Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About (2 page)

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 spätzle 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:

1. It's possible to stop buying plants.

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

3. Ikea is just another shop.

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

5. 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.

6. 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.'

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?