Kiss code

Although the kiss has long been recognised as a sign of affection, in our house it serves a dual function in that the Boy Wonder and I use it to test whether the other is awake. If we aren't looking at each other, don't want to wake the other or just want to test whether our suspicions are correct, we will blow a little kiss to see if it is reciprocated. Admittedly I do this much more than the Boy Wonder as he is usually the first to go to sleep, but it has become a kind of recognised water testing device between the two of us that I find strangely comforting.

Most sane or most in denial?

I've noticed that off all the blogs I read, most of the writers have a therapist, or if not an active relationship with one, at least a diagnosis of some kind which suggests that their mental health is a cause for concern occasionally. Partly I suspect that this is due to the fact that many of them live in the US, which does seem to have a more open and honest approach to the treatment of mental health problems unlike the UK where we still have to be convinced that it's not just attention seeking and fecklessness that causes us to falter under the pressure of our increasingly unwieldy expectations. But partly I suspect that there is something about the introspectiveness of assessing the way you think that either appeals to writers or leads those who otherwise would not write to contemplate capturing their thoughts in an attempt to record the processes through which their minds slink when they are left to their own devices.

I am, perhaps shortsightedly, not under the care of a mental health professional and don't feel the need for any more introspection that this blog affords me - an outlet for my thoughts, obsessions and petty annoyances that doesn't really require any outside input or feedback. Occasionally I will attack the Boy Wonder with a topic of frustration and, if he fails to deliver the response I require, I will fill in his part of the conversation as though that in any way provides an endorsement for my rantings. To his credit, he usually goes along with this charade, obligingly parroting back the lines I feed him with an admirably attempted facsimile of outrage, and fortunately this seems to suffice, for the time being, to keep my brain happy.

Me vs the Boy Wonder

Apropos of not a lot, this evening I just happened to ask the Boy Wonder if he would like to be more like me. This was not designed to be a trick question, but the speed and fervour with which he delivered his answer ('no' in case you couldn't guess) and the fact that I wouldn't even hesitate to say that I would like to be more like him made me wonder whether it would be better if we were both more like me or more like him, so I have decided to score us both according to some arbitrarily chosen criteria in the hopes of proving one of us right.

1. Innate gender-specific abilities

The Boy Wonder is blessed with a sort of elemental knowledge about things like cars, guns, planes and other traditional boy stuff, whereas I fail spectacularly on the girl-stuff front. I have only one handbag, didn't know eyeliner existed until I was about 13 and don't even like cake, therefore failing on many scores at being a girl. I do like kittens and puppies, but allergies to both make that a fairly tragic state of affairs involving red eyes and rather too much snot to be anything approaching cute.

2. Social Awkwardness

Whilst I am currently the owner of an unwanted fringe (on which more, perhaps, another time), an odd 'friendship' with the eastern European guy who sells the Big Issue outside our local Budgens and a weird village magazine delivery round due to my inability to extricate myself from awkward situations, the Boy Wonder is admirably able to sail through life without ever seeming to torture himself with the idea that he is secretly offending people who will hate him more and more with every encounter until their seething resentment causes them to break into our house and lick every item in the cutlery drawer.

3. Ability to Deal with Bugs

This is where I triumph, largely due to the Boy Wonder's hilarious and irrational fear of moths. For reasons which may well be due to some deep psychological trauma from which his memory is protecting him, he believes that moths will bite him in the face and transmit some kind of moth based disease from which he will never recover. He is also scared of cockroaches to the extent that he once declared the sighting of four cockroaches to be an 'infestation' and made me run the gauntlet of an unfamiliar side passage in the pitch dark to activate a security light which would send them scuttling back underneath the house we were living in. He claims to be 'fine' with a selection of other creepy crawlies, but rarely passes up an opportunity to get me to deal with them whilst lurking on the periphery of the room offering encouragement and keeping a safe distance. Perhaps the one downside of my awesome abilities when it comes to bugs is the fact that gardening becomes almost impossible when I have to stop and rescue every insect which might be injured during the process.

4.Ability to Exist Without External Stimulation

Sometimes the Boy Wonder will just sit and stare at a wall, thinking about nothing. I, on the other hand, require almost limitless entertainment, finding that just watching television for example is nowhere near enough for me to remain focussed without another task in hand (such as writing this post). This has some benefits in as much as I can get a lot done when I'm on form, but also some negative side effects such as my hatred of showering on the grounds that washing is nowhere near fun enough to make listening to the radio an acceptable alternative form of distraction. I should point out, I still shower once a day, I just put it off and whine about it until I absolutely have to do it, making me sound like I actively want to be a hobo with things living in my hair, whereas I actually quite like being clean but would prefer to achieve that effect whilst reading a good book.

5. Ability to Fill in Forms and Deal with Admin Tasks that Keep Our Household Running

I recently completed the application process for a new credit card, including a secondary one for the Boy Wonder. All he had to do was sign and date a form to confirm that he was aware of this. I took my eye off him for around a second, which was apparently long enough for him to sign in the wrong box and then dither uncertainly as to where to write the date. He once declared the process of buying a house as 'easy' on the grounds that his main contribution to the whole affair was pretending to read the masses of paperwork which came our way, before saying 'it looks fine to me' and writing his name wherever he thought looked most likely.

6. Ability Not to Die in Normally Non-Deadly Situations

The Boy Wonder totally kicks my arse on this one - not only has he rarely even been hospitalised, but his body apparently understands that nuts are a good source of protein and can make a delicious snack. My body on the other hand, seems to be under the impression that nuts are a threat to my wellbeing on such a scale that it's worth killing me to keep their marauding ways at bay. Not only that, but apparently it has now decided that penicillin, a drug specifically designed to treat illness, falls into the same category and warrants a similar sort of nuclear stand-off whereby it races to kill itself before the penicillin can. All this despite the fact that for the last 31 years (up to and including the last 8 weeks) it has recognised the healing properties of said antibiotics and it has only been in the last week that it's taken it's near psychotic stance on the matter.

7. Apoplectic Rage

I can barely go a day without descending into apoplectic rage about one thing or another. Recent examples include: a woman on 'Wanted Down Under' who was considering moving to Australia with her husband of four years and leaving her 14 year old daughter back in England; the book I read by Moon Unit Zappa and the reviews about it on Amazon; the fact that all store bought pesto has nuts that I can't see in it (c.f point 6); misleading use of statistics in contexts that are supposed to be educational.

The Boy Wonder works himself into a rage about things that can really easily be avoided: me saying that I have a tapeworm; people leaving the ends of their guitar strings hanging out of the tuners instead of trimming them neatly; me saying 'oui' like a French trucker when he asks me a question; the fact that our guttering keeps springing leaks and depositing water into the air bricks which ventilate the area under our house.

8. Being Ticklish

The Boy Wonder is ridiculously and entertainingly ticklish, meaning he can be completely incapacitated by a light poke to the side. I, however, quite like being tickled and am therefore impervious to retaliations, meaning that I would hold up better under interrogation by a pervy clown or feather duster, which I suppose is some sort of skill.

9. Light Footedness

Living with the Boy Wonder is like having a herd of elephants stampeding around the house, and even when he's trying to be quiet he manages to make everything in the entire house shake as though we live at the joining of tectonic plates beneath the earth's surface.

10. The Ability to Accurately Ascertain My Level of Drunkenness

In recent times, the Boy Wonder has been responsible for the following when under the influence of alcohol: three stops for sandwiches and ice cream on the way home at 3am, drunken limping and the subsequent denial thereof, pretending to be a toad (albeit a fairly poor impression which fooled nobody), and consistently telling me he's 'not that drunk' despite being clearly quite drunk. I, on the other hand, seem to tend more towards believing that I'm a lot more drunk than I am even when I am actually still in control of most of my faculties.

Totting up the results of this supremely unscientific analysis it appears that unless one of us proves to be a dab hand at the arbitrary assigning of value to any of the criteria above, it has proved a wildly inconclusive yet somewhat entertaining exercise.

Weird dream crushes

Every so often I will wake from a dream with a guilty feeling that I have cheated on the Boy Wonder. Exciting though this may sound (or repellent, depending on your point of view) I should confess now that even in my dreams I am never actually unfaithful to the Boy Wonder, so the kind of romps that I enjoy with my dream crushes tend to be chastely affectionate hugs, chatting about subjects of mutual interest and the general feeling that I am important to someone. None of these are things that our relationship is lacking, but I assume that these dreams are the playing out of some kind of Freudian tomfoolery not least because the men involved are rarely age-appropriate but also because there is an element of revisiting the people who I idolised in childhood.

Last night's dream featured Hugh Laurie who filled a kind of avuncular role as the provider of a meal whilst we discussed books and shared innocent albeit slightly flirtatious hugs. Even as a child, I always like Hugh Laurie, probably because he was an adult who acted like a child, and his recent appearances on television combine my old affection for him with his current New Orleans connection. Either way, I awoke with a slightly guilty feeling of inappropriate behaviour tinged with a sudden urge to gaze at a picture of Hugh Laurie imagining that he was a friend of my parents who I would occasionally get to hug.

I'm assuming that the Boy Wonder wouldn't feel particularly threatened by this, not least because whenever his dreams feature real people they are always dead musicians who have come back to life to play guitar with him, which I suppose is along the same wish fulfilment lines as my desire to squeeze Hugh Laurie. If not though, I can rest assured that the fact he never reads this will protect him from the knowledge that his wife is a faithless weirdo who secretly wants to read books with popular comedians and then discuss them over a nice meal.

Thumb Pick X-Factor

Having experimented over the years with different styles and playing positions, the Boy Wonder has developed a process for creating the perfect pick. First he imports thumb picks from the US, because even with shipping it's somehow cheaper than buying them in the UK. Then, every couple of months he goes through a process I have christened 'Thumb Pick X-Factor' which is an emotional roller coaster.

The first round involves a very literal whittling down of the entrants - each thumb pick is trimmed to fit the Platonic (Boy Wonderic maybe?) ideal of a thumb pick, and we start to get to know the contestants and learn a little bit about them. Occasionally the trimming involves an injury on the Boy Wonder's part which makes it easy to work out which one has the tragic but heart-warming tale of adversity well and truly overcome with which to engage the audience's sympathy.

Round two is an exercise in polishing the product - the picks are filed down to give a smooth playing edge and checked for uniformity of shape.

Round three is gruelling for all the contestants - each pick is scored several times across its inner surface before having ground up bow rosin pressed into the grooves.

Round four is the most competitive part of the process - each thumb pick is tried out, with a chance to be used to play for a short period to ascertain whether they are fit for purpose.

Round five is the makeover - it's very rare that any of the contestants don't make it through the final round, but there is always a pecking order, and this is where the makeover comes in. Each pick is decorated in a unique design picked out in permanent marker, so that the Boy Wonder can identify his favourites when examining the contents of his hand after scrabbling in his pocket for a pick. The favourite is used almost exclusively to start with, and the others follow suit until, through loss or overuse, they are all deemed impractical and the process begins again.

Not surprisingly, this exercise would usually be of little or no interest to a spectator, which goes some way to explaining why I can often be found providing interesting facts about the contestants while he works. It stops me getting bored and makes me feel as though I am supporting all aspects of the Boy Wonder's musical career.

Boy Wonder - in charge of bedtime

For some reason, I have always been really bad at going to bed, perhaps because I always had a bedtime when I was living with my parents due to their inability to sleep if someone is so much as considering consciousness elsewhere in the house. When I first moved out, the fact that I lived in one room meant that my bed was my main piece of furniture so it wasn't so noticeable that I would often fall asleep on top of the covers having drifted off whilst intending to be otherwise occupied. Since living with the Boy Wonder, I would estimate that around 80% of the time we have 'headed up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire' has been at his suggestion - I will quite happily lie around on the sofa, even to the point of falling asleep rather than actually committing to going to bed.

It's not as though our bedtime routine is particularly gruelling - we have a fish and a rabbit to feed, one door to lock and some lights to switch off. We aren't exactly neat freaks, so it's not like we do anything in the way of cleaning or tidying, but for some reason the idea of choosing to go to bed is completely alien to me - despite being 30, I still feel like one of those kids on 'You've Been Framed' who ends up falling asleep in their spaghetti hoops in spite of their attempts to stave off the overwhelming tiredness. I'm not sure whether it's come about because the Boy Wonder generally has no problem going to sleep, whereas I used to spend hours in bed staring at the ceiling and wondering whether I would make it out alive in the event of a fire (one of the weirder fears I had a child after a not-particularly graphic safety lecture at school). I still have a propensity to let my imagination run wild whenever I can't sleep, which may be why the concept of going to bed fills me with a childish determination to stave it off for as long as possible.

Stupidly enough, this applies even when I'm really tired - I can spend all day planning an early night, wishing I was in bed and looking forward to a nap, but when it actually comes down to going to bed, I will still find ways to put it off. I used to be surprised at how my productivity levels increased at the most inappropriate times, namely when it was getting late and bedtime was looming, but as I become more aware of the fact that I have slight issues surrounding going to bed I realised that this is just another way to put off the inevitable.

I also really like being in bed - once the decision is made, the jobs are done and the wooden hill has been breached, I have no problem with actually going to bed - it's just the instigation of the process which I find unpalatable and when left on my own I just don't do it. I will either sleep on the sofa, start doing jobs in the bedroom so that the decision is never made or just stay awake until the whole thing becomes moot at some point the next day.

My worry is that at some point, should our mid-term future go to plan, I will be in charge of our children's bedtimes, which in some senses should be fine (I don't care if other people want to go to bed, I just don't want to myself) but I do worry that one of our kids might be like me and when they tell me that they don't want to I will feel like a huge hypocrite. Fingers crossed then that they will take after the Boy Wonder and will be thrilled at the idea of going to bed, when and wherever the urge may strike him, otherwise our kids are going to end up watching a lot of weird films of the kind that are shown at 4 in the morning and probably scar toddlers for life.

What is with these 'reality' shows

The first time I saw Run's House, the 'reality' TV show about Rev Run and the antics of his hilarious family, I was understandably intrigued to see how life would play out when you spend your whole time with a full sized clock around your neck. Then I watched it, and realised that it was scripted, and poorly at that, making the whole premise pointless and resulting in some of the most ridiculously poor television I've ever seen.

Since then, our nocturnal lifestyle has lead to us watching TV at odd hours of the day or night, which has limited our viewing to some extent and resulted in us watching 'The Hills', the most entertaining element of which is the anger it inspires in the Boy Wonder who without fail declares all those involved to be hateful and gets genuinely agitated about their continued existence. I think the fact that every turgid, over emotional scene is played out in this weird fake reality but with peculiar camera angles, inane whiny conversation and utterly vacuous situations engineered apparently to entertain people who have yet to become bored of the pathetic teenage antics of people with nothing better to worry about than how they look and whether they can steal their friend's boyfriend without looking like a bitch on television. I find it amusingly crap, but it is worth it for the rage that 'The Hills' inspires in the Boy Wonder - watching him fume in fury at the fact that these people continue to occupy space on the planet is hilarious.

Plarguments

I am vaguely aware that some couples play fight, but the Boy Wonder and I are way too clumsy to even attempt that without the whole affair ending in genuine injury, which kind of negates the whole point of the 'play' element of play fighting. Instead, we have play arguments or 'plarguments' as I have christened them, which more often than not end with one of us threatening to punch the other in the face or poke them in the eye.

I sometimes worry that when we do this outside the house, we run the risk of being overheard and that someone might only hear the end part whereupon they could be forgiven for thinking that we are intending to throw down and fully explore the limits of an abusive relationship once we get back home and can let our middle class rage out without embarrassing ourselves. So far nobody has ever approached us to ensure that we aren't about to do injury to one another, but it may only be a matter of time.

I also worry that if anything were ever to happen to one of us, although I'm sure our friends would tell the authorities that we were very happy together, under more prolonged questioning, one of them might let slip that they have heard us threatening to smack one another in the faceholes and start considering the other as a suspect. Having said that, I'm also worried at what a CSI team would find under our sofa, so maybe a little distraction would buy me enough time to whip round with a hoover.

C-peck-mockle country and the magic basil plant

The Boy Wonder, whilst being generally brilliant, is prone, as we all are, to moments of surprising specialness which always crack me up and then go in my mental hilarity bank to be revisited whenever I need reminding of how simple pleasures are by far the best. One of my favourites was a misunderstanding in which I was unwittingly complicit and involved a month-long holiday to Canada. We had a basil plant in full growth when we left, which I optimistically left on the windowsill despite the fact that it clearly needed watering at least once a day to survive, so naturally when we returned from our trip, despite the poppies at the front of the house being so large we couldn't see out of the window properly, the basil plant was a brown, dried-up husk of a plant sitting on the windowsill like a memorial to our neglect. Being the super efficient little worker bee I am, I spent the day of our return doing all our laundry and ordering a shopping delivery, so within 24 hours of returning home, we were more or less back on track with normal life. I put our new basil plant on the windowsill and the Boy Wonder joked that obviously his giving it a pint of water the day before had worked magic on its health. It was only the next day when we went round to visit his sister and wonder at their new house, and I heard him telling her the magical story of how he had resurrected the brown and crispy basil with a pint of water and how incredible it was that it had come back to full green leafy goodness within around 24 hours, that I realised he hadn't been joking the day before, and was under the illusion that he had brought it back to life. Needless to say, I explained what had happened through my chuckles and tried to convince him that I hadn't intended to let him think he had magical powers, but I was secretly sorry that I had said anything as I would have liked to hear him tell the story at least once more before bursting his bubble. The most recent example of his capacity to crack me up is down to a music programme shown on the BBC iPlayer called 'Ceol Country' showing (often bizarrely lame) excerpts from various country music festivals around the gaelic speaking world with the occasional subtitle in English. We had been happily calling it 'Ke-Owl' Country until one day I insisted that the Boy Wonder look up the correct pronunciation before we watched another episode. He consulted the oracle on the laptop and after a few moments of looking confused he announced 'Well, that can't be right!'.

I asked him what he'd found, but he was just standing their muttering to himself 'C-peck-mock-l- hmm, that doesn't sound right'. I went and looked over his shoulder, and he was looking at a site which had pronunciations of Irish words, and next to 'Ceol' it said c, e-peck, o-mock, l. The Boy Wonder was very sweetly taking this literally, and it wasn't until I said 'I think it means to pronounce the 'e' as in peck and 'o' as in mock', not to actually pronounce the whole words!', that he said 'I thought that didn't sound right!'. I nearly wet myself, and from now on that programme will forever be called 'C-Peck-Mock-L Country' in our house.

Road Trip!

So, it's only three weeks and one day until the Boy Wonder and I skip the country to travel the US and enjoy all the southern hospitality our cholestorol levels can handle. We began our planning process by booking flights to NY which was fine, and we thought we could fly down to New Orleans, buy a car and carry on our trip up the Mississippi towards Chicago. Then we decided that it might be more fun to buy a car in NY and drive down to New Orleans. Then we realised that it was ridiculously hard to buy a car in the US without an address to register it to and that insurance is similarly hard to come-by but also extortionately expensive, because even though we can both prove that we have clean UK driving records, US insurance would be offered to us on the basis that we have no driving history. So, we are now in the process of working out how much it will cost us to ship our car, the Popemobile, to the US, driving it around amongst monsters three times its size, and then shipping it back, which seems to be a pretty convulted way of getting a bargain, but nonetheless we are undeterred and will continue to try to beg and plead with various institutions in the hope that they will succumb to our charms and offer us insurance which won't eat up our entire budget! So, as the designated home worker, the Boy Wonder has been valiantly ringing the US for the last week in an attempt to make some sense of the needlessly confusing process which seems designed to prevent us from doing what on the face of it seems simple. At least we won't be homesick for red tape...

Everybody loves toast

One of the topics that elicits most conversation in our house is the Boy Wonder's toast stand. I think it was around the time that he was made redundant that the Boy Wonder started coming up with ideas for new businesses he could start, which included such well-formed ideas as 'Let's have a shop full of cool stuff' and 'We should open a record shop where we only sell funky records' (which is pretty much the same as the 'cool stuff' idea, only a little more targetted). However, the idea that will not die is the toast stand. The concept is pretty simple - a toast stand at the station where you can buy hot, buttered toast to eat either while you wait for your train, or indeed on the train if your timing's right. The major flaw in the plan, as I see it, is that start-up would require the business owner to get up and be at the station by around 6 every morning for the beginning of rush hour and the commuter trains. There is nothing about the Boy Wonder, the last 10 years I have spend with him or his stated plans for the future which makes me think that he is capable of such early morning endeavour, and if by some miracle of circadian rythms he actually managed to get himself there in time, the resultant personality failure which occurs when he is low on caffeine is completely inappropriate for customer-facing purposes. Having said that, we have discussed the potential for this venture with several people (the very nature of our conversations being cyclical at best, plus the Boy Wonder feels much maligned at my unerring disbelief in his capacity for early rising)and to date we have not had a single detractor. I put this down largely to great marketing - the slogan 'Everybody Loves Toast' seems to be almost universally accepted as both a snappy advertising message and a universal truth - and the enthusiasm that the Boy Wonder conveys when holding forth on this topic. Unfortunately, said enthusiasm is not limited to the setting-up of such an endeavour (in fact, it pretty much skirts ronud the edge of anything useful like that) and instead is allowed to roam freely amongst all toast related subjects, resulting in plans for the invention (requiring a not-inconsiderable R&D budget) of a bread pen which could be used to write marketing messages on toast and several 'specialist' breads and spreads which would require a fleet of bakers and specialist spread manufacturers to be on hand at all times to provide exotic alternatives to white sliced and jam. I have been accused, mostly by the Boy Wonder, of being insuficiently excited by this project, which is probably true but is also probably down to the fact that it's not quite a pipe dream and therefore because it's vaguely within reach, I feel as though discussing the best design for the patent pending Boy Wonder Toast corners (for holding the toast so that it doesn't get your fingers greasy but also doesn't re-absorb its own sweat and go soggy) is probably best done once you actually have a business to use them. Also, I suspect it's because it's a pretty good idea which would have relatively low start-up and running costs and could actually become a profitable franchise, but it's neither the kind of thing we're cut out for nor the kind of thing we would actually want to do, so it's been relegated to the level of amusing after dinner conversation where I'm sure it will stay.

The Boy Wonder as a Boy

Yesterday we spent the whole evening drinking Lynchburg Lemonades and going through the Boy Wonder's school books from his formative years, a process which left us both on the verge of seizures at various points of the night. For some reason, it appears that the Boy Wonder has barely changed in the last 20+ years meaning his project on 'A Treasure Hunt' featured a banjo, there was a very informative little side-bar about Leo Fender in completely unrelated story and pictures of guitars adorn the pages of most of his work books. The main difference between the young Boy Wonder and that of the present day is the fact that, as a callow youth, the Boy Wonder was convinced he could skateboard. From what I can gather from all concerned, there was no evidence to support this belief but still his stories are peppered with tales of derring do undertaken by skateboarding protagonists (who are called Keith with inexplicable frequency) and almost every character has cause to do an ollie at some point. Tragically, there was even one story about a talking roll of Flypaper Grip Tape trying to wake up a Ray Barbee Deck for a chat, which made me laugh so hard I thought I was going to swallow my tongue. As entertaining as the products of the Boy Wonder's imagination are, there is something intrinsically engaging about his writing style. He points out that he finds it hard to write about things he has seen as 'I haven't a very good memory' and describes his artistic shortcomings when it comes to pastille work as 'substantially over the top with blending colours'. His way with words was charmingly old fashioned at that age, making his reflections on his own abilities seem exceptionally insightful. Coupled with the fact that his handwriting was considerably better between the ages of 7 and 10 than it is now, we have uncovered quite the treasure trove of entertainment.

The New Boy thinks the Boy Wonder's Weird

As a freelancer, the Boy Wonder has had occasion to return to the company he used to work for, and whilst they seem to be systematically making everyone who knows how to do anything redundant, they have taken on a new boy. The Boy Wonder has reported to me that the New Boy thinks he's weird, although he's not sure why. On a separate note, Dan confirmed Ben's theory that the TV looks weird when he's blowing a raspberry.

A tragic event

On Monday, as part of our plan to sort out the house this year, the Boy Wonder spent a valiant few hours, no small amount of money, and a goodly level of energy making the inside of our oven sparkle like a brand new 70s brown oven. On Monday evening, I marvelled at the clean wonderland which is now in our kitchen, enjoyed the delight of being able to see through the door, and was confident that the slightly tricky hinge would be fixed by the next evening. On Tuesday however, we had a sudden resurgence of 'fixing it by breaking it' on the Boy Wonder's part (although not at all his fault) which lead to the spanking clean oven being rendered unusable without spending £78 on new hinges or using only the grill section. My immediate response was to buy another oven, followed very shortly by the desire to somehow preserve all the work the Boy Wonder had done and contemplate the option of 'making good' the already ancient oven in favour of spending slightly more on a new oven which would nevertheless be guaranteed to work for a reasonable period afterwards. So, reluctantly, I tried as gently as I could to encourage the Boy Wonder not to feel too bad about the situation and in fairness, he was already thinking along the same lines, but was having trouble reconciling the practical facts with his desire to at least have one chance to enjoy the clean oveny goodness of the existing model. One upside is that, having been living with a substantially old and knackered oven, the process of choosing a new one is made all the more exciting by the impressive array of features which now come as standard. I was half way through an excited moment with the Boy Wonder whereby we rejoiced at the fact that our new oven will have a light inside it, before I realised that EVERY bloody oven has a light in it! Even the clapped out old oven that my Dad had when I was a kid that had to be lit perilously with a match had a fricking light in it! Nonetheless, the level of excitement we have managed to muster about an oven which is four times more efficient, has glass through which it is actually possible to see and a light inside for aiding the view through the clean glass is almost unbelievable! Roll on 'sometime next week' - the peculiarly vague delivery date we've been given by a company with a broken database who seem unwilling to admit that fact, preferring instead to let themselves appear wantonly incompetant instead. Edited to add: Not only did the new oven arrive on Friday morning, meaning we were without an oven for only three nights in total, but on taking the old, spiteful oven with the malevolent hinges to the tip (sorry, household waste recycling centre) the Boy Wonder and Uptown PJ found a Farfisa Organ in a skip which made the collective days of the whole band. Thus the balance of karma has been restored and we still have a new oven which is delightfully lit, enchantingly clean and thus far smells a little bit like chemicals and old fish. It also lead to a sharp increase in my ability to look interested in websites about Farfisa Organs which is an underrated skill in today's modern world.

Relationship Advice Cliches

I really hate the way 'universally accepted' relationship advice takes the form of cliches which are actually impossible to live by. Some examples which particularly rile me are: 1. Couples who don't row have an unhealthy relationship It's possible that couples who do row made this up to make themselves seem more normal, but I think it's more likely that everyone has their own level of rowing which suits them and they should stick to it. I'm not going to instigate rows so I can have a 'healthy' relationship. 2. Doing things separately keeps the relationship fresh Not sure if this counts when you both want to do things together - I have made attempts to force myself to do things without the Boy Wonder before, and after nearly ten years, I think I am qualified to say that there's nothing more pointless. 3. You should marry someone you can live with, not someone you can't live without The implied exclusivity that one person can't be both pisses me right off. 4. The exciting toe tingling will wear off Then maybe you should too - people who aren't still excited to see each other, or would prefer to spend more time apart should stop telling other people that they must be stupid and immature (although I would probably concede this one in my case) to expect the loved-up stage of their relationship to last. 5. Don't stay with someone because you're scared of being alone The only reason I'm scared of being alone is because I know how much more fun it is to be with the Boy Wonder! 6. Realtionships need work Maybe yours does - mine doesn't. Reading this back, I think I am just fed up of people trying to somehow make out that happy relationships are wrong and that people who enjoy spending time with their partners are either brazen liars, deluded naifs or childish fools who will learn one day that you're not in a proper relationship unless it makes you unhappy. Well screw them and the horse they rode in on.

Fix it by breaking it

The Boy Wonder has a brilliant technique he uses to ascertain the seriousness of technological failure in our household appliances. I call this process 'Fix it by breaking it' and it usually involves a little swearing from him, followed by some laughter from me, then some more in depth swearing from him and finally my collapse into giggles whilst asking 'have you fixed it by breaking it yet?'. Despite the fact that the Boy Wonder is very good at most technological things, something about our TV service or websites which require the user to follow simple instructions send him into a state of complete denial about his abilities and render me useless through laughing. I try to help by pointing out how much better it was before he started fixing it, or reminding him of how long since he started fixing it, which I think he appreciates.

Hair bear bunch

I had my hair cut today - about two thirds of it is gone, meaning it is no longer down to my arse, but just below my shoulders. I was a bit terrified, but the girl who cut it was, as I always find with hairdressers, really nice. She pandered to the fact that I kept saying I didn't know what I wanted, she didn't seem too put out that I turned up looking like an angry tomato after a rather brisk walk down from the office, and she cut my hair (as far I can tell at least) very well. I got back to the office and everyone was very nice about it, which was also a good sign, and none of them believed that the Boy Wonder wouldn't notice the change, and in fairness, I wasn't as confident as I sounded. I got home, with hair tied up (thinking I would make it a bit harder for him!) and spent a few minutes doing nothing out of the ordinary, then a few more minutes turning my head away from him so he could see the teeny tiny ponytail I had. When that didn't get a comment, I took it down and started flapping it about before going in for the kill with a request to scratch my back. As he was scratching my now hairless back, he actually made a comment about someone's hair on TV - I did give him a few seconds to make the connection, but was too impatient to wait any more, so I finally said 'I'm guessing you're not going to mention the fact that I have had nearly all my hair cut off' which apparently triggered the synapses which deal with observation, prompting him to say 'I was just thinking that your hair was different!'. I have to say, whilst I think I am delightfully low maintenance, even I was a little surprised that he didn't notice, but not at all offended, which I think is hard for other people to understand. But I am happy to live with someone who isn't observant about my looks - it means I can get away with wearing a pair of paint-covered pyjama bottoms around the house most of the time, leave my crazy hair to do what it wants, lie around unshowered with greasy hair when I'm hungover and prance around in clothes with holes in them without worrying what he thinks, which I think is well worth the somewhat-less-than-annual hair-noticing debacle!

Overheard in my house

Me (coming downstairs): 'What are you doing?' Boy Wonder: 'Just looking at tambourines on E-bay...' It's a good job we found each other.

Conceptual laundry basket problem

The fact that the Boy Wonder and I don't really row, I put down to the fact that there are a few things he does which I have chosen to find endearing rather than infuriating. For example, he has a peculiar habit of putting teaspoons in the sink, despite the fact that he's making coffee closer to the dishwasher. But his tenuous understanding of the idea of a laundry basket is one which is easier to enjoy. We have a relatively large laundry basket in our bedroom, which I have come to think of as a place where laundry goes. The Boy Wonder on the other hand, seems to view 'laundry basket' as a kind of concept which encompasses any area containing dirty laundry. This belief is, in turn, responsible for the phenomenon of 'sock nests', little fluffy piles of used socks which often germinate in recently removed shoes before sending out shoots and spores to corners by the sofa and heaps in the kitchen. Occasionally, some plucky sock will actually start colonising the washing machine, inevitably hiding in there just before a white wash goes in. Edit - reading this back I have realised that this post makes it sound as though my saint-like patience is the only thing stopping us from a quickie divorce which is definitely not the case. Not only do I have an array of infuriating habits which I am sure the Boy Wonder ignores with equal if not enhanced levels of maturity, but we actually just get along very well too.

100 things (61 - 70)

61. I love local radio, which plays host to a delightful selection of crazy people with crazier opinions who love nothing more than to voice them on air, often between the hours of midnight and four am. We are lucky enough to be able to pick up Radio Cambridgeshire and 3 Counties Radio at our house, so not only can we enjoy the dulcet tones of Jeremy Sallis, but we can also tune in to Ern and Vern for some late night single entendre action. I rarely listen to any other live radio and cannot understand how people don't actually know about local BBC services, let alone enjoy them in all their glory! 62. I could eat crisps until my arteries clog and I keel over, but I don't out of concern for my health. Technically I am limited to one packet a day, although sometimes this extends to one really large packet, which is offset by the days where I don't eat any. I generally prefer savoury snacks to sweet, and my tolerance for crisps is far greater than my tolerance for chocolate. 63. I don't like ice-cream or cake and feel as though this in some way makes me freakish, particularly since last night I caught about 10 minutes of an episode of Friends in which Ross was actively mocked for not liking ice-cream as though it's the same as not liking air. 64. I don't have any irrational fears - all my slightly peculiar dislikes (sticky hands, poorly maintained toilets etc) are relatively well managed, and I don't have panic attacks or anything. I'm not scared of insects, in fact I actively like most kinds of bugs, I'm not great with heights but only when I feel precarious, so I can cope with most situations and can overcome most cases of vertigo with by thinking logically and forcing myself to suck it up. I like all animals, don't mind any particular form of transport, I don't exactly enjoy spending time in hospitals or going to the dentist, but I don't even really get nervous about either, and the only things I am really scared of is stuff you should be scared of like people I love suffering, so I assume that's pretty much normal and everyone has to put up with it. It's weird because a part of me would like to conquer something inside myself, but I really am not sure if any of my particular foibles would count. 65. If I could live with a pet, I would love to be a trainer for guide dog puppies. I don't think I could ever get a kitten or a puppy as the Boy Wonder and I are both more inclined towards going to an animal shelter and taking home the cat or dog which nobody else wants or that has a slightly gammy element to it. As such, I think that getting involved in guide dog puppy training would be a brilliant way to have a puppy for a period of time and then replace it with another puppy. It's not ideal - obviously I would have to consider whether I would be able to actually give a puppy up, but I do think that if I knew I was doing it for someone who needs the help a seeing eye or hearing dog could offer, I could probably manage it. 66. I love doing things on Friday nights - it feels like a bonus weekend day and I can easily forget a day at work after a couple of hours being sociable. It's really easy to lie around on a Friday night, but unfortunately it does feel a little bit too much like every other weeknight, whereas going out on Friday night makes Saturday feel like Sunday and then you have a bonus weekend day to enjoy before the horrors of work on a Monday. 67. I would like to wear dungarees, but fear the connotations as I already look butch enough without adding to the lesbian accessories. The practicalities of going to the loo are a little hairy, but I would put up with that for the fun of having a pouch to keep sweets in. I have consistently forbidden the Boy Wonder to have anything to do with dungarees, so it's wildly hypocritical to even lust after them myself, but I cannot pretend that I don't think about them and sometimes I'm literally wearing them in my dreams... 68. I am intolerant of PMS/PMT which makes me a little uncomfortable. On the one hand, I refuse to see it as an acceptable excuse for rudeness and poor behaviour, but having never suffered from it myself, I wonder whether I am a little harsh on those who do. However, I have suffered many other symptoms of PMS and have felt irritable and ratty, but never used it as an excuse for being unreasonable. I am frequently unreasonable for no reason which I am quite happy with, but I don't see how your personality can be completely altered once a month without there being any inner moment of thinking 'I seem to be taking this a little seriously/I think I am overreacting/maybe this is not worth the bother'. But then I can't really be bothered with rows generally, so maybe this is more to do with that than PMS. 69. Is the funniest number, and if I haven't grown out of finding it amusing by now then I doubt I will. 70. I am learning geography. When I was at school we did environmental geography which was pretty interesting, but really only taught me about rocks breaking and oxbow lakes, whereas I would actually like to learn a bit about where stuff is in the world. Last week I got a TV quiz question about oceans right based on actual knowledge rather than wild guesswork, which was a treat, and I put this down to the fact that I bought the Boy Wonder a map of the world which now lives in our bedroom and helpfully transmits knowledge to my brain through sheer power of its presence in the room.