Es gibt noch mehr....und auch über Frauen, Männer und Filme...
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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, and 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 at all, 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 due to the 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 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, unfortunately he said no - as he's perfectly entitled to do, of course - but the gist is 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 'cloth taking-things-from-the-oven-things', above) 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,' says Margret (where an amateur would have, say, shrugged).
'No,' I reply (at the moment that 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 from the belief (incorrectly, of course, 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.
You'll know by now that, from time to time, I like to give you a little test, just to see if you've been paying attention. It'd be nice to think that this is because I love you all dearly and want only to share with you the wonders of knowledge. Sadly, as we know that anything up to 20% of you are plain simpletons, a further 35% are so ferociously self-righteous and humourless that you Just Don't Get It and between 15% and 20% of the remainder are the kind of teenage girls who find this many words being together in one place repellent on a moral level… well, that only leaves a possible 30% to love, doesn't it? No, the fact is that this is my homepage, it isn't sponsored by anyone, it has no banner ads and I can therefore do whatever takes my fancy from moment to moment.
Before you judge me, just think how many people out there would use this space to put up photographs of their cats.
Here, then, is the quiz:
Last week we were sitting down to eat our tea. At the table there is Margret, First Born and I. The meal is mussels - the kind that are still in their shells (steam for approx. 5-10 minutes, serve with a French loaf and salad). We began to feed… what does Margret do next?
I want to give the intelligent 30% of you every chance to guess the answer here (the other 70% may try, not try or just flop silently in front of a railway locomotive - follow your instincts) so I'll tell you what actually happened when we arrive at 2002. OK?
............[These dots indicate the passage of time. I have only a limited special effects budget.]...........
Gosh, 2002 already - where do the days go, eh? Anyway, I'm sure most of you will have worked out what happened by now, but let's go over it, just for the record. (Also, for the record, Americans, 'tea' is the name of a meal too; it's the one you have somewhere between 4pm and 6pm, OK?) Right. Flashback: We're sitting around the table, eating. Margret spoons another ladleful of mussels out onto her plate. She prises the shell of one open to get at it and then pauses, a bright, fascinated smile taking hold of her face.
'Look,' she says to me, proffering the mollusc, 'Look - it looks just like a clitoris.'
My eyes jerk from the pornographically exposed bivalve up to her beaming expression and back again.
There is a roaring, rushing of wind inside my head.
'What?' asks First Born, trying to crane over the table, 'What does it look like?'
'Never mind, Jonathan,' I say, 'Eat your food.'
'But what does it look like?'
(I briefly think of lying. You know, 'It's a kind of fruit, Jonathan,' say, but the risks are huge. It's screamingly obvious that, a few months on, I'd be in a greengrocer's shop and Jonathan would shout across to me, 'Papa! Show me where they keep their clitorises… I want to find out what they taste like.')
'Never mind, Jonathan. Eat your food.'
Margret, now in her own little world, is peering closer into the shell with captivated amusement. She's alternatively poking exploratively and tickling it, rapidly.
I'm telling you, I would absolutely not swap her for any woman on Earth.
Also, I just ate bread for the rest of the meal.
This is the first thing Margret said to me today: I walked downstairs into the kitchen and she handed me a yoghurt and said, 'Here, eat this, it's out of date.' Excellent.
But anyway, never mind about that because I'm here to talk about mathematics. I'm sure every couple has the occasional row about mathematics, but Margret and I are something of a mathematics argument blackspot. She's forever handing me bits of paper covered in chaotic waterfalls of figures and saying, 'Check this for me. Mil. Now. Stop doing that thing that you're clearly enjoying immensely, and check this for me.' I try to convey the pain, of course, 'Awwww - why? Why do I have to do it?' but she'll just wave the paper insistently and say, 'Because you're good at this kind of thing.' Which isn't any sort of compliment, by the way - my maths expertise peaked with an 'O' Level at sixteen - it's just her way of saying, 'You can apply yourself better than me to this because you're dull.'
The next stage is that never - ever - will the figure I arrive at be the same as the one she's got. And, despite the fact she's hunted me down and made me do it in the first place because, she says, I am 'better', she'll dispute my result and insist hers is correct. And they're always terrible calculations - work hours (base sixty, there, so fun already) that need to be averaged accommodating shifting patterns and odd holidays and allowances, comparisons of English and German bank accounts taking in variable exchange rates and compound interest. The worst one is fuel consumption. Buy a car in Britain and fuel consumption is given in miles per gallon. In Germany it's given as litres used per hundred kilometres. Work out a conversion for that. Go on, try it. Go on. GO ON. They're the kind of equations that reject calculus or algebra and can only be solved by shouting - 'No, here - here - this figure here, look. Oh, for God's sake, let's start again; I'll go... very... slowly.' I try to explain the figures in my calculations to her more clearly by writing them on the paper very hard, and perhaps underlining them, perhaps several times. And, to cap it all, Germans write a 1 so it's easy to confuse it with how an English person writes a 7: mathematics and cacography can lead to Margret and I not speaking to each other for a week.
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.'
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