MARY: So Giles and I are off to Florence on Wednesday to attend the wedding of Gug, who is almost a family member. Gug weighs not an ounce more than nine stone and Giles, who is a little envious of Gug because our daughters and I love him so much, refers to him as Mr Puniverse.
It’s almost exactly ten years since we first met Gug one Saturday lunchtime, following which he came to work for me for ‘two days’ but swiftly made himself indispensable.
It was David Smith, the Head of English at a local school, who introduced us. David had arranged an end-of-term barbeque in his garden so that those sixth formers who wanted to go into journalism (in those days it was still a possibility that there might be a job available), could meet some people with hands-on experience of the trade. David had rounded up ten local practitioners including Giles and myself, Cyril and Ursula (who then lived locally as their children were at school in Marlborough), the then-top interviewer of the Sunday Telegraph and the then-Times parliamentary correspondent.
I remembered seeing this young figure, who resembled nothing so much as Hergé’s Tintin, standing on the edge of a conversational cluster which contained Cyril and the parliamentary correspondent of The Times. I noted that Tintin was silent but was laughing at all the right jokes.
I introduced myself to him and Tintin/Gug replied that actually he and I had spoken on the phone during the time he had worked at the Spectator as a part-time receptionist while he was a student at UCL, and when he had been put in charge of compiling the Spectator Book of Wit and Wisdom. Gug had sent me the entries he’d selected to represent my own wit and wisdom from my ‘Dear Mary’ problem page, for my approval.
‘I remember!’ I cried. ‘Because the examples of my wit and wisdom you chose were the very ones I would have chosen myself.’
Now I’d actually met this person who was so clearly exactly on my wavelength it went through my mind that I should try to extract more journalistic services from him.
It emerged that he had had to leave London since he had now graduated from UCL and none of his student friends wanted to go on paying rent for their shared flat in London. As he couldn’t afford to live alone he had been forced to give up his job at the Spectator and boomerang back to his GP in Oxford father’s house.
It was only June so he now had time on his hands before starting his new term on a one year teachers’ training course in September, so I opportunistically asked Gug would he like to do a couple of days’ work for me.
‘I’ll pay you the minimum wage,’ I said. ‘And you’ll have free delicious food cooked by Giles.’
‘What would you want me to do?’ asked Gug, smiling.
‘I don’t know exactly…’ I pondered, ‘…just generally obey me.’
When he burst out laughing and said, ‘all right’ I realised here was a soul mate.
Gug arrived (late – he always has been late ever since). He didn’t need to obey me; he took it on himself to walk the dog, tutor the (then) children, mend bicycle tyres, go shopping, force me to go on walks and to Weight Watchers, read aloud to me and the children, and generally be just good company. The French writer Alexandre Dumas, fils, said, ‘The chain of marriage is so heavy that it takes two to bear it, sometimes three.’ Gug’s eventual residence in the cottage was this theory borne out in practice and shown to work.
Obviously there was no romantic relationship between me and Gug, but he served as a human buffer between me and Giles during those ten years in which he worked for us – sporadically, but often enough – and as his career advanced, sometimes I worked for him. He got on with what Giles called ‘his own little career’ in journalism, into which he was successfully springboarded through his association with us. And then he bought ‘his own little cottage’ four miles away.
Until Gug was snatched from us by his own inevitable marriage, his presence helped ours. Not just because he is never bad tempered. He was able to run down to whatever room Giles was shouting from to find out what he wanted, and the sight of this other human standing in front of him would shock Giles out of his gardening trance and cause him to be more reasonable in whatever request or demand he was about to make of me.
Gug was the third person carrying the chain of our marriage. Then there were more Gugs, a series of bed blockers, as Giles uncharitably referred to them, in the form of the three young people who were at the start of their careers at that stage and one by one stepped into the Gug void. There was Karl, Gug Two, now head of scholars at an Oxford prep school; there was George, Gug Three, now running a Scottish stately home in the Borders. And there was once Syrah, a female Gug, who was by far the most efficient of all the people who worked for me. She virtually tied me to my chair and made me process one bit of paper at a time. No job was too menial for Syrah, once a saddo spinster who spent her weekends wandering on Salisbury Plain with a scotch egg and a flask of whisky in her pocket, now a happily married mother of two with a global audience for her botanical artworks. The Gugs came singly and they could be found sleeping either in the Slit or the Pointy Room.
Giles referred to them as the bed blockers, but secretly he enjoyed their company for reasons earlier outlined. They would find him very funny, they liked his food – particularly his full English breakfasts with black pudding – they admired the way he grew and chopped his own logs and most pertinently they would go to see what he wanted when he called me from another room while I was sitting down with a load of newsprint or other paperwork on my lap. The trouble is that the vintage Gugs have all got their own little lives now; they are too successful to want to come and skivvy for us.
GILES: One of the reasons why Mary liked the Gugs was that they were all good drinkers, while I can only process three units per day. If I have more, I develop a condition called Fish Eye where my eyes change shape and I can’t stop yawning, the yawns often culminating in a high-pitched yelp.
Being bed blockers was only a rite of passage, though, I always knew that one day they would leave us with Empty Nest Syndrome – just as Fleur and Rosie have.
MARY: Some say the clue to Giles’s sometimes unreasonable behaviour is simply that he has never worked in an office. It is working in an office, or at least in a workplace scenario with colleagues, which civilises us. We can behave badly at home where we can assume the fellow occupants will forgive us because they love us, but our colleagues can’t be assumed to be even fond of us and therefore we can’t behave badly in the workplace. People talk about the School of Life, but Giles has never attended that school.
‘There were three people in the marriage and it was a little bit crowded,’ Princess Diana famously told Martin Bashir. But, in my opinion, had the third person been no romantic threat, she would have welcomed his or her presence.
As our friend Tom points out, ‘Not everyone can afford to hire a human buffer as you hired the Gugs. But it’s certainly true that the presence of a third party in a household usually makes a couple behave in a more civilised manner – in most households this role is taken by a child.’
‘Or,’ as Giles points out, ‘in the past, a servant.’
Now we no longer have the Gugs nor our children in the household, we have to find ways of getting along without them. This was why it was so useful to our marriage when Gogglebox came along.
While we wait for each programme to begin, we end up chatting to each other for about three hours a week in total. Some of our chatter eventually gets broadcast and we have been amazed to hear from Giles’s sister’s, who monitors Twitter, that people have found something we said funny. How interesting that other people have found our chit chat funny when we thought of it as irritable backbiting. It certainly gives you a new perspective on your life.
But also, because both of us are so busy, we had got out of the habit of discussing things and so now these scheduled chats became our opportunity to revive our ‘parliament’, which used to take place in the Volvo in the days as we drove the children to school when we would discuss forthcoming business every morning.
Gradually we realised we were enjoying the Gogglebox ‘preambles’ – indeed they became an essential cog in the wheels of the marriage because, as with the counsellor all those years ago, we had to take it in turns to speak. And then we realised that we had a huge amount in common, although, as Alain de Botton has pointed out, you are barking up the wrong tree if you are searching for a partner who is compatible with you. What you need to be focussing on is honing the skill of negotiating the inevitable incompatibilities between you and your partner.
But to get back to Gug One, I think the very best thing about his influence on the domestic happiness quotient within the cottage was that Gug himself is a happy person and laughter comes easily to him. He laughed almost continuously – but not sycophantically. He laughed at the right jokes.
It made us think that we were funny. This boosted our morale. Moreover, if this clever, sympathetic young observer found our irritated backchat hilarious rather than harrowing – then maybe our marriage wasn’t as bad as it sounded to us.
But the truth is that man and woman were not designed to spend twenty-four hours a day in each other’s company. What underpins most successful marriages is the knowledge that irritation, if it arises, will only be short-lived since you will soon have an eight-hour break, at least, from the perpetrator because he or she will have gone out to work while you can bask in the blissful mental privacy of having the dwelling to yourself and thereby build up the reserves of good nature which will allow you to greet your partner’s return from the coal face with genuine enthusiasm.
MARY: Giles is still complaining bitterly about ‘having’ to go ‘abroad’ to Gug’s wedding. ‘I know you are over-subscribed with guests,’ he told Gug, ‘so I’d like to help you out. I’ll volunteer to give up my place to make room for someone who might be chippy they haven’t been asked.’
‘But Giles!’ cried Gug. ‘You’re practically my father! I couldn’t possibly not have you there.’
Giles has been acting Basil Fawlty re the travel arrangements. Quite frankly his company has been intolerable for the last three days, especially without Gug to dissipate the tension.
GILES: I believe that trips abroad should be planned and run like a military operation and what I find difficult to grasp in the modern age is that so many things are left to happen spontaneously.
For example, my inability to book flights online, check-in online etcetera meant that I had left Mary in charge of organising our trip to Italy for the wedding of Gug, a family friend (we leave tomorrow) and as a result I suffered from anxiety because she had only booked three nights’ accommodation in Florence for a six-night trip!
If left to me to arrange the trip I would’ve tried to go to Thomas Cook, purchased travellers cheques, purchased a new money belt, and worried constantly about inoculations and how to avoid foreign pickpockets. I like everything planned beforehand and not arranged on the hoof.
MARY: These days, if twenty-something ‘children’ are involved, you can’t plan trips abroad like a military operation. No arrangements can be set in stone since the Young now change plans right up till the last moment and I didn’t want to book rooms if we weren’t going to use them. Re the boarding cards: Giles is the only one who has to have his printed out. This wastes endless time because, of course, all the printers in the village, as is the nature of printers, are broken. The rest of us can have electronic boarding cards sent to the wallets in our iPhones.
GILES: Mary found it annoying that I went missing for forty minutes on the way through Departures at Stansted and didn’t answer my (analogue) mobile. The problem was that after my luggage was forensically searched I repacked the mobile in my cabin baggage instead of my pocket so I couldn’t hear it ringing.
But why did I try to conceal a jumbo-sized deodorant spray in my luggage in the first place, knowing that it would be spotted and, of course, thrown away?
One: to see if the security system worked – my window on the world is the Daily Mail and I worry that low-cost airlines may be cutting back on safety or maintenance. Two: I must enjoy being searched. Three: I think I have a thing about bossy women in uniforms because at the back of my mind I may believe I deserve to be punished. For that reason I gave my searcher just enough cheek to annoy her by asking, ‘Is there any reason why the searching has to proceed at such a glacial pace?’ but not enough to get myself arrested.
On the whole, I see myself as a classic type of English man: 50 per cent Basil Fawlty, 20 per cent Alan Partridge, 20 per cent Mr Bean (especially when travelling) and only ten per cent David Niven. I think the future is female because men’s inability to adapt to change and to multitask renders us like so many defeated generals with our heads in our hands. At my public school I was educated to be a leader of men and yet my family consists entirely of women and I have never worked in an office or in an organisation. Hence there is a feeling of redundancy – except on Thursday evenings when I swing into action by putting out the relevant recycling bins for Friday mornings.
GILES: This morning, Mary and I find ourselves tucked away in a musty corner of a quiet café located in the northern quarter of the Piazza della Repubblica. Over café Americanos we both stared in silence at the passers-by. My newly acquired anorak, a Berghaus l shell-hooded lightweight model, which would provide the most impermeable protection from the rain but not from the heat, is duly rested on the back of my wooden chair.
Mary finds anoraks very un-aesthetic and, when we’re at home, she resents the presence of so many on the various chair-backs of our tiny cottage. She also complains of the ‘noise’ of the anoraks while I am wearing them. However, living with ever-increasing climate chaos, the quest for the perfect anorak will, as far as I am concerned, continue. I very much admire Chris Packham’s choices of immaculate anoraks and would love to know the brand name of Ray Mears’ green anorak. Or is it brown?
MARY: Giles is colour blind which causes additional hiccoughs in life, for example when he is referring to the ‘white’ telephone, what he means is the yellow one, or meconium yellow as he likes to call it – even though it isn’t meconium yellow, he has been fascinated by the word meconium since we had our first baby.
GILES: As we look out onto the Piazza, I realise that almost everyone in the street is transfixed by their iPhones. I can see that an iPhone is a very good prop to make it seem as though you are connected to the larger world, but the fact is that I’m not involved in this larger world. I don’t even know what an app is, what Instagram is or a Snapchat, and this makes me feel isolated at times. The times like this, when I have left the cottage.
The problem is that I’m a slow learner, like I’m a slow reader and have slow delivery. It doesn’t mean I’m not intelligent, but it means that no one in this fast-moving world has got time to teach me how to do things at a slow and logical pace. Recently, for example, I had collected a series of newspaper cuttings about an unfolding drama concerning my godson, who had been charged with masterminding a crime abroad He was innocent but risked spending a life sentence in jail if this could not be proved. I was pleased with the fact that we had been fastidious in collecting every story as the drama unfolded over weeks, and I’d been looking forward to showing the bundle of cuttings to our younger daughter (Rosie), when she came home on one of her rare (detox) visits, and I would finally be able to get her attention for a moment while her mobile was charging.
I couldn’t understand why she showed no interest. ‘What you don’t realise, Daddy,’ she said, ‘is that my generation has read all the news before you have because it comes up on Facebook. And yes, it’s amazing what’s happened to Harry, but we see at least three amazing Snapchat Stories on our phones each day.’
MARY: Even though I am much more digitally aware than Giles I was unfamiliar with Snapchat Stories. Rosie showed me a few examples – they are short films of her friends water-skiing, another one hang gliding over an empty desert, a third one on stage in a nightclub belting out a song as a pop-up member of a band to an audience of a thousand…No wonder she has ‘amazement fatigue’ – she can barely process the reams of astonishing digital data that come at her every single day.
GILES: The idea that our own daughter might be suffering from ‘amazement fatigue’ is depressing. She says I must be the only man in 2016 not to carry a ‘smart’ phone. I do own a pay-as-you-go mobile but, even when I do carry it, it is usually switched off.
We are living in an era of accelerated, technological change and it’s only a matter of time before humans are subsumed by technology as predicted by Futurologists in a phenomenon called The Singularity. You can already see evidence of this by witnessing what happens when the till in the village garage shop breaks down and immediately a queue of angry customers begins to snake around the forecourt. These days there is no alternative to the chip and pin. I’m proud to be resisting the dependency on machines and to be able to describe myself as an analogue man in a digital age.
But I have asked myself why I have no appetite to ride the techno wave?
Missing the wave has been a very important theme in my life and not just metaphorically. There was the time when I sat in the sea in Polzeath for a full two hours waiting for the perfect wave to ride in on but the surf finally stopped and I never rode one. It was hesitation. The same hesitation that led me to turn down offers of exhibitions – ‘Am I ready for it? Perhaps you should put me into a group show’ – and commissions from important collectors by asking for example, ‘I’m not sure it’s the right time of year for me to do any painting in a room which might appear to have a very cold light.’
And the one important book deal. ‘There seem to be so many books out there already. Wouldn’t it be a blessing if I were not to add to the mountain? There are too many writers chasing too few readers as it is…’
When the offer to appear on Gogglebox came in, I was only five years away from the age my father had died at. The ‘contents page’ of my life was looking a bit thin and I thought the time for hesitation was over.
Besides, I had a vague memory of once appearing on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour on an item about hypochondriacs. I remember saying that on the rare occasions when I took public transport I staved off minor infections by continuously chewing extra strong mints and exhaling more than inhaling, and I discussed the time I grazed the roof of my mouth on an upturned crisp, which had put me out of action, conversation-wise, for at least thirty-six hours.
I remembered I had enjoyed the attention; first of entering the studio and having people fussing around me, then of having my views taken seriously enough for someone to bother recording them, and finally I enjoyed getting feedback from friends who had heard the broadcast.
MARY: After watching dear Gug tie the knot in the English church in Florence and attending his reception in a hired house above the city, we returned to our hotel room. I was exultant, but as Giles lolled back on the hotel bed I sensed he was settling in for some negorrhoea.
I’ve recently eschewed the oven timer method of solving arguments. Instead I employ new technology. I’ve found that for more gritty major disagreements, it can be illuminating to set the Voice Memos feature of my iPhone going and record the arguments so later I can type them up and print them out so we can assess which one of us has been unreasonable. In anticipation of his putting a dampener on the glorious proceedings which had taken place, I determined not to rise but instead just to record. The taping was not covert. Giles allowed me to do it but, as one does, he quickly forgot the tape was rolling.
Later on playback, I heard myself gushing about the triumph of the wedding and Giles retorting that it was ‘a triumph of style anyway’ and that the young groom had exhibited very little composure. Gug had sobbed as he took his vows. Giles griped that he must have been watching rather too many Grayson Perry documentaries attacking the macho culture.
GILES: In my generation there was a thing called the stiff upper lip and we were taught not to show our emotions in public. One should at least be able to get through something like a marriage ceremony with a reasonable degree of decorum and not blubber away like Kate Winslett at the Oscars. I was fully expecting him to clap his hands and say ‘gather!’ It’s usually the woman who shows elements of emotion and the man should be robotic.
MARY: I had to point out that men were different in his young day. The stiff upper lip was the norm because those were the days before all the oestrogen had entered the water supply through women being on the Pill and on HRT. Oestrogen is an exquisitely potent hormone which can’t be filtered out. Result: feminised fish and frogs and men, and ball-breaking women like the Williams sisters.
The carping continued with Giles complaining that for the same price as two nights in Florence we could have had a week in the Canary Islands and me saying yes but we got to bond with 200 really nice people in a short but intensive scenario, then Giles said that we might have ‘over-reached ourselves socially’ and I retorted that this was inverse snobbery – why shouldn’t the classes interact? Giles said he felt it would be more natural for us to interact with solicitors, town planners, metallurgists and…
‘Dental hygienists?’ I suggested.
‘No,’ pondered Giles, ‘perhaps dentists and principals of agricultural colleges…’
Giles went on searching for something negative about the marriage he could ‘harvest’ from the experience. Without success. But why did he want to harvest something?
‘Why, you might ask, did Gug bother grooming us all those years and buying a cottage in the Vale of Pewsey if he was just going to get married and leave us?’
Mystery solved. Giles was just as sad as the rest of us to be losing Gug as a bed blocker. His ‘grief’ was being expressed through carping. The mystery would never have been solved without dialogue.
GILES: We voted Remain but when I got up this morning I saw the Leavers had got four percent more votes, but I had no one to discuss it with. Mary has been staying in Austria with our neighbour Christof who has a ‘second home’ there. I was asked too but it rained every day the last time I was there. Mary says this was an illogical reason not to go and I mustn’t blame Christof for the weather which is beyond his control and that it’s ‘such fun’ inside his Austrian house in any case.
But she has much more social stamina than I and enjoys after dinner games and attempting to dance the Polka while wearing silly hats. In any case, she seems happy to go and stay in house parties without her own husband.
I ask myself what are husbands for these days? No longer needed as escorts to houseparties, neither are we needed as breadwinners, map-readers, soldiers – not even as builders. In Jamaica I saw women hod-carriers. Apparently they are favoured over the males on that island because they don’t need to stop for ganga breaks. It’s a trend that will be heading this way soon.
At least I am still useful for drain unblocking, checking the salt levels in the dishwasher and removing the rosemary stalks from the filter.
MARY: I got back from Austria and Giles confronted me as usual by saying that I was lucky he had stayed behind because he had kept the show on the road by killing slugs, etcetera. Frankly I would much rather he had just come to Austria than stayed behind to kill slugs. Did he really want me to stay behind? No, he likes me to go to things and report back to him, partly because it means he can ‘enjoy’ whatever I’ve been to by proxy but without having had to make any social effort.
He asks, ‘What are husbands for these days?’ he might as well ask ‘What are wives for?’
Things have moved on since the Seventies, the decade where Giles is stuck. Those were the days when an Englishman’s home was his castle, ditto the Englishwoman’s home. She had eight to ten hours of blissful mental privacy per day while her husband was out at work and she was well incentivised to behave herself when the breadwinner came home.
Of course, everything was neat and tidy and meals were on the table and the exquisitely groomed wife would suck up to the man when he came home (bringing the bacon). After all, he would be in bed and fast asleep three hours later.
I would love to spend all day cleaning and tidying and cooking for Giles coming home after a hard day’s work but the fact is that he ‘works’ at home and I ‘work’ at home as well. Which one of us should suck up to the other and which do the housework?
I used to feel there was no room in marriage for both partners to have a career. Were I to devote myself to Giles as a full-time aide, making his breakfast, lunch and dinner – even though he is a far better cook than I am – doing all the cleaning and tidying and the admin and all the buying the paints and washing the brushes, and the work that an agent might do such as soliciting clients and then recording who had bought what, then maybe miracles could occur. Indeed, he is more talented as an artist than I am as a writer. Or, if he were to sublimate himself into my career and to the resolution of my anxieties, perhaps we too could achieve miracles.
However, because I have to write two columns a week, hold down a job as a PR to a Jamaican businessman and do the admin for the adult children, we need the immediate cash flow.
That is why it was so good when Gogglebox came along to help us both to achieve something together.
GILES: There has been too much going on in the garden for me to tackle the house. During our absence in Florence, Phoebe the dog was looked after by our former nanny Melly and they did not come to the cottage, but what never ceases to amaze me is the amount of hoover matter which seems to generate itself in a room that no one has even been into for a week. It is as though there has been a Glastonbury Festival of nanoparticles partying in the house while you have been away. I am interested in all matter at floor level, particularly the whimsical galaxies of dust and fluff under beds, and will happily hoover, especially enjoying using the crevice nozzle, and mop, leaving Mary free to tackle anything above floor level including ceilings. Between us we should be able to act as a team to ‘clean up’ like Jack Spratt and his wife to cover all bases, but somehow this doesn’t happen.
When I am in cleaning mode I do find it satisfying to see how black the liquid in the bucket goes. I am very keen on 1970s cleaning agents like Flash and Ajax powder (increasingly hard to find), which always seems to produce a pail of water and a mop which are completely black, whatever I have been cleaning, as if we have been living in the most polluted inner-city areas next to a coal mine rather than in a rustic Arcadian idyll.
I like nothing more than to end the chore by throwing the pail of water violently onto the former lawn from a great height. When Mary challenges me about this I advise her that nature is very good at dealing with small quantities of pollution.
Tonight we are expecting a visit from Harry, a single man who is helping Mary with one of her literary projects. As previously noted, we tend to work together in harmony when we are having people to stay and we make an effort to make it nice for them.
Other people, no matter how fastidiously they keep their own domestic quarters, seem to love the cottage. But following the visit of a nine-year-old child who described it as ‘the house with all the notices’, Mary has become self-conscious about the number of warnings I’ve had to put up and says that lately I have put up too many, e.g., in the sitting room, ‘Please do not ask to borrow a book as refusal may offend’. In the kitchen, ‘Shut the freezer door’; in Room Two, ‘Do not open this window’ and in the Pointy Room ‘No Love-making’. Usually this only applies to Cyril and Ursula.
I love a bossy notice. The folk in the big house have erected a sign from yesteryear on their field gate advising that, ‘Failure to secure and fasten the gate will result in a fine not exceeding one shilling’.
It’s only partly a joke. I suspect that they actually mean it. Strange words that you never use in conversation can be employed in bossy signs, i.e., ‘Please ‘refrain’ from smoking in this food preparation area.’ Mealy-mouthed words like ‘rectified’, suddenly come alive. As in ‘Please check your change as mistakes cannot afterwards be ‘rectified’.
I am currently working on the wording of a new bossy notice for our library to deter book thieves. Just as in the old days folk would think nothing of using your telephone if you were away, or stealing a bottle of wine from a party on the basis that ‘I might have drunk it anyway but I had a hangover’ so some people become light-fingered when surrounded by an interesting collection of ‘borrowable’ books. Max Bellows, at the time a Marlborough schoolboy, was one such offender who borrowed my rare book about hallucinogenic mushrooms. It took me two years to get it back from his bedroom on the top floor of a mansion outside Oxford! And involved much subterfuge and mental gnawing and resentment.
‘We do not lend books. Therefore please do not ask, as a refusal may cause offence’ is almost there, but not quite. I would like to get the word ‘desist’ in somewhere.
My mother, however, is less bothered by the notices. For her, the levels of cleanliness fall below the ‘minimum standards’ which were decreed when she attended Winkfield, the finishing school for a certain generation.
But even though guests know the cottage is not overly clean, they know the beds will be clean, the so-called surfaces of the kitchen and bathroom and the vitreous wares. But no one should attempt to run their fingers over the top of picture frames.
Why is everybody else’s house so immaculate? Even on telly the houses for sale on property programmes always look like show homes.
In our case, as our garden is organic it means we do have more insects, spiders’ webs etcetera than other cottages. One thing I would never use is a Vapona unit and we are deeply suspicious of microwaves.
One of our key bonding moments occurred when Mary was expecting our second child in 1993 and we attended the Cornference (Crop Circle Conference) in Glastonbury, Somerset, along with legions of other credulous New Agers, old hippies and readers of The Cerealogist – the limited circulation magazine edited by the late John Michell.
We live only three fields away from the classic formation of a crop circle that Led Zeppelin used on an album cover; the field was a magnet for Japanese tourists over many summers. Glastonbury was too far to drive home from after the lectures (which virtually confirmed an imminent invasion of little green men) so we had booked a B&B to sleep in afterwards so as not to miss out on this seminal event.
We managed to get the last room in Glastonbury. When we arrived at the house at about nine thirty that night, the room we were shown into was painted a brilliant, marzipan white over anaglypta wallpaper. There was not a fingerprint or a stain to be seen anywhere.
The double bed, whose bedlinen (polyester) was almost crackling with biological detergented cleanliness, was almost as big as the room itself.
There were no fewer than three hermetically sealed windows with Vapona units belching out toxins, plus, in the ensuite plastic bathroom, a lavatory freshener almost as big as the lavatory bowl itself.
The room was as spotless as an operating theatre but we knew immediately that we could not spend a night in it.
Mary and I looked at each other and my normally dormant masculine protective instinct came into play as the hormones were clearly making her vulnerable. ‘Eraserhead,’ she whispered.
It was a code word we both understood.
No room had ever so actively replicated the atmosphere of that 1980s film by David Lynch, which, we both agreed, was the closest thing we had experienced in waking life to being in a nightmare.
I took the owner aside and told him that Mary was pregnant and had come over queer. I offered to settle up there and then but he allowed us to go without paying as he had a cancellation customer waiting to take up the ‘suite’ if we didn’t. As we drove away I told Mary that we would go straight ahead and spend six times as much on a poncey hotel we knew half way home. I treated her. We have rarely been happier. It was the thought of having escaped the Vapona units that swung it.
MARY: Living twenty-four-seven with the same person means that inevitably patience will be over-tested from time to time.
This morning, our neighbour Rosemary called to collect an envelope she had dropped off a few days ago asking for a donation towards a charity. I headed for the parking coins jam jar but found it empty.
‘Just a moment Rosemary,’ I said. I opened the door of Room Four and called, ‘Giles! Have you seen the pile of coins that I collected for parking and that were in this jam jar yesterday?’ I knew Giles was in the telly room. He had heard the latch of the front door being clicked open and had scarpered to hide in there to avoid being ‘emotionally drained’ by having to be pleasant to whoever might be coming in.
Since there was no reply I burst my way into the telly room. Rosemary, who was standing behind me in Room Four, must have been alarmed to hear me suddenly scream ‘Stop nodding!’
As it turned out, Giles had decided to hide my collection of about twelve pounds in parking coins on the grounds that ‘you should never leave money lying about to tempt thieves’, but in the short term he couldn’t remember where he’d put it. Giles reacts badly to ‘unreasonable workloads’. Being ‘put on the spot’ like this, ‘without notice’ and being asked where coins are when somebody has dropped in unexpectedly had sent him into Churchill-dog nodding mode.
This is where he expresses confusion by nodding as though he has developed a neurological disease which is manifested by nodding. I know it’s not funny but it’s something he’s started doing.
‘Stop NODDING!’ I will scream. And his mother warns him, ‘You had better be careful Giles – or one day, sooner than you think, you’ll find you can’t stop doing it.’
Yet Giles insists that by rehearsing doing the nodding deliberately now, he will be in a better position to control the reflexes in old age when it may well have become involuntary.
