Woke up with absolutely no idea of the eureka moment about to occur in the bathroom. Bath, teeth, flossed a little bit, nothing out of the ordinary. Attempt to shave, but last razor is on last legs. I’m busy hacking away like a tired peasant in a cornfield when, out of the corner of my eye, I spot another option lying provocatively on the shelf: Isabel’s pink leg-razor. Isabel is still in bed and what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her. Amazing. It’s all over in a flash, a clean shave, my skin all silky smooth. Pink girly razor: the best a man can get…I put it back, so no one will ever know. Skip to work, delighted that the years of hacking away and patching up cuts with bits of loo roll might be over.
Isabel found dark stubbly hair in her razor. Firmly told not to do it again or she’ll tell Johnson.
‘Evening, boys.’
‘Evening, Isabel.’
The four of us are in the pub. Johnson is behaving like he’s in an interrogation room. He squints suspiciously at Isabel.
‘Well, since I’m the honorary bloke, I’ll get the first round.’
While we sit in silence, she goes to the bar, returning minutes later with four pints of bitter, four whisky chasers and four packets of pork scratchings. Everyone starts to relax.
Three pints later, we are playing one of Isabel’s traveller drinking games. A pint after that, Andy is explaining to us how breasts vary from one nation to the next. Then, Isabel tells every
one that I use a Ladyshave. Then Johnson tells us his post-pee dribble trick.
You have to trick it. Finish the pee, shake as usual, put away, zip up, pretend you’re leaving then retrieve when it thinks it’s in the clear and have another shake. I tried it and it works. Andy did too. Can’t believe I’m almost thirty and only now have I truly mastered the art of urinating.
Rest of evening spent discussing where to hold the door handle on the way out of the toilet. I always hold it at the top corner, where other people don’t touch it. Johnson reckons that doesn’t work because it’s the bit least likely to be cleaned properly. Even though it’s touched less, the germs have longer to prosper. Andy uses his shirtsleeve or waits for someone else to come in. Isabel thinks we should get out more.
Andy is unconscious, perhaps dead, on our sofa. Johnson called to say he fell asleep on the night bus and woke up in a depot near Hounslow. I feel as sick as I did on the third day of our honeymoon after eating the warm lamb rogan josh.
Isabel, on the other hand, is eating toast and contemplating a fry-up.
‘I think I’ll skip the next few pub outings. You three are lightweights.’
‘Fine by me.’
‘And it really is true, isn’t it? Blokes can spend a whole night in a pub talking about absolutely nothing whatsoever. No “how was the
honeymoon?” or “how’s work?” or “sorry things didn’t work out with the waitress” or “terrible what’s going on in Bangladesh”.’
‘Blokes don’t need to natter on the whole time.’
‘Oh, I see. Okay. Still, at least I know how to shake my willy.’
Johnson was right—women should not be allowed to gatecrash bloke-nights.
It’s exhausting.
We’re not Italian.
Life is too short.
We spend our (too short) lives being nattered at by women. It is therefore only sensible to think of male company as a pause between bouts of nattering. Isabel can’t see this because she is a woman. While she made a good honorary bloke last night, she has reverted to type this morning by nattering. Even if she did make an excellent fry-up.
Met Isabel four years ago today. Seems like much, much longer. Not in a bad way.
Dinner at Andrew Edmunds (note for next time, refuse downstairs table if upstairs full and go somewhere else instead because left smelling like lamb chops), then a tour of all the bars we’d got drunk in back when we were all excited and unfamiliar with each other. Isabel gets super-nostalgic: ‘We sat on this sofa, you ordered those drinks, you tripped on that step and ruined the dress of a girl
sitting at that table. And you were wearing that horrible off-centre skintight jumper.’
I explain, as I did at the time, that it was bias-cut, very fashionable, chosen by a fashion PR who’d felt sorry for me. She explains, as she did at the time, that I will never be fashionable with my sticky-out ears and my sticky-out nose and my pointy little head. And I remember why I fell in love with her. And how we met on a speed-dating evening neither of us had planned to go to.
What if she hadn’t gone along to support her recently dumped friend? What if my mate Tom hadn’t forced me to go along with him because he wasn’t going to turn up on his own ‘like some creepy pervert’?
‘Hello, I’m William.’
‘Hello, William. I’m Alison. Isn’t it hard to meet people these days? Just so busy at the firm…working all the hours. Not a min, simply not a min to meet a man. Wouldn’t be here otherwise, course. If I had some sensible job, you know. Not going to meet someone between my flat and the office, am I?, which is the only time I ever get out these days. I’m not going to fall in love with the fat middle-aged guy who looks up my skirt on the Tube every morning, am I? That’s why I’m here. Not because I’m desperate.’
‘Hi, my name is William.’
‘Right, William. I’ll be straight with you. I’ve been mucked about by men far too much and I’m sick of you lying bastards. Yes, I’m blonde and yes, I have very large breasts but that doesn’t mean I’m a tart. I want to know, right now, before we go a single second further, if you’re seriously looking for love, if you want to have a relationship. You know, with actual dating and cinemas and walks
in the country. I’m not interested in wasting any more time with no-hopers. Capiche?’
‘Good evening, I’m William.’
‘William. Charlotte. Do you ride? Horses, that is. Hahahahaha. I love riding. I’m still talking about horses. Hahahahahahahaha-haha-snort. I ride three. Still horses, William, you filthy-minded man. Hahahahaha. Another glass of ssshampypampy? Oh go on. Oops. Spilt it. Bit squiffy, which is odd because I’ve only had two glasses. We should go riding sometime. Not talking about horses any more, William, hahahahahaha.’
‘Marriage is a wonderful invention;
But, then again, so is a bicycle repair kit.’B
ILLY
C
ONNOLLY
Married for a month, only one proper argument and that was under immense airport-related stress. Don’t know what Johnson was worried about. If anything, life with a wife is even more exciting than life with a fiancée. Apart from the John Lewis thing, the Honeymoon That Dare Not Speak Its Name and the new, tougher line in bathroom politics, my first thirty-one days hitched have been nothing short of blissful. Everything is the same but everything is different. In a good way.
And I like my job. It doesn’t matter that I am never going to get a half-mill bonus to blow on a gin palace called
That’s My Buoy
.Or that I will never be able to splash ten grand on a corked bottle of wine in a snooty restaurant. Or that I won’t have a penthouse serviced by an elevator that has a retractable floor which, if required, drops enemies into a shark-infested swimming pool. Well, it matters a bit but the main thing is I no longer work for
Cat World
. I have a great boss. I get paid enough to enjoy the simple things in married life: the occasional dinner out, the odd weekend away, a subscription to
Money Can’t Buy Happiness Monthly
.
None.
One.
A new marital rule has been snuck in before I’m even properly awake. It was Isabel’s turn to make the tea, which she did and brought back to bed, looking like butter wouldn’t melt. But the tea tasted bitter and strange. Gave her a ‘this-tea-tastes-strange’ look; she pretended not to notice, went on reading her magazine. Had another taste, looked at her again.
‘Darling, there’s something wrong with the tea.’
‘It’s got goat’s milk in it. You can’t taste the difference.’
‘I can taste the difference.’
‘You can’t. It tastes exactly the same.’
‘If it tastes exactly the same, why would we be having this conversation?’
‘We’re not having cow’s milk any more. It’s hard to digest.’
‘What?’
‘Cow’s milk is designed for calves.’
‘We’re not goats either.’
‘What?’
‘We’re not goats. We’re humans.’
‘Look, goat’s milk is much better for you.’
‘But goat’s milk tastes like cat spray.’
‘You should try drinking tea without sugar as well. It’s bad for you.’
‘What?’
In our wedding vows, we had both promised to honour, love and obey each other. At the time, it seemed like a good idea. We’re
a modern couple. We were both up for a bit of obeying. Rather sexist if it was only Isabel who said it. The vicar, in one of his compulsory marriage classes, had explained that obeying in a marital context didn’t mean doing what someone said anyway. Oh no, no, no, no. It followed its original Latin meaning, ‘to listen’, as in ‘to empathise’, as in ‘to be lovely to each other all the time’. Which seemed to have slipped Isabel’s mind this morning.
‘But I like sugar in my tea.’
‘You’ll get used to it without. It’s only because I love you, and care about your health, darling.’
And with a gentle pat of the bed linen, she signified that this discussion was over.
Henceforth, tea shall be taken with goat’s milk but without sugar
. So speaketh the wife.
Feeling quite put upon, I ordered a double espresso at Moor-gate. Then drank sugary cow’s-milky tea all morning. Then ate a whole packet of nuts to reduce sugar-and caffeine-poisoning effects before lunch. Then had no appetite for lunch and had to eat a sandwich at 5 p.m. so then had no appetite for dinner.
NOTE TO SELF: now that you are married, you must capitulate more often. Resistance is inadvisable. At best, it will throw a day’s eating patterns out of kilter. At worst, it will make you wonder what on earth you let yourself in for when you said ‘I do.’ And it’s far too soon to start thinking like that.
Not only am I not working on
Cat World
any more; not only have I joined a reputable magazine that does proper grown-up stuff about proper grown-up things like politics and economics and how to look good in a cheap suit, but I am getting a pay rise. Thank you, editor, for recognising my hard work and dedication over the last twelve months.
None.
‘Congratulations. I’m really pleased for you,’ says Johnson on our way to the Tube. ‘Obviously, bum-licking is seen as a more useful skill on this magazine than the ability to string a sentence together.’
‘You mean bum-licking is a more useful skill than hosting and winning the World Throw the Paper Aeroplane Out the Window and See if You Can Hit a Traffic Warden Championships?’
‘Teacher’s gerbil.’
‘Low-income earner.’
‘Bottom-dweller.’
‘Tramp.’
I know Johnson is secretly pleased for me—even if he is a miserable old bastard. He’s always been my mentor—it was him who saved me from
Cat World.
If he hadn’t lied about how good I was, I wouldn’t have got tea-maker on
Life & Times
. I’d still be tasting new Whiskas flavours every month in my famous ‘Good enough for your dinner plate?’ cat-food column.
Isabel is much more excited. She’s popped the champagne before I’ve stepped through the door, even before I can point out that the champagne almost certainly cost more than my pay rise is worth.
‘Do you want to go out and celebrate?’ she says.
‘No, let’s have a night in. Just the two of us.’
‘Why, I’d love to, Grandpa.’
This is another great thing about being hitched. We can have a quiet Friday night in. We can even watch
Gardener’s World
.And
Have I Got News For You
. And the news. With a cup of hot cocoa. Because we’re incredibly old and incredibly boring and we don’t
have the willpower to go out at the weekends and stand in loud bars communicating by sign language any more.
Bliss.
Except upstairs is having a party. I know this because two hours after the DJ starts, one of them (the actor, claims to have been in
EastEnders
, has a nose ring) comes down to warn us they’re having a party.
Until that point, I’d been planning his and his two flatmates’ execution intricately. It would involve a pitchfork, a corkscrew, two bicycle pumps, a pair of size-eleven ice skates and one of those old-fashioned elevators with the iron concertina sliding doors. Isabel tells me to stop being so aggressive, they’re only young, they’re allowed to have a party. Then the doorbell goes, the guy who says he’s from
EastEnders
says he’s having a party and, instead of ripping his head off or even saying something dry like ‘no kidding’, I say, ‘Oh right, a party. Good-o,’ and gyrate my hips a bit. ‘No problem at all, thanks awfully for letting me know.’
Now it’s 3 a.m.
Would forgo ice skates and corkscrew for simple but effective baseball bat. Isabel ear-plugged and valerianed, dead to the world. Really thought she was actually, prodded her to check, got a tut. How can she sleep through this?
And why, at the age of twenty-nine and almost a year, am I still living in a middle-floor flat, trapped like a noise-sensitive piece of ham in a sandwich of irritation? A sandwich on a platter of other rundown sandwiches full of people who spend all day mugging each other. So tired.
Now it’s 4 a.m.
Scratch previous comments on being happy with lack of half-million bonus/yacht/shark-lift. Am putting the flat up for sale tomorrow morning. I don’t care how far the housing market has crashed. And when I sell, I’m moving to the Isle of Skye.
Surprise, surprise, Isabel’s not sure about the Isle of Skye idea. She says she likes living in Finsbury Park. It’s colourful and multicultural and vibrant and alive. She likes our flat, she likes being near her friends. She’s hardly going to commute to work from Skye, is she?
‘Two months ago, you wanted us to move to a flat around the corner from your favourite bar in Quito. The Isle of Skye is a lot closer than Quito.’
‘Two months ago, I was stressed about the wedding. Now, I’m blissfully married and very happy here, thank you very much.’
But I play my trump card…
‘Think of the space, the trees, the nature, the organic farm we could start. With yaks and llamas and our own biltong shop.’
She really loves biltong, enough to hesitate for a split second.
But only a split second.
‘We can move to the outer reaches of civilisation when we’re in our thirties.’
When I suggest I am in my thirties, practically speaking, she says we’re married now and that it’s not ‘I’ but ‘we’, ‘I’ might be practically middle-aged, but ‘we’ are still almost two years off.
By the time I have had my morning coffee (I am allowed cow’s milk and sugar because I’m grumpy), I am recovered. I like living in Finsbury Park too. I like being near my friends. I like our first marital home.
Things continue to improve.
Although I was dreading today’s chore—getting the wedding ring I thought I’d managed to dodge—it couldn’t have been easier: turned up, put my finger through a spaghetti measure, gave the man with the monocle £300 and it was all done. Easy. Unlike the first ring I ever bought.
Unless he’s a surfer or a scoundrel who tries to stall for time with a ‘friendship’ ring, the engagement ring is the first ring a man buys.
Two months’ salary is the rule: it’s fun watching flashy bankers with a penchant for ordering champagne in pubs work that one out. They go pale.
I am obviously not a banker but I didn’t have two months’ salary tucked under the mattress either the day I decided I would marry Isabel. I ransacked everything, from my Post Office account to my piggy bank, scrabbled for coins in the sofa, my old suit trousers and the hard-to-reach bit around the handbrake of my car. I had a princely £1,426.32.
‘How much would you like to spend?’ asked the man with the monocle.
‘Oh, two thousand. Maybe two thousand five hundred,’ I replied without hesitation. I think it was because I’d had to ring a doorbell to get into the shop. And then been shown in by a security guard. It intimidated me into making wildly inaccurate summations of wealth. The man with the monocle still looked unimpressed, scrabbled around in the dusty bit of the display and found some itty-bitty diamond rings.
There is a cruel diamond ratio you only learn when you have to buy one. A small high-quality one costs the same as a large low-quality one. Girls know the difference, which means you must ignore the size-is-everything rule, and go for quality. That was Johnson’s advice. (Andy suggested I write a poem and engrave it on the side of a silver tankard instead.)
So I brushed away the big sparkler that would have impressed my ignorant mates and went for the near-perfect, near-invisible solitaire.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she had lied when I’d got down on my knee, done my speech and opened the velvet box. Still, she’d already burst into tears and said yes by that point, which is what she was supposed to do.
Lunch at Alex’s to meet his new girlfriend (who he seems to have rustled up despite his alleged grief at being dumped by Watszerface) and to go through wedding photos (which, apparently, he can’t wait to see). Consider knifing myself to get out of going but it is made clear that this is not an option. I must stop behaving like a child. It’s very unattractive. Alex, bless him, has made a Moroccan tagine to go with his new Moroccan-themed terrace and his new conveniently Moroccan girlfriend. Don’t know what’s wrong with roast chicken. It is a
Sunday
lunch after all. He says Sunday lunch is the new Saturday night and threatens to make this the first of several ‘day dos’ through summer.
Despite my silent, desperate prayers, it doesn’t rain, the tagine isn’t burnt beyond recognition, he doesn’t suffer anaphylactic shock from the couscous and the afternoon is simply splendid.
Although I’m left exchanging pleasantries with the Moroccan girlfriend while Alex calls Isabel babes a lot, says all the right things about how wonderful the dress/flowers/father’s speech was, and touches her on the arm repeatedly.
The only other way to kill time is to go to the toilet a lot. Alex’s flat, sorry, maisonette, sorry split-level garden apartment, is so minimalist that you can’t even find the doors without feeling your way around like a blind person. So it wasn’t my fault that on the nth pretend toilet stop, I accidentally found myself in his office/spare room/mirrored gym absent-mindedly wondering how to sabotage the chest-press.
Or that I accidentally spotted a torn photograph of me poking out from under a sheet in the corner.
Or that I accidentally lifted the sheet to discover bundles of photos from the wedding, all chopped up.