Day 20

I was trying to sneak out the door early this morning on my essentials trip – fegs – but the part-time wife caught me on and added a few of what can only be described as optionals rather than essentials. I mean, washing powder, anyone? Is anyone else even still washing clothes this weather? Sure you can turn whatever clothes you were wearing last week inside out and get another week out of them now that nobody is looking at you apart from your family. And they don’t count. It would take something much bigger than the Kerfuffle, though, for the part-time wife to give up what I presume (from how often she does it) to be one of her favourite hobbies.

She caught me on sneaking out the door because she has occasionally taken to performing some of her 16 hours per day sleep on the couch in the front salon in the West Wing, which happens to be adjacent to the vestibule with the tricky turn for coffins in it (do try to keep up, or else scroll down and find out) which contains, in a charming protruding porch, the front door, beside which I was bent over double nosily extracting some mucus from my lungs. She claims that this variation of sleeping location is because if she happens to wake up during the night, she enjoys watching the stars do their thing from her recumbent position below them. I have pointed out, in vain, that said stars are also available for viewing from a recumbent position in the Master Bedroom, but, intuitively, I know that this new interest in astrology is just another excuse for her to get out of carrying out her full wifely duties in what I would describe as a complete and thorough manner. Hence her part-time status.

It is a truth barely ever acknowledged that one of the most effective contraceptives known to man is marriage. Barely ever acknowledged by men, that is; women are all too aware of this fact, as they created it. It comes as a surprise to many a married man, however, not a few of whom were tricked into the institution in the mistaken belief that they would have en-suite sex available for the rest of their lives, saving them the bother of going out hunting for it in discos and pubs and ‘walking clubs’. (By ‘en-suite sex’ I do not mean sex in the shower, although chance would be a fine thing.) But what with children (which, ironically, are a daily reminder that the sex thing did use to happen, or happened three times, at least), constant clothes-washing and intermittent bouts of astrology, like the mucus in my morning cough, the flow of on-tap sex eventually dries up, and, by that stage, the poor man finds he is too old, or too bald, or too damned tired chasing his wife around the house in pursuit of a snog, even, to go back out into the disco jungle in pursuit of his main hobby. He is too tired even for the pretence of joining a walking club in search of an extra-marital affair; it’s the incidental walking that puts him off. In a brief and related theological aside [it had better be – Ed.], if your wife gives up sex for Lent but has not consulted you about the matter beforehand, does that constitute rape?

So anyway, the news on the car radio on the way to the local shop was so depressing that I switched over to the Leonard Cohen CD. (Remind me to do a post some day about the criminally-neglected humour in the oeuvre of Beckett and Cohen, which sounds like a law firm now that I see it typed. For information, I hear this stuff first before I see it in print: I have no idea who is dictating it into my head. Now, how am I going to get out of these brackets gracefully?) I also happened to see myself in the rear-view mirror of the car. I took a good, hard look at myself (the car was parked, dear reader, but thank you for your concern for the safety of other road users – there weren’t any, by the way) and realised that this is actually getting serious. I would go so far as to say that we are approaching crisis point. And the really annoying thing is that there was a chance, before it all began, to take preventative measures and to thus now be in a much better state of preparation for the dangers ahead. These truths struck me as I gazed – fondly – into my own unfathomably deep pupils, and became fully aware, for maybe the first time since the Kerfuffle began, that my hair is on the point of explosion. And I could have had it cut three weeks ago when I dragged the middle teenager into Belfast one Saturday to be shorn – never, ever go to a culchie barbers, readers; the reason being visible all around you on the craniums of the locals. Do any of you know any city-based barbers who do deliveries?

I note (in passing, obviously) that Blustering Boris is so embarrassed at the gentle ribbing I subject him to in this blog that he has gone into hiding in an Intensive Care Unit. C’mon, Boris, show some balls! Come back out and face the music. And dance. Like the circus bear that you really are.