Bizarre Valentine's Day

Yesterday we went over to the house of another couple for dinner with the offspring in tow. I knew about this so far in advance I'd semi-forgotten about it and at no stage did I put the date together with the Saint's Day and make any kind of connection.

The Fat Bastard and his mate went off and shopped and I took the offspring round when the meal was almost ready ... a full chinese menu starting with Crispy Duck followed by a selection including a beef/mushroom dish, ribs, sweet and sour chicken, chicken chow mein, a vegetable stir fry, rice etc etc.

We watched a bit of telly, including the highlights of the third and deciding match in the finals series between the Aussies and the Sri Lankans at the Gabba (which we won, naturally; oh what an aberration was the summer just past).

Eventually we packed up and came home ... I had one or two things to do before I went up to bed and as he passed me on his way upstairs he wished me a Happy Valentine's Day.

How bizarre is that?

Well, all things considered I would have to say that one a scale of 0 - 10 it is a moment that scores a big fat dozen.

Life's Dull Tapestry

Ok, so my husband may or may not be conducting a long distance affair with a (professionally) successful career woman who lives in (or used to live in) Philadelphia in the USA.

I've known about this for years and stayed put, so why suddenly get all vindictive and start plastering their cupidity, or stupidity or whatever the hell it is somewhere the entire world could read about it if it chose?

The reason is, of course, that the rest of my world is hardly worth writing about.

Yesterday's 9-4 shift seemed to take all day and all night and now I have to go and dress for another tour of duty. Morons, imbeciles and idiots; and you can decide whether I'm referring to the staff I work with or the customers we serve.

Did he really Tell his Wife About our Affair

It did occur to me as I cleared up the typos adn speling misstakes that an alternative interpretation could be placed on the search on those four words: Tell, wife, about and affair...

What if the search were being done by some 'other' woman who is growing impatient and doubtful about her lover. It isn't true that they never leave the wife, but fewer do than stay in the nest.

That charming creature with the wife at home who doesn't understand him or no longer loves him or hasn't put out for him in years ... what she's putting up with, what you never see is that beneath the veneer he's just another paunchy, balding bloke who leaves dribbles of piss on the toilet seat and clothes all over the house, who's never washed a dish in his life or cleaned up after he's cooked, or done a single chore about the house without being asked a hundred times or so - and that's if you're lucky.

If you're unlucky he's a liar and a thief with habits straight out of Animal House and a taste for porn involving females who look barely pubescent.

It must seem easy to be charming with someone who doesn't know the truth.

'Should I' or 'How Do I' Tell my wife about my Affair

It seems this blog turns up in the results of a search on the words "tell, wife, about and affair".

Well first of all, give her a bit more credit, she probably knows. She probably knows whether or not you want her to know, and you probably do.

If you're trying to find out whether she's most likely to

• do you with the carving knife there and then, or
• do you with the blunt instrument while you sleep later tonight, or
• slip some rat poison into a meal at some later date, or
• have a retaliatory affair (though she's probably already done this if it is her most likely response), or
• hire a divorce lawyer and take you to the cleaners, or
• move you into the spare bedroom and throw half-heated tv dinners at your head for the rest of your natural life

then you are a prize idiot.

Any 'man' worthy of that epithet (as opposed to 'decent human being') has already planned to tell her some place other than the kitchen, given away his cricket/baseball bat, locked the garden shed, beaten the lover in a round or three of golf or over a business deal and engaged the best divorce lawyer in town (just in case) on whose advice he's moved the moveable assets into an offshore account she'd have to bankrupt herself to get access to.

So if she’s feeding you, doing the housework, doing your washing and ironing, paying the bills and raising your children show some gratitude and leave her to know about your seedy little sideline in peace.

But if you really are fucking around and still screwing your wife (literally, as opposed to in every other sense) have the decency to wear a condom when slumming it or otherwise being taken by a ride by the bit on the side.

Days like this are why I drink heavily

Saturday morning we've done some housework, straightened the slum that is his work in progress by the front door (including the box of cigarette butts, and the camping crap), been to the library to do some work on the half-term project and now we're waiting for the pall to fall... he's due home any minute.

Sadly there was nothing useful at the library which seems to have dispensed with the useful fall back which is the multi-volume encyclopaedia in favour of the Dorling Kinder(?) encyclo-lite which is strong on technically well-executed and colourful illustrations but relatively light on (a-hem) information.

The offspring are reading while waiting for their nutritious lunch of sausage roll, crisps and apple ('Tangy', what ever the fuck that might be, thank you Tesco; it isn't a variety that appears in any book on fruit trees I've consulted).

After lunch the fat bastard will spread himself on the lounge floor, shove one hand down his pants and prop himself on the other elbow to watch the rugby. And the rest of us will work around his pressing tv schedule (in this town?).

He claimed he went to London yesterday to see his mother ... and came back with nothing which is very nearly unprecedented and makes me believe that the Fool from Philadelphia is in town.

I did it again

A few days ago he brought back like the true hunter gatherer a bag full of beef steaks all.

Yesterday, for our evening meal we consumed between of us four of these mighty slabs of iron-rich red meat, along with a few vegetables and a tray of oven chips. Nutritious or what! Bear in mind that there are three of us and one is eight years old and that these four steaks were all of them adult portions.

The remainder were to be consumed tonight but I couldn't face another plate of red meat nor could I bring myself to inflict it on the offspring, so we had fish instead, and some salad greens and potato.

Now he's come in and spotted the remnants of the meal and asked, pointedly if we had the steak tonight. I had to say no (notice the difference, he'd have lied: it was off, or I forgot, or I didn't see it, or some such bullshit; see I can't come up with them even in anger).

Now he's pissed at me. It's that closed in pissed-ness, where he shrinks his mouth to a nasty little moue, as though what he really wants to do is rip and tear but see how heroic he is, and quiet and not saying anything ('witness my restraint'). Why oh why can't he just row like a normal, healthy human (meaning I'm not sure if he's normal, or healthy or even human)?

Not even a why, just a sulk.

Fucking creep.

Ouch

We're in the process of not getting the evening meal ready. This involves me asking that we are eating by 6:00pm, him then announcing he'll have a bath before hand, then that we'll have something we don't have all the ingredients for, then him deciding the oven he's got to temperature still smells slightly of cleaner so we'll cook in the other one... at this rate we'll be lucky to eat by 7:00pm...

And in the mean time he's fucked off out into the cold to have a drink and a smoke ... I've just had the most foul look thrown at me because it had to hunt for its precious favourite Staropramen glass which turned out to be in the glasses cupboard in the kitchen but not washed, dried and polished. In fact not even washed. I found the thing on the kitchen bench along with a couple of other glasses he's prone to use - I just shoved them away in the cupboard and out of my sight.

The only other alternative would be to put them out with the rubbish, since I positively will not spend my life cleaning up after the fat, indolent slovenly lying bastard.

Postscript to the Great Curry Explosion

He, the fat bastard that is, was home relatively early this afternoon, at just after 1:30. I set up a rather relaxed atmosphere and then dropped into our conversation a remark about how I'd discovered that the same curry-type substance I'd had to clean up from the front of the washing machine etc I'd now found in clots on the kitchen ceiling.

Sadly and all too predictably he first of all feigned no memory of my original discovery and they denied all knowledge of what the substance was (or indeed how it might have come to be ALL OVER THE KITCHEN) and finally amazement that something of which he had neither knowledge or memory could be on the kitchen ceiling.

Around 2pm he left to go to the Internet Shop, presumably to check on the paramour's progress (the Fool from Philadelphia) or perhaps to spend an hour trying to find out what it is I'm up to...

Now he's back again and he's parked his fat arse on the floor in front of the television watching early episodes of The West Wing which we have on video.

How did he do it? Why does he do it?

Questions, questions; always questions.

The background to this is the bizarre, impractical and infuriating practise in this country of siting the laundry in the kitchen. Under the best possible circumstances ie, no one using a dish without immediately washing it, no one cooking without cleaning as they go, the filter of the cooker being in top-notch condition etc etc, it is hardly ideal.

When you live under the same roof as a world champion slob managing the washing can be next to impossible. For a start he'll fill the washing machine up, put it on, walk away and forget it. Three days later, if I've not taken his things out in the meantime, he'll come back and discover that the washed clothes now smell (surprise, surprise) and run them through again, then once more for good measure . He doesn't pay the water and electricity bills, you see.

If he does take the washing out of the machine he rarely does more than dump it on the kitchen bench beneath which the washing machine is sited. That's fair enough with stuff that isn't his, but unreasonable when its his own washing. Somehow the washing he's left piled up on the bench becomes invisible, at least to him; and it will sit there and sit there until it begins to smell and then he'll put it through the washing machine a couple of times to freshen it up.

At about this point he might finally haul it outside and hang it up... and it might stay there, on the line for weeks. And get crapped on by birds, leaked on by the fruit on the green gage tree, splashed by mud droplets sent flying during heavy downpours and bleached unevenly by sunlight.

What hasn't been rendered unwearable (ie, rotted away) will have to be put through the washing machine another couple of times to clean it up properly and freshen it up. The stuff that's blown off the line (because he has an antipathy towards clothes pegs) usually simply goes in the rubbish bin.

The upshot of this extravagant behaviour is that his clothes often pass through perhaps 7 cycles in the washing machine between wears. And did I mention that he doesn't pay the water or electricity bills?

Why the hell he does this is something I cannot begin to understand.

Recently I came home to discover a pile of my washing on the bench, placed there because he had some of his own to do.

Fine, fair enough. What was a problem was the curry-like globules all over the bench and down the front of the washing machine. In an even tone I asked him, as I cleared it up off the bench, the washing machine and the kitchen floor what it was. I got that tedious blank 'not me, guv' look he dons when he can't bear just giving me a straightforward and honest answer. I might well rip and tear and call him a lazy fuckwit. Much better to pretend that it had nothing to do with him. Well who was responsible? The seven year old?, the cat?, the goldfish?

The stuff, what ever it was, got everywhere it seemed and took me ages to clear up. A couple of garments had to go into the bin as they were stained. Then, today, with nothing better to do I rolled up my sleeves to clean the bathroom and the kitchen.

So I scrubbed and bleached and worked my way downstairs in my fit of housewifely virtue ... and came horribly unstuck when I reached the kitchen. I was planning to wash the walls and in looking around I happened to take a glance upward.

And there they are ... great globules of a curry-like substance in splashes across MY ceiling. Right now I can't face climbing up on a ladder and scrubbing the ceiling. I've cleaned up all the other traces of what ever explosion took place in MY kitchen and I'm feeling distinctly resentful that this last part of the clean-up too falls to me.

But more than that, now the heat of the moment has passed I just wish he'd tell me (assuming he can't explain why he tells these stupid fucking lies) quite what the fuck happened and how it happened.

The Fool from Philly is due very shortly now. No fucking wonder she's got cold feet about having him actually move over with her. Much easier to keep him on a long leash and available for occasional no-strings-attached week-end or week-long fuck-ins.

There, that feels better.

Men's toilet habits

I may well be obsessed by male toilet habits, but I'm not the only one. As so often happens I think myself a complete antediluvian only to discover I'm actually riding the crest of the wave.

Now news reaches me via the Magazine supplement in Saturday's edition of The Times that grapples with the vexed and therefore rarely debated question of why men stand to take a piss (or as the correspondent Tina Gaudoin put it: Why is it frowned upon for men to sit down when they pee?)

Among the little factoids she, the correspondent, dispenses are five confessionals extracted inside the past 12 months from men of her acquaintance to the effect that they do in fact, though not always, sit down. According to one this most often happens when he's tired, or its late (or he's drunk according to his wife).

The correspondent who in addition to living with a husband shares her home with a tribe of growing male children plays almost all the same chords : seat left in the upright position, splashing. Apparently she's been spared the seat not being put into the upright position before standing...

And that brought her to MAPSU: Mothers Against Peeing Standing Up, which may or may not be a joke... but is no the less worthy a venture for all that. Check out the website.

The Week Today

It has been quite a week one way or another ... what with the spectacular news of a mutual friend's son, more of which anon.

I did get my money out of him having had to take the direct approach on Tuesday morning. There I was minding my own business at my kitchen table with a cup of coffee, planning to spend the rest of the morning in bed with a fantasy, and then I catch a snippet on the radio which is playing in the background.

It is the last day for getting in tax forms ... twenty minutes later I was bailing up at work for petrol money so I could get to the nearest tax office and back again. That was a close shave.

I still have one or two other matters to straighten out with Inland Revenue, before I get myself into seriously deep smelly stuff.

In the meantime his little flirtation with bleach seems to have faded to nothing. No tell-tale wiping sounds from the bathroom in the morning, and no clunk of the seat going up and coming back down again after wards (which is the acceptable alternative).

Right now he's back from work and tucked away in his bedroom, either asleep or cybering with his lady friend in Philadelphia.

Of course I could be wrong about that, but they've been on and off for twenty something years now, so if they are off at the moment I've still got no good grounds for believing it is over for good.

While he's lolling about

Well I know which week his friend from Philadelphia is visiting Europe - it is the week buttressed by the weeks of 18/19 February at one end and 25/26 at the other. And I know this because he has some flexibility around which weekend he disappears.

I can't wait.

Shame she doesn't have a big enough suit case to pack him up in and take him back with her to the States. Shame there isn't a suit case big enough.