‘Just a minute,’ said this friend of ours, opening his front door a crack. ‘We haven’t quite finished our regular Saturday morning argument.’ He retreated and the muffled rat-a-tat of conjugal warfare sounded in the distance.
‘Right, you can come in now,’ he said a few moments later. Silence hung in the air and his wife flung a staccato ‘Hello’ over her shoulder before disappearing into the kitchen to make coffee. I dearly wanted to ask if they saved everything up for weekly outbursts on purpose, or if the general tenor of Saturdays brought grievances into the open unplanned.
Because it is noticeable that, however closely knit we consider ourselves during the rest of the week, Saturdays can have a distinctly unravelling effect on our family relationships.
Monday is a bleary day. Tuesday we get into our stride. Wednesday is early closing. Thursday is a culinary challenge. Friday is lovely. By Sunday all is peace and pottering and unfinished crossword puzzles.
But Saturday is rather like wading through treacle. It is sweeping round people’s feet, staggering round the shops, carburettors on the kitchen floor and living-rooms full of other people’s husbands dropping in to borrow a cupful of 1-inch screws.
I try. Sometimes on a well-adjusted Friday evening I do tomorrow’s sweeping and polishing. Airtight tins clamp down on home-made cakes. Weekend clothes are laid out. Comfortable, gay outfits to encourage bright, easy-going thoughts. Hair is washed and nails are trimmed. So are lawn edges if there is time. Tomorrow all will be a fiesta.
Olé, I croak, as I stumble downstairs next morning to pay the milkman. He’s been up and hard at work for hours, and to make it worse he looks incredibly fit and cheerful. My husband is another early bird. His morning gesture towards peaceful co-existence is to wash up last night’s cocoa mugs before climbing into his clean, bright sports shirt and crawling under the car. I can only see his turned up toes in the drive, but they look fit and cheerful.
I will make a real effort this morning. I will fill the house with Breakfast Special and do something exotic and herby with half a dozen eggs. Moving purposefully towards the kitchen sink my good intentions thud drearily into limbo. The sink, bleached and refreshed the night before, is now a turgid pool of cold cocoa and floating spent matches.
The children are lobbing toothpaste about upstairs, the cat is proudly laying something sinister and furry and dead at my feet, and whatever I whip up for breakfast will have to be based on the one available egg. ‘Let’s make an early start,’ says my husband. ‘I’ve cleaned the car.’ (The drying-up cloths show evidence of this.) Now comes the centre-piece of our morning: the Saturday shopping trip. In our nearest town there is a wonderful supermarket but no attached parking facilities. Sometimes, as we cruise slowly past for the fifth or sixth time, a space appears and we tuck ourselves into the kerb. But so over-abundant and enthusiastic are our traffic wardens that there is barely time to whizz our trolley round, snatching frantically in all directions before they close in with their little notebooks. Which explains why we arrived home last week with three drums of curry and no butter.
At the open-air vegetable market parking is even more of a problem. Sometimes, in fact, it is necessary for my husband to drive endlessly round its perimeter while I hurriedly lob heads of celery in through the car’s open windows.
So far the family have been more or less on my side. Food is food. But should the need arise for a dressmaking pattern or a new lipstick it is a very different matter. My ideal store would allow pushchairs on Saturdays. It would have a permanent Father Christmas/Mickey Mouse film show and/or free half-hour rides on clockwork rocking horses. There would be room to move, up-to-date buyers, air conditioning and staff who liked people. Not to mention a car park. I don’t want to dwell on this point but recently we collected a parking ticket, drove round to the magistrates’ court counting out the £2 fine, and couldn’t find anywhere to park to pay the thing.
Home again, shopping unloaded, and now it’s a race to get the potatoes on and the lunch organized before sportin’ life takes over in the living-room.
Sometimes on Saturday afternoons I drag out the mower and do noisy things in the front lawn. As a gesture it fails miserably. Either the blades are set too high or too low or something drops off. Pitifully I tap on the window with a screwdriver but the smoke in there is unhealthily dense and the commentator’s voice is reaching a cracked crescendo as everybody’s favourite but my husband’s races past the post.
As soon as I hear, ‘shush, it’s the football results’ I know it’s time to put the kippers on. I don’t like kippers myself but in some mysterious way they have become an integral part of Saturday tea in our house. For this reason I always feel a bit sick on Saturday evening. But I comfort myself with the prospect of a quiet evening watching the telly.
Have you ever watched Saturday evening television? Roll on Sunday.