice there, you can see, Sherlock Holmes's rule that, "Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable must be the truth."
'I'm nearly there.' Yeah. Right.
I came home from work on Friday and, as I wearily opened the door into the house, Second Born, Peter, heard me entering and poked his head out of the living room.
'Hello, Papa - I've missed you,' he shouts. From within the living room Margret's voice calls out to him 'No you haven't, Peter.'

You're all up for testifying for me in court, right?
OK, you tell me whether I'm wrong to be starting to get seriously worried about this. OK? You tell me. I shuffled out of bed into the bathroom this morning to have a shower. I took my clothes off, innocently pulled back the shower curtain and This is what I saw. (Fortunately, the digital camera - 'For me? I see - for me, is it?' - I bought for Margret this Christmas was just in the other room to provide photographic proof. Because I know you all think I make this stuff up. Damn you.) Now, tell me, is Margret placing it there the act of a rational human being?

You know what I think? I think she's having an affair with it. That's exactly the shudder of realisation I felt as I pulled back the shower curtain. I mean, it's not like the clues weren't there, is it? I can perfectly picture myself unexpectedly coming home early from work one day, walking into the bedroom and, with a cold slap of shock, discovering them in bed together - underwear and foliage flung carelessly across the floor by their impatient passion. 'You! Of course - what a fool I've been!'
I know from the emails I get that a fair number of you are holed up in Wyoming basements surrounded by automatic weapons, livestock and racks of cassettes filled with analysis of the Book of Revelations you've recorded off talk radio. If you have a moment, go and look in your freezer. That's how Margret stocks our freezer too. She doesn't buy one of anything. She waits until she finds it, 'Buy Two - Get One Free,' and then she buys nine. Moreover, she can't manage to suppress an indulgent smile - as though I'm a father telling my teenage daughter that her skirt might give boys all the wrong signals - when I suggest that checking to see how full the freezer is before she starts buying extra stuff for it might be a good idea. Beyond the simply obvious - they'll have terraformed Mars before our family runs out of oven chips, for example - there is another consequence of this. The sheer volume of food that needs to be crammed into the freezer means it's only possible at all because Margret employs two ruses.
The first is brute force. Basically, she just hammers things into the drawers with the heel of her shoe. Which works, but at the expense of horrifically deforming whatever she's storing. We're all used to this now, naturally. Jonathan pretty much expects his turkey dinosaurs to be a collection of misshapen body parts: they're turkey dinosaurs, as modelled on the scenes of carnage the day after the comet hit Earth. It really only becomes an issue when he has friends round, asks them if they'd like an Cornetto ice cream and is then bemused by their expression of stark horror when he returns holding something that looks like it's been trampled by horses.
The second point is that she only has any chance whatsoever of jamming all the things in if she throws away the cardboard boxes in which everything's packed. The boxes which, of course, bear the cooking instructions. Now, I know you're not going to believe this, but I'm just the tiniest bit anal. No, no, really - it's true. Anyway, one of the symptoms of this - very slight - finickiness on my part is that if the instructions say, 'Pre-heat the oven. Cook at Gas Mark 7 for 23 minutes. Turn once at 13 minutes,' then that - precisely that - is what I do. And I become rather agitated if anything prevents this. (A regular argument we have springs from my setting the oven timer for, say, 7 minutes then going into the living room and pacing backwards and forwards, additionally checking my watch, while I wait. At about 9 minutes, and still not having heard the beeper go off, my crackling nerves will take me into the kitchen, where I'll find Margret has reset the timer to 45 minutes because she's using it to time some glue drying or something. A discussion will follow.) Not having any cooking instructions leaves me in a fearful swirl of uncertainty. Even worse is when Margret decides the cooking instructions are vital, so she'll cut them out, and throw them into the freezer as she's loading it. I'll find them some years later. There's no clue as to what they belong to, of course. I'm merely left there with my shaking hands holding a slip of cardboard that has instructions ending with - in bold - 'Leave to stand for two minutes before serving,' and not the smallest idea what it's referring to. I'd be happier, quite frankly, if it read, 'There is a bomb somewhere in your house.'
So anyway, I came downstairs at lunchtime on Saturday and saw that the oven was on. Margret, in a worrying development, was cooking something.
'What's in there?' I ask, as off-handedly as the situation allows.
'Your pizza.'
I make a lunge for the oven door. Margret becomes bellicose.
'I can cook a frozen pizza, you know?'
'No, it's not that,' I bluff, 'I just want to add some extra ham. They never use enough ham.'
Margret taking on a frozen pizza is a chilling enough prospect under any circumstances, but when you remember she's flying blind here - no cardboard box bearing cooking instructions to light the way - well, I'm sure you can imagine my terror. I take the pizza from the oven. I add extra ham. I return the pizza to the oven.
On a whim, I amend Margret's arrangement by removing the polystyrene base from under the pizza before continuing to cook it.
I tend to get quite a few men writing to me saying, 'Think your girlfriend's a nightmare, well mine's worse.' Now, this always surprises me. First of all, I wasn't aware that I was giving the impression that Margret is something of a trial to live with. I'm here merely stating the facts, without bias or embellishment: a simple camera pointed at the scene, recording it with complete neutrality. I am, frankly, shocked and disturbed that anyone might think I'm here to make the case that my girlfriend is, say, as mad as an eel.

What surprises me more about the emails I get from these men, however, is that they can in any way believe their situations are similar to mine. Yes, of course, sometimes you'll be sitting in McDonald's and your girlfriend will say, 'You just deliberately dropped that napkin so you could look up the skirt of the woman over there, didn't you?' - everyone's had that conversation and it's perfectly healthy. There'll be some loud, German invective, a degree of storming out, perhaps mayonnaise may get thrown at some point - we've all been there. The crucial thing to keep in mind about Margret, though, is that she is playing by rules no one else understands. Every exchange with Margret holds the potential to result in my spending several weeks in traction. There is no way of judging which will and which won't, because the laws that govern her thought processes have resisted all my analysis. Not even the tiniest thing can be taken for granted, because it assumes one knows how Margret's head works. The proof is in the details, not the broad sweeps, so let me illustrate the, 'Do not fall into the trap of believing you exist in the same universe,' idea by the smallest moment, on the unremarkable Saturday that has just past. We are sitting together on the sofa. I say
'Brrrr - I'm cold.'
Margret replies
'Where?'
Our sink is blue and we're not talking about it. It happened over a week ago; I was leaning over the sink, brushing my teeth, when I noticed that there was a sort of lazuline patina that had seeped over most of the surface. Margret hasn't mentioned anything about this. Why she hasn't is that she's obviously tried to clean the sink with, well, I don't know, some fluid used for stripping entrenched cerriped colonies from the hulls of submarines or something (they were probably offering three bottles of the stuff for the price of two at Aldi). She is waiting for me to mention it. But I am a wily fox, and will be doing nothing of the sort. I'm no wet-behind-the-ears, naive youth anymore, not by a looooong way, and I can perfectly see the spiked pit the seemingly innocent words, 'Did you know the sink's blue' are covering. It would go - precisely - like this:
Me: Did you know the sink's blue?
Margret: Yes. I did. I used a jungle exfoliant produced by the Taiwanese military to clean it, and it discoloured the surface.
Me: Oooooooo. K.
Margret: Well maybe, just maybe, if you cleaned the sink once in a while...
You see what she did there? Now I'm facing a whole day of 'When did you last...?' Well, not this canny fellow - not this time, my friends.
Our sink is blue and we're not talking about it.
Because of my selfless desire to further the vocabulary of medical science, it would delight me to the toes if everyone could adopt the use of the phrase 'Margret's Syndrome'. This affliction being used to signify a condition characterised by a profound and chronic 'point blindness'. Allow me to give you a case study for diagnostic purposes:
I bought a mobile phone the other day. Yes, I'm aware that this revokes my human rights and I won't disgust you further by attempting any kind of wheedling justification. We all become what we hate (raising the disturbing possibility that one morning I'll awake to discover I'm Andie MacDowell, but let's avoid looking there) and so I've naturally mutated in that direction. Anyway, I spent the best part of an afternoon entering the names and numbers of people I know into the internal address book via the phone's keypad - an activity that's roughly as much fun as performing emergency dental surgery on yourself. The picosecond I'd finished, Margret walked into the room and said, 'Let's have a look at your phone.'
'Don't touch anything,' I replied with sombre gravity.
About two minutes later, when I returned from the kitchen with a cup of tea, Margret glanced up at me and chattily asked, 'Can you get back things that you've deleted?'
My lips became the thinnest of lines.
Margret doesn't know what she's deleted, but does offer the solution, 'Tsk - you'll find out eventually if it's important.' I have to admit that this phrase would be rather good to recite repeatedly, singsong fashion, as I danced around a swirling bonfire in the centre of which Margret was staked. Now, had we handed out a simple questionnaire to the population of the Earth, almost everyone would have replied that the point - the point - of the argument that was now racing through volume levels was that Margret had deleted something, without even knowing what it was, after I'd spent hours setting up the phone and had specifically said not to touch anything. Margret's assessment, however, was this:
'You know what the trouble is? You're a gadget freak.'
Last Friday was Margret's birthday. I bought her this oriental, geisha-style pyjama thing (Margret - 'Hey! I could have a go at that massage they do; I could jump on your back.' Me - 'Walk, they walk on your back.' Close call there.) while I was down in London. She liked it. Simple. Clearly, I've been a fool and all I needed to do to get Margret a present she likes was make sure I asked nearly every single woman who works for The Guardian newspaper what the hell I should buy. It wasn't her favourite birthday present, though, not by a long way. There were almost tears of delight when her best friend turned up at the birthday party and surprised her with two bags full of horse manure. I mean, it seems so obvious now, of course.
The Terror Of Lids: Yes, the rewards are high, but it's a game where the price of defeat is savage. Sometimes Margret, after grunting with it herself for a collection of 'hnggh's, will hand me a bottle or a jar that has a screw top along with an impatient, 'Open that for me.' If the gods lie content in the skies above England at that moment, then what follows is a rapid flick of my wrist, a delightful 'click-fshhhh' gasp of surrender, and my handing the thing back to her FEELING LIKE A HERO OF NORSE LEGEND. Generally, though, what happens is that I strain for a while and strip the skin off the palm of my hands. Then I wrap the lid in a tea towel and strain some more to equal effect. At this point I'm on to using the jamb of the door as a vice to hold the lid while I twist at the container; Margret will be saying, 'Give it back here, you'll wreck the door,' and I'll be swearing and twisting and saying, 'I'll repaint that bit in a minute.' The fear is upon me. If it's a fizzy thing, you can sometimes puncture the lid to relieve the pressure and then get it open, but you're not often that lucky. 'Give it back,' Margret repeats, reaching around me, trying to take the item from my hands. I swivel away - 'Just a minute' - and desperately twist at the lid again, now not even attempting not to squint up my face as I do so. At last, though, Margret will manage to get the thing back. This is the darkest moment. If she tries again and it remains fastened, then I am saved. 'It's just completely stuck,' I'll say, 'It is. Stop trying now. Stop. Stop it.' However, there are times - and my stomach chills now, even as I write this - when she gets it back and, with one last satanic effort, manages to spin the lid free. A slight smile takes up home on her face.
'What?' I say.
'Nothing.'
'No - what?'
'Nothing.'
'I'd loosened it.'
'I didn't say anything.'
And I'll have to drag the tiny, damp shreds of my manhood away into the reclusive garage until the slight, slight smile disappears from her some thirty-six hours into the future.
Hanging Things. Margret simply cannot stop hanging things from every defenceless lampshade, rail or drawing pin-able piece of ceiling space. Mobiles built from small, wooden, peasant figures, baskets of plants or vegetables or toiletries, angular crystals or tiny, twirling shards of coloured glass, wind-chimes - oh, pale, waltzing Lord, the wind chimes. Not just those tubular bells that generate a sound like a modern jazz orchestra rolling biscuit tins of ball-bearings down a stairwell either. No, she actually found some evil outlet that sold her a suspended helix of hollow clay doves. This produces an arpeggio of dull, ceramics clungs when it's struck. And it's struck, many times a day, by my forehead, whenever I pass into the living room. My head is a Somme of wing-shaped indentations. Where does she get this Drive To Hang? Admittedly, I've sometimes looked at an empty bit of wall in my computer room in the attic and thought, 'Mmm... Winona Ryder would look good there.' Occasionally even, 'Mmm... A poster of Winona Ryder would look good there.' - but that's a hugely sensible distance from a compulsion to attach dangling bits of pointlessness to everything, house-wide. I have, for many years, tried to work out what lies behind her behaviour in this area, but it wasn't until recently that I was sure I'd found the reason for it. Thankfully, though, I have now identified its cause: She's nuts.
One of the many things I love about Margret is her zest. You probably won't have picked up on this, but in actual fact I am a sullen, cynical kind of character (honestly, it's true), while Margret hisses with energy and finds taut excitement in everything that passes through her field of vision. Perhaps this is why, in a Garden Centre, I just shuffle around sighing, 'Red pot, blue pot; whatever you want - can we go home now?' yet Margret only has to walk through the doors at Sainsbury's Homebase to achieve orgasm.
Anyway, this whippy outlook of hers can sometimes be a bit wearing. As an example, yesterday, her brow creased with anxiety, she said, 'I need a haircut, urgently.'
Now, I just can't imagine a world where people need a haircut urgently. Quite possibly, this explains a lot - those of you who have looked elsewhere on the site will surely have thought, 'Christ! There's a man who needs a haircut URGENTLY!' - but let's not confuse understandable alarm with imperativeness. When Margret said this, it was about eleven o'clock at night, and she really did look like she expected me to dash to the phone right away. 'Hello? Shapes? Prepare a chair, we'll be there in two minutes. Yes, it looks bad. I... Oh my God, it's frizzing! Clear!'
Tch - wear a hat until the weekend.
The quality with which I am identified most closely is probably fairness. There's an almost breathless speed about my disposition, when appropriate, to say, 'Margret, I am clearly in the wrong here. Please smash up my stuff.' However, there are times when the Shield Of Justice gleams on my arm and all of Margret's shouted accusations merely strike it and fall, lifeless, to the ground. Averted eyes and a slowly shaking head tell that I am in a place where she cannot touch me. Yes, as you ask, I am thinking of something specific.
You don't know me, right? You're aware, perhaps, that my hair's bright red, you know I've got some Web space, you have a certain suspicion that in quiet moments I speculate on what it must be like to be rubbed all over with a Nastassja Kinski - but that's it. It's not like, say, we've being going out with each other for something over sixteen years and have had two children and decorated a landing together. Given that, let me place before you a scenario: You are leaving the house to go shopping for a number of hours. Just before you go, you poke your face towards me (I, hunched and unblinking, am playing a computer game of the most frantic and intricate kind) and say, 'If it starts to rain, get the washing in off the line.'
Now, you know what's going to happen, don't you? You've never even met me, and yet you know what's going to happen. So if Margret, with whom I've lived for well over a decade and a half, doesn't bother to employ painfully basic foresight to see what's obviously going to happen... well, the Shield Of Justice is mine, I reckon.
When I'm driving the car, Margret reaches across and operates the indicator. How annoying is that, ladies and gentlemen? At the distance from the turn that she considers to be appropriate, she'll lean over and flick the indicator lever on. Be honest now, would any one of you prefer to be in a car with someone who did that over, say, being trapped under rubble for four days with a person who writes the verses for greetings cards? It's rumoured, in fact, that certain people are working on the Being In A Car With Margret Experience so that it can be recreated in the punishment wing of Alabama jails.
That's not to say that she's a bad driver. She's a better driver than I am, certainly. But a better driver in, um, well, by the 'male' definition of better, let's say. If we were in a rally, Margret would leave me in the dust. She is never more alive than when reversing into a tight space. Gears matter to her. However, I've only had one crash, and that was indisputably not my fault (someone drove through a red light into the side of me). Margret has hit countless things. Hit them in England. Hit them in Germany. (I was in a car with Margret in Germany once, when she'd been back and forth between there and England quite frequently. She's racing along the centre of a country road. A car appears heading straight for us, and Margret shouts at me, 'Which side should I be on!?' A nice moment. If I'd been out to score points I'd have remarked that, if you're asking that question, then perhaps slowing down at all might be a thing to do also. I didn't say anything, however, as at that point I was busy finding religion.) Margret has hit stationary things - bollards, a public electricity exchange, walls - and moving things - other cars, an ambulance. (Yes, 'honestly'.) One time we hired a car to drive up to Scotland. Margret doesn't so much ignore speed limits as have trouble with them conceptually - 'What? There's a speed limit here too?' She drove from Birmingham to Carlisle (about 200 miles) flat out. And I mean 'flat' 'out', her foot was on the floor the whole way. The hire company obviously expected their cars to be driven by the sane, and it just couldn't cope. The temperature gauge strained against the end of the scale and Margret eventually pulled over to let it cool down for a few minutes. But the wind coming through the radiator grille due to our forward motion was the only thing that had kept it going. When she pulled over every single electrical wire in the engine melted away. Fortunately, there was rescue cover so we were picked up and given a replacement car. Margret, clearly humbled, said, 'Oh brill! This one's got a cassette player!'
So, Margret's a better driver than I am, and a better map reader too, incidentally. I get there eventually and can operate my own indicators, thanks very much... but I am, sadly, far less likely to make my fortune endorsing airbags.
Insomnia. The thing with - hold on, before I start, look at this. Guess which one of us hung that up at some point on Friday, and which one of us walked into the bedroom sometime later and said, 'Wow, that's really good. I've often thought how not at all irritating it would be to have a bunch of feathers dangling just in front of my face all night, and I've also frequently been overcome with a sudden sadness that I had no means of a casual arm wave as I slept somehow entangling itself in ribbons and a suspended hoop so as to bring a halogen lamp crashing down onto my sleeping face. Yet, I've never thought of bringing the two together - now, that's genius.'
Apparently, it needs to be hung over our bed - rather than, say, outside, on a tree, in front of somebody else's house - as it's a dreamcatcher. And there I was thinking that, once I logged off the Net, I was safe. That, in my own bed, I was beyond the sinister reach of Wacky Californians - what is it with you people? What did I ever do to you? OK, apart from that. (By the way, if you're a Wacky California who was all set to write me an email suggesting some kind of family therapy pioneered by another Wacky Californian, but who finds yourself now even more compelled to write one beginning, "In fact, the dreamcatcher is an old Native American tradition. Nokomis, the grandmother, was watching a spider..." then can I ask that you just don't, OK? In fact, as a general rule, I tend not to take advice - 'consider the source', right? - about life from people who choose to live on a massive earthquake faultline.) As an aside, Wacky Californians, there was a tiny piece in last week's Metro newspaper, which I found interesting. I emailed the editor to ask if I could put a scan of it up here but, unfortunately, he said no - as he's perfectly entitled to do, of course - but the gist was that a couple had their application to adopt refused because they don't argue enough. Maybe Margret and I should give classes or something.
So, as I was saying, 'insomnia'. The thing with insomnia is you never know when to give in. Do you stay there, trying to get to sleep, or do you give in and say, 'Well - not going to get to sleep anyway: might as well get up and do something.' It's a tricky one and no mistake. When I get insomnia, I generally try all the standard things: I try to relax, I try to clear my mind, I try to think of something pleasant (often this turns out to involve Courteney Cox and, in the 'encouraging a condition where sleep is likely' stakes, backfires massively). If none of these works, I'll quietly get up, go downstairs and read Pinter until insomnia's spirit breaks. What I don't do is turn to Margret and, at intervals precisely judged to be 'just long enough to have allowed the other person to have got to sleep again', keep saying, 'I can't sleep' and, 'I can't sleep' and, 'Really, I just can't sleep' and, 'I'm still awake, I just can't sleep' and, 'Pheeeeeeeeeeeeee - I can't sleep' and, 'I don't know what it is; I'm tired, but I can't sleep' and, 'I can't sleep' and, 'I can't get to sleep' and, 'I'll be so tired in the morning - look at the time. But I can't sleep'. Because that's the kind of behaviour that can lead... to... someone... snapping.
First Born cut his hair on Friday morning. Apparently the casual notion that his fringe was too long and didn't look sufficiently wicked strolled through his head, so - without the use of anything as lame as a mirror, naturally - he got a pair of scissors and cut his own hair; he now looks like a tiny Howard Devoto. Except blond. And without the spectacles. ("So, not very much like Howard Devoto at all, then. Also, we were born in 1987 and have entirely no idea who Howard Devoto is." - Everyone.)
Now, Margret and I don't do that widespread thing of transferring ownership of the children depending on the situation; 'My son is a neurosurgeon,' 'Your son has just poured byriani behind the radiator,' that kind of thing. We do another thing. Margret, who is the one to spot Jonathan appears to be the first seven-year-old to be suffering from male pattern baldness, marches into the room where I'm sitting, reading the paper, and, looming over me with her arms knotted tightly across her ribs says:
'Jonathan's cut loads of his hair off.'
I look up at her and, after a few moments of thought, naturally reply:
'Tsk.'
She's unable to find herself entirely satisfied with this.
'So, that's it then, is it? You're all parented out now?'
'What am I supposed to do?' I ask, bewildered. 'He's cut the hair off. Do you want me to wrap it in frozen peas and race to the hospital to see if they can do an emergency weave?'
'I think,' she replies, 'that you should go and speak to him.'
And there it is. There is only one specific type of occasion when Margret feels I should 'go and speak to' one of the children, and that's when they have done something forehead-slappingly idiotic. The implication she is making is that Idiocy is my area. That only I can speak to the children when they've done something comprehensively crackbrained because, unlike her, I can speak The Language Of Fools. 'Maybe you can get through to him,' she's saying, 'Because you know how the asinine mind works.'
I drop the newspaper with a sigh, resigned, now, to the fact that I'll never get to find out what Kevin Spacey's favourite pasta dish is, and plod into the other room. Jonathan is happily drawing a picture at the table.
'Jonathan?'
'Yes?'
'Don't do stuff like that. Your hair looks stupid.'
I see his eyes flick, for the briefest moment, up to my hair. I'm dead in the water and we both know it.
'I like it,' he says.
'Oh, you like it, do you?' I laugh. 'So, it doesn't matter that everyone else in the world thinks it looks stupid? You like it? That's... Um, that's really good, actually. That's good.' I ruffle (what's left of) his hair.
Margret walks in behind me. Quickly, I furrow my eyebrows and point a sharp finger at Jonathan.
'So? Is that clear?'
'Yes,' he replies.
I walk out past Margret. 'Let's not say another word about this, then.'
Of course, next week he'll probably get into homemade tattoos, and his defence will begin, 'Well, Papa said...'
I have my bags packed ready.
We have shower issues. Today I had a shower and she's put out some kind of weird cosmetic soap. I flinch at the idea of guessing how much this soap must have cost because it's utterly rubbish, which is usually a good indication of knee-buckling expense (Cotton flannel - 50p, Skin-lacerating wad woven from dried bark and nasal hair by Amazonian tribeswomen who will use whatever money they make from the sale to buy cotton flannels - £12.50). This soap did not wash, but instead covered me in an iridescent film of grease - and, sadly, I'd made a last minute change of plans and decided to spend today sitting in front of the TV rather than swimming The Channel. Tch - irony, eh? Anyway, I had to have another wash to remove this oleaginous soap from me. This was the Third Thing. I'll come to the Second Thing in a moment, but the First Thing is the ferocity of our shower. British showers are risible, this is a fact. Most people's noses run faster than the average British shower and one of Margret's longest held desires has been to get a shower like those in Germany. Thus, she got one fitted when we moved to the new house here and it is, indeed, German. Now, as much as I'm against the feebleness of British showers, I must ask if it's entirely necessary that a shower should hurt? This thing has a setting called 'massage' and it's not a massage. A massage involves relaxation, the soft, enquiring hands of a 22-year-old Scandinavian woman, and possibly an exchange of cash. The setting on this shower ought more accurately to be labelled 'Jumped By Thugs', you could mount the thing on top of a truck and use it to crush riots. This is all the more horrific when we approach the Second Thing. Because not only does Margret leave our shower set to maim, she also leaves it on cold.
Margret has cold showers first thing in the morning. How unsurprising is that? In fact, I could have just left the rest of this page blank and merely put at the top 'Margret has cold showers first thing in the morning' and everyone reading would have been able to infer the rest. I, it won't surprise you to learn, don't like mornings to begin with, and definitely don't want to find a cold shower lurking anywhere in them. Today, then, I stumbled sleepy-eyed into the shower, wrenched it on, and was immediately hit by a roar of icy water travelling at twelve-hundred miles an hour. My 'O'-eyed, bared-teeth face is going to be stuck like this for a week. Then, once I'd scrambled the settings back to within human limits, I got to cover myself in grease.
Words will be exchanged.
It's getting worse. I've mentioned this, in passing, before, but it's getting worse. We were watching Hannibal on DVD the other week, and Margret was sitting beside me, looking at the screen, right from the moment I hit 'play'. This, incidentally, is because before we watch any DVD or video we have this ritual.
Mil - 'Are you ready?'
Margret - 'Yes.'
Mil - 'No you're not, you're clearly not. Sit down here.'
Margret - 'I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm just cutting out this magazine article and putting the kids toys away in an order based on the psychological warmth of their respective colours and making a cup of tea and wondering if we should move that mirror six inches to the left, but I'm ready - go ahead, start the film.'
Mil - 'No. I'll start the film when you're sitting here. If I start the film now, you'll sit down in three minutes time and say, "What's happened?" and I'll have to do that thing with my mouth. Not going to happen. You sit here right from the beginning.'
[Margret makes an injured pantomime of dragging herself over to the sofa and sitting down beside me.]
Mil - 'Thank you.'
[I press 'play'. The FBI copyright warning comes up and, knowing full well it won't work, I repeatedly try to fast forward through it for the annoying amount of time - precisely long enough for me to fully hate the FBI and the entire motion picture industry - it takes to fade. A logo swirls around the screen. Darkness. A single, threatening, bass note rumbles low. Swelling in volume as the first image seeps into life.]
Margret - 'I've just remembered, I need to phone Jo.'
Mil - 'Arrrrggghhheeeiiiiiieeeeerrrrgghhhhhhhhgkkkkk-kkk-kk-k!'
Margret - 'I only need to ask if she has a text book - carry on.'
Mil - 'No. Make the phone call. I'll wait.'
[Three hours later. Margret returns; I am still on the sofa, remote control poised in my hand, but now visibly older and covered in a light film of dust.]
Margret - 'OK, done.'
Mil - 'Right.'
[I wind back four or five seconds to have the moody intro again, Margret complains we've already seen this bit and - as it's getting late now - there's no need. I reply it's important for setting the mood, she thinks it's a stupid thing to do, the exchange degenerates into a twenty minute row about foreplay, and then we finally begin to watch the film.]
So, that's what happens, every time, and thus on this occasion as with all others, Margret has been sitting beside me since the very beginning of the film. Which, casting your mind back, you'll recall is Hannibal.
Titles. Silence. A face appears.
Margret - 'Who's that?'
Getting worse. I was watching the Davis Cup on TV and, as the players are sitting down for a of change ends, the camera idly pans round the crowd, pausing on a woman eating an ice cream. Margret says?... Louder - I can't hear you... Yes, yes she does.
I'm here to make an appeal for the population of the Earth to wear name tags at all times, three tags if you're an actor: your character's name, your real name and a list of things you've been in before. Please, do it. They only cost a few pence - please don't make me beg.
What Margret and I have, essentially, is a Mexican stand-off with love instead of guns. OK, yes, sometimes there are guns too. The important thing is the mindset, though. Sure, people can argue about important issues, that's fine, good luck to them I say. But where, I ask you, are those people when you take away the meaningful sources of disagreement? Lost. Utterly lost. Let me illustrate the common mistakes amateurs might make using something that happened the other week. You will need:
Margret.
Me.
A roast chicken.
We're having tea and on the table are the plates, a selection of vegetables and a roast chicken in an incredibly hot metal baking tray. Getting this chicken to the table (see - if you're a Mailing Lister and can - 'cloth taking-things-from-the-oven-thing', in the Thing-o-Matic archive) has been an heroic race that ended only fractions of a second short of a major skin graft. Due to this haste it is, however, not sitting precisely centrally on the coaster. Some kind of weird, hippie, neo-Buddhist couple might have failed even at this point and simply got on with eating the meal. Fortunately, Margret is there to become loudly agitated that radiant heat might creep past the edge of the coaster, through the table cloth, through the protective insulating sheet under the table cloth, and affect the second-hand table itself. She shouts and wails. I nudge the tray into the centre of the coaster, but, in doing so, about half a teaspoon of the gravy spills over the side onto the table cloth. Outside birds fall mute, mid-song. Inside, frozen in time, the camera swings around us sitting at the table, like in The Matrix.
'What the hell did you do that for? Quick, clean it up - quick,' insists Margret (where an amateur would have, say, shrugged).
'No,' I reply (at the moment when another amateur would have been returning from the kitchen with a cloth), 'I'm eating my tea. I'm going to sit here and eat my tea. Then I'll clean it up.'
'No, clean it up now.'
'No.'
'Yes.'
'No. I'm going to eat my tea first.'
'Clean it up now.'
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, so a couple of semi-pros might have worked this up into a shouting match. But I am not about to stoop to childish name-calling. Instead I lift up the tray and pour some more gravy onto the table.
'OK?' I say, 'Now stop it. I'll clean it up after.'
'Clean it up now.'
I tip a little more gravy onto the table.
'I'm just going to keep doing it every time you say that. I'll clean it up later.'
'Do it now.'
More gravy.
'Now.'
More gravy.
This continues until we run out of gravy.
I must make it clear that my actions here seemed perfectly rational at the time. I've mulled them over since, of course, and am relieved to find that they still hold up to examination: it's pleasing to know I can make good decisions under pressure. Anyway, we eat the meal from a table awash with gravy. I am happy to have argued my point persuasively. Margret has a smile fixed to her face due to the belief (incorrect, yes, but it's only her enjoyment that matters) that I've clearly done something hugely stupid that she can bring up later in any number of arguments - possibly years from now. Everyone wins. We eat, united in contentment. I clean up the table.
Do you see? I want everyone to try this out at home and write me a report for next week.
This is what I have to do to get into trouble: stand there.
We went to hire a van last week. Margret had phoned and arranged everything and I was there simply because we arrived in one vehicle but had to return in two. As I think I've mentioned before, I am not interested in motor vehicles and know less about them than the average four year old child. If people ask me what car we've got I reply, 'A red one.' I can drive OK, just as I can operate a photocopier perfectly well but feel no need at all to be able to recognise the make of each one from a distance or to look at magazines full of pictures of the latest models. Margret, of course, has an encyclopaedic knowledge and will point excitedly at traffic and say stuff like, 'Hey, look - there's the new-style, five door Fiat Tampon,' or something while I sit unable to care less. So, anyway, we've gone to pick up this van and the bloke there - open shirt, riotous body hair, multiple gold chains - starts telling me about it. Starts telling me about it, despite the fact that Margret has gone in and begun the conversation, while I just shuffled along behind her. He keeps talking to me about stuff.
'Yeah, this is the 2 litre model...'
'Mmmm...' I nod, noncommittally, as I have no idea what he's talking about - ('2 litre'? What's that? The amount of petrol it can hold?)
'There is a 3 litre, V6 version, of course - but...' He laughs.
'Hahaha,' I echo his laugh weakly in response; my 'V' knowledge having stopped at the Nazi WWII rocket the V2.
Margret keeps cutting in with questions about technical things. He answers to me, without looking at her. I can feel her starting to sizzle. (The sole question I've been able to come up with has been 'Um... Eh... Has it got a radio?')
I'm completely innocent here. In fact, I'm terrified he's going to corner me by saying something like 'Do you favour ABS or not?' and I'll just burst into tears. I can see, however, that Margret is approaching the point where she's going to be unable to prevent herself from disembowelling him before standing over his torn body with her bloodied hands outstretched, howling to the sky. That's his problem, but I sense she also regards me as his tacit accomplice. I have to get Margret away before he sets her off and I get caught in the explosion.
As we were in a rush, I managed to get out of the office and put over 300 miles between Bloke and Margret as quickly as possible (I'd have liked to insert more distance, of course, but we were beginning to run out of Britain). Still, it's gnawed at her stomach for well over a week now and the only way it's been kept under control has been by constantly rerunning variations of:
Margret: 'He was talking to you. To you - it's unbelievable.'
Me: 'Yes, he was an idiot. Because he was talking to me. And I'm an idiot. He revealed his idiocy by talking to me, an obvious idiot. He was an idiot. Forget about him. The idiot. He was an idiot. That's right... just give me the fork now.'
At 2pm on Wednesday afternoon I went to the cinema with a friend of mine to see 'Battle Royale' (does Kinji Fukasaku know how to tell a love story or what?). Around 8.30pm I came downstairs from putting the kids to bed and started flicking through video cassettes. Margret, on the sofa, lowered the magazine she was reading on to her lap and asked suspiciously, 'What are you doing?'
'Trying to find a movie,' I said.
Margret sighed and shook her head. With a mixture of incredulity, anxiety and admonishment she replied, 'You've already seen one film today.'
Phew. Lucky we caught that habit before it spiralled out of control, eh?
Which reminds me; test your own self-control by reading this and seeing if you can resist the urge to draw any telling psychological insights from it:
Margret walked through the living room on Friday as I was watching 'Band Of Brothers'. Absently, she asked, 'Is this "Killing Private Ryan"?'
It's the nights I fear the most.
Margret is sitting at this computer (which is in the attic room, incidentally) typing something. I'm flopped in a chair close by with a paper and pad, scribbling away at a bit of work.
I pause and say to her, 'Tortoise and turtle is the same word in German, isn't it?'
She stops typing, reaches over, pulls off one of my Birkenstock shoes, throws it down through trapdoor (I hear it thud below, then flip-flop down the stairs) and returns to her typing. All in a single, silent movement.
Your guess is as good as mine, frankly.

Have you seen 'Good Will Hunting'? Of course you have. I was watching it with Margret the other day and she squeezed my arm and said, 'That's how I'd like you to look.'
'Ahhh,' you're all sitting there saying, 'But Mil, you're already practically Ben Affleck's double.' True enough. But Margret was talking about Robin Williams. Aged 45. With a beard. Kill me.
Relatedly - in the sense that the rest of the world's thought process is here, while Margret's is standing just over there - we had some friends round at the weekend. They'd just been on a skiing trip and took a digital camera with them. Many of you will know what the first thing you do with a digital camera is. Well, let's put that aside; you can go off to the newsgroups if you want to look at that kind of thing. The second thing you do with a digital camera, though, is take pictures of just everything. You know you're not going to have to pay to get the photos developed, so you snap away constantly. Our friends had taken loads of pictures. Huge vistas of oscilloscope-trace mountain ranges misting into the distance, people hissing down the piste at precarious speeds, glistening snow settled into creamy piles on the aching branches of trees, and so forth.
Margret is leafing through the photos when she stops abruptly. 'Wow! That's beautiful...' Her eyes as big and as shiny as CDs, she turns the picture round to show me. It's the inside of a chalet. 'Just look at that kitchen!' she breathes. Sometimes I have to reach forward and touch her, just to check that my hand doesn't pass straight through - 'Ah-ha! She's a hologram generated by an invading alien race - I knew it.'
The other day someone asked me, 'Is there anything you and Margret don't argue about?'
I stared up at the ceiling and patted my lips with my index finger, thoughtfully. A clock ticked. It snowed. The light began to fade. Eventually, I had to go out to buy more milk.
However, just when I was about to give up and resign myself to addressing another one of the backlog of thoughts I have to deal with, I light-bulbed, 'Ah-ha! Money! We don't argue about money!' and was tremendously pleased with myself for the five or six seconds it took to realise that this was demonstrably untrue. Oh, we don't have the standard, 'What the hell are you doing? We're behind on the mortgage and you've gone out and spent all our money on beer!' rows. In fact, Margret doesn't drink all that much nowadays. We have, however, found others.
One of them flows from the fact that Margret asks me how much everything I've bought for myself has cost. Now, I'm not one for the high life: I don't own a car, I'm not interested in holidays in the sun, my favourite meal is a Pot Noodle and the leather jacket I'm currently wearing I bought while I was still in the Sixth Form.
(All this doesn't make me bohemian and fascinating, by the way; people don't happen upon me and exclaim to each other, 'My! Imagine how intriguing he must be on the inside.' That kind of thing only happens in movies. In real life... well. Well, I was walking through the city centre a while ago and Margret called me on my mobile. With all the noise of people and traffic, it was hard to hear so I sat down with my back against the wall of McDonald's, bowed my head and, with the phone in one of them, cupped my hands over my ears to try and listen properly. As I sat there - I swear to you this is true - someone who was walking past looked down at me and threw change. But anyway, back to the point...)
So, I'm hardly what you'd call extravagant. Sometimes, however, very, very practical demands mean I need to buy a digital camera, say, or another guitar. I'll try and sneak it into the house (Margret will discover it eventually, of course, and say, 'Where did this come from?' but I'll be able to reply, 'Oh, I've had that for ages,' which - one day, I'm sure - will be the end of the discussion), but often I'll get caught.
'How much did that cost?'
'It was on offer.'
'For how much� I'm just asking.'
'Look - it has a built-in clock!'
She simply won't give in until she's made me feel like she and the children have looked up from their eighth consecutive meal of lard to see me stride in with a handful of magic beans. But recently the shoe swapped feet. Margret bought a sideboard. A second-hand sideboard that cost at least twice what I'd ever pay for a graphics accelerator card for my PC.
'How much did that cost?' I asked.
'It's an antique. Well� not a proper antique. But I think it was made in Poland.'
'Uh-huh.'
I take the moral high ground. From where I purchase the Buffy Series 3 DVD set. Outrageously expensive, yes, but a thing that, under the circumstances, I am not at all afraid to reveal to Margret. (I revealed it via the column I write in The Guardian, knowing she couldn't say anything because of the sideboard.) (Surprisingly, I was wrong.)
The other money-related argument is about cash. That's cash, specifically. Despite the fact that Margret's earning power is comfortably twice mine, she never has any cash. If you can conveniently pay by cheque or credit card, that's fine, but otherwise it's, 'Miiiiiiiil - have you got any cash? Only, I haven't and I need to go to the hairdresser's/pay a builder/have The Mob carry out a hit for me.' Every time - Every. Time. - I go to the cashpoint she'll appear within minutes with her nose wrinkled up pleading, 'Got any cash?' I'm just a courier; cash is only ever in my wallet for the walk back home from the bank - I think that the second I key my PIN number into the ATM machine it texts her phone. The result of this is that now I never have any cash, because Margret has it. Except, she doesn't. Margret is chronically cashless to the size of two people.
If I'm sitting on the sofa reading a book and Margret enters the room she will say this: 'What are you doing?' If I'm peeling potatoes in the kitchen when she happens upon me, or pushing batteries into one of the children's extensive range of screeching toys, or writing on the side of a video cassette I've just pulled out of the recorder, the same thing: 'What are you doing?' I mean, a fellow likes to feel he's a bit enigmatic now and then, a tad mysterious and deep, but how can a person see me, for example, screwing a new bulb into a light fitting and not be able to see immediately and with huge, reverberating, chill clarity precisely what it is that I'm doing? It's like living with Mork. It's not even as if I can use these moments to exercise my impressively sardonic (yet, at the same time, profoundly attractive and alluring in a deeply sexual way) wit either. Because, as previously mentioned, Margret regards large sections of what we on Earth call humour as nothing but shameless mendacity.
Margret [spotting Mil picking with his fingernail at the goo left on a CD case by the price label]: 'What are you doing?'
Mil: 'I'm talking to Mark using Morse code - he's at home right now holding one of his CD cases, picking up the vibrations I'm making.'
Margret: 'No you're not, you liar. You're lying. Why do you always lie? You liar.'
Mil: 'It works by resonance. You just have to practise for a bit to be able feel the plastic quivering - go over and get that Black Grape case, press it on to your nose, and we'll see if you can pick up anything.'
(There's the briefest flicker of indecision in her eyes; offering me, for one tantalising moment, the possibility that I'm going to spend the next ten minutes - 'What about this, then? Press it on your face harder.' - having quite simply the best of times... but then she grunts.)
Margret: 'Liar. You're just a liar.'
Mostly, however, we've got it smooth and efficient now. We don't have to think. She says, 'What are you doing?', I peer at her with irritation and expel air, we go on about our business. This morning, though, she came upstairs to the attic here while I was sitting in front of the computer doing some work on the net.
'What are you doing?' she asks.
Trying to concentrate on something, distracted and harassed, I reply with some degree of acerbic aggravation.
'What does it look like I'm doing?'
There's a beat, during which we hold each others eyes, unblinking.
It's immediately after this beat has passed that I realise I'm wearing no trousers.
There is, it's opulently redundant of me to add, a perfectly reasonable and innocuous explanation for why I'm browsing the web alone in my attic with no trousers on, but you're all busy people and I know you have neither the inclination nor the time to waste hearing it. As an image, however, it did rather undercut my sarcasm. Margret - in a brutally savage reversal of tactics - didn't speak. She merely raised her eyebrows and there, revealed, was a face that read, 'I have been waiting thirteen years for this moment.'
I was watching Mission Impossible and it was making me uneasy. Tom Cruise was doing something - infiltrating, probably, you know what he's like - and he was continuously describing the situation to his distant support buddies via his headset radio. For a while, I naturally assumed that it was simply Tom Cruise's big nose that was unsettling me and tried, using soothing visualisations and breathing exercises, to move myself, mentally, to a place where it wasn't an issue. But then - the realisation freezing my arm and abruptly halting a crisp's journey from bag to mouth - I had a small epiphany: 'Lawks,' I thought, 'This is my girlfriend.'
"Margret, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to wander around constantly articulating precisely what it is that you're doing at that moment, as though relaying it to an unseen control team somewhere. Possibly, on an alien mother ship, secretly orbiting the Earth. For example."
She does this all the time. 'Get some eggs from the fridge... here's the butter... and now a frying pan... What's in the cupboard? OK, we've got oregano... some basil... I'll go for the mixed herbs... Now I need some scissors...' Who is she talking to? It's certainly not me: for one thing, I can see what she's doing - and, further, am not interested - and for another, I sometimes hear her doing this while she's alone in a room in another part of the house. And - though, admittedly, there's often a huge temptation to think she functions like this - I don't believe it's because she simply has no idea what she's going to do until it's actually occurring and I'm merely listening to her keeping her mind informed about what it is that her body appears to be doing right now. Sometimes we'll be sitting down watching TV and she'll get up and say, 'I'm going to the toilet.' Why would anyone say that? Does she think I'm keeping a log for research purposes? Is she intimating that she needs help? Does she have reason to expect that she may be abducted halfway up the stairs and thus wants me to at least be able to tell the police, 'Well, the last time I saw her I know she was on her way to the toilet.' What?
Surely, it can only be that she's an undercover member of the M.I. team. Every time a van is parked near our house now, I imagine Ving Rhames is in it; 'OK, the toilet's at the top of the stairs - it's unguarded, but has a slightly bent hinge...'
Oh, and the first person to say, 'Well, if she's doing an impossible mission, then that'd be 'living with you', Mil, wouldn't it?' gets a very slow handclap, OK?
The other possibility is that she's simply talking to the air. 'But that,' you say, 'would make her mad.' Yet, isn't there an idea that everything - water, rocks, fire, etc. - has a spirit, that everything is, in some way, 'alive'? Isn't that believed by some people? 'Yes,' you say, 'mad people.' Well, I certainly can't argue with you there (and don't wish to debate the theory with any Californians who are reading either, thanks), but I raise it as a possibility. Because, if we're looking for a mystic answer, she certainly regards the television as the Magic Box Full Of Tiny People Who Can Hear Her. If an actress says - as actresses seem highly prone to - 'I'm just going down into the cellar,' she'll often call out to her, 'Don't go down into the cellar!' Or she'll offer lengthy and detailed personal advice: 'No, don't send him that letter. He's just using you. Leave him and go back to Brian.'
I can watch a film many times. Margret thinks watching a film more than once (even worse - buying the DVD so that I can watch it whenever I want) is, well, I'm not sure there's a word to describe it. If she discovers me watching a film, says, 'Haven't you already seen this?' and I reply, 'Yes,' and continue to watch, she looks at me like I'd just confessed to being sexually aroused by livestock. A swirling mixture of incomprehension, contempt and with just a hint of, 'I knew it...' I realise now that this might be because she doesn't feel she's watching a film, but rather guiding the Tiny People through actual ordeals - a strain she doesn't want to have to endure twice.
I've tried telling her that TV doesn't work like that. That the people are just actors. But she just doesn't seem to get it. She throws back some nonsense about me compulsively sitting there, flooded with adrenaline, barking out the answers when University Challenge is on - clearly unaware that this is exactly what has made humankind so successful: the desire to test oneself against oceans, mountains, one's own deepest fears, or a selection of general knowledge questions. More disastrously, she also completely misses the point and starts going on about me shouting at the tennis on television or something. Incredibly, it seems she's unable to see the difference between her talking to actors, recorded on film, and my shouting, 'Go down the line!' while watching the television broadcast of a live match when, of course, in those circumstances there really is the possibility of my altering the course of play by vocalizing the sheer focussed power of my will. She still has an awful lot to learn about science, I'm afraid.
Margret was away with her friends the other weekend. It was a hen party thing. I hesitate to mention that, as English women on hen nights are quite the most repellent spectacle it's possible to encounter - if we happen across a group of hen night women when we're out together, Margret will invariably point at them and dare me to defend a culture that has incubated such an embarrassment. So, let me stress that, though it was technically a hen weekend, it wasn't the whooping, cackling, "Look! We have a huge inflatable penis and an openly desperate desire to have you think we're fearless unfettered rebels so don't let the fact that we clearly all work at a local building society and are trying way too hard!" kind of affair that you'll often see congoing through Brannigans in ill-advised skirts. It was still hen, though, there's no escaping that. I stayed here with the kids; if they asked where she was, I had planned - to avoid inflicting on them the psychological damage of knowing their mother was at a hen weekend - to say that she was simply away serving a short sentence for shoplifting.
Before she went, she asked me to record a couple of gardening programmes that were going to be on the TV. The first night she was there she rang me. She'd had a row with some bloke in a bar. He'd apparently pinched her bottom and then, when she responded, um, 'unfavourably' to this, had tried to smooth the waters by saying he couldn't resist as she was the best looking woman there - a point which Margret found really quite an insufficient reason for being pinched by somebody; she expressed this concept to him. Now, as I was a good two-hundred miles away and, in any case, had a big pile of ironing to do, there wasn't really very much I could do to support her. I did think of demonstrating that I shared her contempt for him by pointing out that the bloke was clearly also a calculating liar: 'There's no way you could have been the best looking woman there - I mean, what about Jo, just for a start?' Some tiny alarm rang deep in my head, however, and told me that not saying this would work out better for me in the long run. She continued to talk for a while, and finished by reminding me to video the gardening programmes.
The next day, right on cue, I forgot to video the gardening programmes.
I can't quite convey to you the icing I felt on my skin and the claustrophobic tightening of my chest that occurred when I idly glanced down at the clock on my taskbar and realised I'd forgotten to record them. I know you think I should have set the timer on the VCR, but I deliberately didn't. The timer on our VCR has poor self-discipline and vague life goals and will often fail to work, just for kicks. So, rather than risk giving the job to a recidivist video recorder, I decided it was far safer to do it manually. And to fill in the time until that point by going up on the computer, entering 'Fairuza Balk' in Google and, you know, just seeing where that led. It was obvious I was going to have to tell Margret what had happened and - although it was just 'one of those things', for which no one was really to blame - I knew very soon, and with a clarity of understanding that bordered on the spiritual, that the best time at which to inform her about the situation was while she was still two-hundred miles away from me. Therefore, I immediately texted her mobile - knowing she wouldn't have it switched on, because she never has it switched on, but that she'd see it before too long. Only, the second I'd sent the message, I began to worry. I'd assumed that letting her know now would give her a chance to cool down before she returned. But, equally likely, it would just give her a chance to work up a head of steam. And, if Margret's playing a, 'The trouble with Mil is...' riff, then the very worst place to ensure that it doesn't build and build is in the company of a load of exclusively female friends on a hen night. And she was in Manchester. Manchester. She was going to come back after a day and a half of, "...well, it's not for me to say, Margret, but if I were going out with Mil, then...", wired on crack, and carrying an Uzi.
That night, I slept under the children's bed.
We had an earthquake here the other week. Surprisingly, I'm not being metaphorical. I mean we had an actual earthquake: in the geological rather than the emotional sense. It happened at about one o'clock in the morning, we were pretty close to the epicentre, and it was 4.8 on the Richter scale. Now, I'm depressingly aware that all you Californians are right now glancing up from your crystals and pausing mid-mantra to snort, '4.8? Poh. That's not an earthquake, that's just someone slamming a door.' Well, yes, I suppose it's all relative, but here in England where tectonics is less brash and showy, 4.8 is easily vulgar enough to stand out.
The important thing is that just before 1 A.M. the whole house shook. Naturally, this woke us up. Cupboards rattled and banged, furniture shivered across the floor, the bed struggled like it was possessed by the spirit of a wild animal that was trying to get out. The instant it ended, Margret's freshly woken face slid in front of me. Her voice irritated and her eyes accusatively thin, she hissed, 'Was that you?'
I better note this down before I forget it again. I was reminded of it last week - apologies if you were around at the point when my memory was jogged but, before you start whining that you've heard me mention this observation already, may I just point out that anyone who's sitting around watching daytime TV probably oughtn't to get too captious, eh? So, Margret and I were having an argument (you'd think I'd have a shortcut key for that sentence by now, wouldn't you?). I can't remember what we were arguing about, but that doesn't matter here because in today's lesson we're focusing on style, not content. Say we were arguing about, oh, lettuce (even if we weren't, it's surely only a matter of time):
Margret: You haven't washed all the lettuce.
Mil: I've washed the bits I'm going to eat.
Margret: And left the rest for me to wash.
Mil: If you wash it all, it goes off quicker.
Margret: So, we'll eat it quicker, then.
Mil: I don't want to eat it quicker.
Margret: But I do.
Mil: Then wash it yourself if you're so bloody desperate to gorge on lettuce. What am I? Your official Lettuce Washer?
Margret: My last boyfriend was taller than you.
Etc.
Fairly standard stuff, clearly, but what you need to realise is something that I can't get across on the page. It's that, as the exchanges switched backwards and forwards between us, there was a kind of bidding war going on with the pitch. It's not just that each one of us upped the volume a little for our turn, but that we also changed the tone by raising our voices so that our reply was about a fifth higher than the one that the other person had just used. It was like two Mariah Careys facing off - pretty quickly, we were having an argument that only dogs could hear.
I've noticed that this often happens, and I reckon Margret secretly initiates it as a ploy. She raises her pitch, subconsciously luring me to respond. It's tactical. She knows it increases her chances of winning the argument because - when I come to deliver the final, logical coup de grace with great imperiousness and gravitas - I discover I'm doing so in the voice of Jimmy Somerville.
Margret bought a jacket. The purpose of this jacket, its raison d'etre, was not to provide warmth or woo the eyes or give employment to jacket makers. The purpose of this jacket was to demonstrate to me my place in the world. To provide a medium through which I might gain knowledge - much like the rustling of the leaves at the Oracle of Dodona being a means for discovering the will of Zeus. Only, you know, except with lots more polyester. Margret bought this jacket and placed it on a hanger in the hallway. Later that day, when she judged I had approximately 1,285 things I'd rather be doing, she commanded me to view it.
She takes it down from the hanger, puts it on and says, 'What do you think?'
'Well,' I say, 'if you like it...'
I hear the fire alarm go off and briefly glance up the stairs before realising that the noise is actually in my head.
'What's wrong with it?' asks Margret. Somewhat challengingly.
'Oh, you know, nothing in particular,' I shrug. This is factually correct. It is a comprehensively appalling jacket; no particular aspect of its extensive dreadfulness stands out as especially distressing.
'What... is wrong... with it,' Margret replies, filling in the spaces with facial expressions.
'Um, well, it's shapeless.'
'No, it isn't.'
'OK, then, it's cylinder-shaped. Which is not a good shape. For a jacket.'
'I like the shape.'
'Fair enough. Right, I'm going...'
'What else?'
'Did I say there was...'
'What else?'
'The material is unpleasant.'
'No it's not.'
'And the pattern is awful.'
'The pattern's nice.'
'And it doesn't appear to fit properly - look at the arms.'
'That's how it's supposed to fit.'
'Fair enough, then.'
'I like it. I'm going to wear it always.''
'OK.'
She places it back on the hanger, lets me know I'm a fool and we go on about our business.
The next day Margret's friend calls round to drop something off quickly. She drops it off (quickly), they (quickly) talk for four and a half hours, and then she has to dash. Coincidentally, I'm coming down the stairs when Margret is seeing her out. As Margret is by the door she says to her, 'Oh, look, I bought a new jacket. What do you think?'
'Well,' the friend replies, 'if you like it...'
Margret returns the jacket to the shop, immediately.
Immediately.
Margret: 'Mmm... Is anything in the world better than the feel of fresh bed sheets?'
Mil: 'Yes.'
Do you remember the thing about 'Shut up'? It's not on this page anymore but, if you're an old-timer (or, I suppose, on the Mailing List and have read through the stuff that's no longer here) you might recall it. Well, she's sort of at it again.
I was looking for something that should have been somewhere, and wasn't. I asked Margret where it was, and she said, 'It's in the bedroom.'
'No, it isn't,' I replied - having just come from searching in the bedroom for about ten increasingly tantrumy minutes.
'Yes, it is,' she repeated.
'It's not. I've looked there.'
An expression of amused indulgence came over her face the subtleties of which I can't quite convey, so I'll have to make do with the description of it as, 'absolutely bleeding infuriating.'
'How much,' she said, 'will you give me if I find it?'
OK, so this operates on two levels. The first is simple sadism. Margret knows the agony it would cause me if - after my prolonged, stomping insistence that it isn't there - she calmly walks over and places her hand immediately on it. Tauntingly, she knows that just the possibility of this happening is quite probably enough for my nerve to crack. She is well aware that if, just one more time, my frustrated raging of, 'The nail scissors aren't here. See? They're not bloody here. Do you understand? Not... Here... Look! Go on! You try to find them then! Go on! Where are they then? Eh?' receives the near-instantaneous reply, 'Here they are,' and a pair of nail scissors, then I'm simply going to have to run away to sea. Can you see the other level, the one which ties it in kind with the 'Shut up' affair, though? Have a think.
That's it, well spotted: monetary gain. If I've maintained that something isn't somewhere until I've had to jump up and down, hold my breath and squeal that she's not my real mom, then simple, human decency should compel Margret to say, 'Yes, you're right,' rather than go there and find it. Going there and finding it is what you'd expect a Colombian Death Squad to do. What separates Margret from a Colombian Death Squad - perhaps the only thing that does - is subtlety. She's awfully keen to make that bet about finding things, isn't she? Now... why could that be? Well, obviously, it's because she's rigged the deck. The reason I can't find what I'm looking for is that she's previously spotted what I'm looking for, and moved it.
I have innate positioning instincts, you see: like a salmon returning thousands of miles across unmarked oceans, right to the stream where it was born. In exactly the same way, when I've finished using it, I will place a screwdriver on top of a bedroom radiator and - when I need it again, perhaps eighteen months later - unerringly return to that spot to retrieve it. Frequently, to discover that Margret has, maddeningly, taken it upon herself to transfer it to somewhere else. My instincts, moreover, are incredibly precise. If I'm looking for a pair of trainers that my astonishingly accurate positional memory remembers putting down in the bottom left of a cupboard, then I'm not going to notice them if some fiend has moved them to the bottom right of the cupboard during the intervening four and a half years, am I? That'd be stupid. What's the point of having a gift for such specific location if your visual perception is so vague as to wander around all over the place? Eh? What's more, I place things logically. Where are you most likely to need carpet tacks and a hammer, for example? Precisely. So leaving them on the stairs is simple ergonomics.
However, for some reason, Margret is unable to respect my filing system. She spends her day roaming the house, wilfully moving things from where I've deliberately placed them. And that's why she's keen to make the bet. She's hidden my stuff, and now she wants me to pay for her to retrieve it. It's basically a form of extortion, isn't it? Let's call a spade a spade: Margret has kidnapped my stuff and is holding it for ransom. Really, ladies and gentlemen, it's a sad state of affairs when your girlfriend abducts your favourite underpants.
Simply odd. Odd. We're writing Christmas cards at the moment, and Margret asked if I'd print out a family photo to include with them. (I have many photos of us, taken during every season and in numerous different locations - all, however, show precisely the same pose: Margret - beaming smile; Mil - solemn resignation; First Born - looking down at a Game Boy; Second Born - tongue out at camera, fingers pulling up to expose inside of nostrils.) Now, I'm aware that including a family photo with a Christmas card is not at all unusual in America, and I don't want to appear to criticise this: I'm sure it's perfectly lovely when an American sends such a card to another American. It's simply a tradition and no more a cause for comment, in its context, than any other of the fine customs unique to that country, like... um... like pie eating competitions, say, or religious snake-handling. As an English person, though, the notion of sending out pictures of ourselves strikes me as narcissistically brash. I mentioned this to Margret and, though she had sympathy with the concept that (non-American) people who send out photos of themselves might reasonably be assumed to be utterly dreadful, she said she thought that sometimes it was nice to get a picture. She thought it was nice for a very specific reason. '...because then you can see what size they are.' Now, this is clearly nonsense - 'Oh, look - they're 8"-by-4".' - unless people are sending out photographs of themselves next to an item of known dimensions. A bit like those kidnap photos where the victim is holding the day's paper: Bill, Emma, Helen, Matt and Blackie ensure that they're posing by a regulation, roadside telephone CAB box, with their arms linked to avoid tricks of perspective. More pertinently, though - what the hell? 'So you can see what size they are'? What on earth does that mean? Am I expected to open a card, splutter out my mouthful of tea in shock and call out, 'Quick! Take Ted and Sarah off our list - I've just found out they're bleeding midgets!' It is, as I say, 'simply odd'.
I'm off to Germany for a few weeks. Apologies if my absence results in your doing any work.
Except, I have to pop back briefly to tell you what just happened. I'm about to cycle into town and Margret stops me as I'm setting off. 'Will you bring back that filing cabinet from Argos?' she asks. Can you, ladies and gentlemen, imagine a person cycling two miles through Christmas traffic on a mountain bike carrying a filing cabinet?
Margret can.
Right, I really must get packed for Germany now.
Right, I've just got back from Germany so I have a huge backlog of stuff to get sorted - the inevitable result of a short break away hissing around the Allg�u, past numberless gasping locals, all swooning, 'Incredible! He skis like some kind of god!' You'll be happy to know, however, that Christmas this year went very well. As I think we've established by now, providing Margret with Christmas presents that evoke joy - rather than massive, brutal retaliation - is something that must be bought at a terrible cost. The fearful, Faust-blanching price of this ability is to - quite literally - listen to everything that Margret says throughout the previous year. I mean, Kung Fu monks (according to the omniscient well of knowledge that is popular 1970s television) only had to do a decade or so of training then carry a red hot metal bowl for a couple of meters with their bare forearms. I have to listen to everything Margret says throughout the entire year. Endless, endless, endless hours of stuff about the comparative aesthetic merits of different Ikea storage units, just so I'm there - prickling with alertness - on those occasions when she slyly drops in a hint about what she might like as a gift when the trial of buying one for her confronts me again. As I say, though, last year, twelve months worth of intelligence gathering paid off. This Christmas morning she was so thrilled that she stared at me - literally unable to form her thoughts into words - for quite the longest time imaginable after unwrapping her presents of a barometer and one of those 'Make Your Own Will' kits.
Oh, as you ask, I had a pretty uneventful time over in Germany. Skiing, visiting friends, waiting for the figure to turn green at pedestrian crossing lights even though there quite plainly isn't any sort of moving vehicle within a mile and a half, being shown photographs of my girlfriend naked, etc., etc.
The Old Timers among you will be well aware that pretty much every household in modern Germany contains at least a couple of photographs of my girlfriend naked, and also that this is a) "Not sexual. Tch - what the hell's wrong with you?" and b) very much My Problem. So, I'm sitting in a living room and - after tea and cakes - out come the photographs of Margret naked. I hold one of the pictures in my hand and sit there, radiating heat. Alerted, perhaps, by the grinding sound I'm involuntarily making with my teeth, Margret looks across at me and lets out a long, weary sigh.
'Oh, for God's sake,' she tuts, 'OK - so I'm naked. But you can't see anything.'
I glance pointedly at her, pointedly at the photograph, and then back at her again - pointedly. She lets out an even wearier sigh and rolls her eyes.
'OK...' she shrugs, '...apart from that.'
In what I can only assume was an impromptu but gutsy attempt at the World Irony Record, the other day Margret started to lecture me on how I could become calmer. I mean, really, eh? It's like being pitched Al Qaeda's Little Book of Love. Her spontaneous proselytising was conjured from her now going to yoga one evening a week.
'It's really relaxing when I'm there,' she says.
'Yes, it is,' I reply. (You see what I actually meant there, right? Lord, but I'm arch.)
'Why don't you come to a session?'
There's a sucking, cultis