Things my girfirend and I have argued about.

[Mort]

I was wondering if my girlfirend Rachel and I argue too much.

Monogomous relationships do tend to break down from '24hr shagg-a-thons' in to a series of one argument after another which themselves evolve in to one long...well, hundred years war..... I regard it now as a kind of domestic pastime... I'm not really allowed pastimes anymore you see....

However there is always the positve side...Nothing keeps a relationship on

its toes so much as lively debate. Fortunate, then, that Rachel and I agree

on absolutely nothing. At all.

Combine utter, polar disagreement on everything, ever, with the fact that I

am a text-book Only male Child, and she is a violent psychopath, and we're

warming up. Then factor in my being main stream sort of English while she

is Scouse (well Chester actually.... But they're all the bleedin same out

that way...), which not only makes each one of us personally and absolutely

responsible for the history, and the social and cultural mores of our

respective cultures, but also opens up a whole field of sub-arguments

grounded in grammatical and semantic disputes and, well,............. just

try saying anything and walking away.

Examples? Okey-dokey. We have argued about:.........

The way one should cut a Kiwi Fruit in half (along its length or across the

middle).

Leaving the kitchen door open (three times a day that one, minimum).

The best way to hang up washing.

She really over-reacts whenever she catches me wearing her underwear.

Those little toothpaste speckles you make when you brush your teeth in

front of the mirror.

I eat two-fingered Kit-Kats like I'd eat any other chocolate bars of that

size, i.e., without feeling the need to snap them into two individual

fingers first. Rachel accused me of doing this, 'deliberately to annoy

her'.

Which way - the distances were identical - to drive round a circular bypass

(this resulted in her kicking me in the head from the back seat as I drove

along).

The amount of time I spend on the computer. (OK, fair enough.)

First Born's name (Dylan). Then, when that was settled...

How to pronounce First Born's name.

Our telephone number.

Where to sit in the cinema. On those occasions when we a) manage to agree

to go to the cinema together and, b) go to see the same film once we're

there. (No, really !).

Whether her cutting our son's hair comes under 'money-saving skill' or

'therapy in the making'.

Shortly after every single time Rachel touches my computer, for any reason

whatsoever, I have to spend twenty minutes trying to fix crashes, locked

systems, data loses, jammed drives, bizarre re-configurations and things

stuck in the keyboard. There then follows a free and frank exchange of

views with, in my corner, 'It's your fault,' and, in hers, 'It's a curious

statistical anomaly.'

Rachel enters the room. The television is showing Baywatch. Rachel says,

'Uh-huh, you're watching Baywatch again.' I say, 'I'm not watching, it's

just on.' Repeat. For the duration of the programme.

She wants to paint the living room yellow. I have not the words.........

Rachel doesn't like to watch films on the TV. No, hold on - let me make

sure you've got the inflection here: Rachel doesn't like to watch films on

the TV. She says she does, but years of bitter experience have proven that

what she actually wants is to sit by me while I narrate the entire bleeding

film to her. 'Who's she?', 'Why did he get shot?', 'I thought that one was

on their side?', 'Is that a bomb' - 'JUST WATCH IT! IN THE NAME OF GOD,

JUST WATCH IT!' The hellish mirror-image of this is when she furnishes me,

deaf to my pleading, with her commentary. Chair-clawing suspense being

assaulted mercilessly from behind by such interjections as, 'Hey! Look!

They're the cushions we've got.', 'Isn't she the one who does that tampon

advert?' and, on one famous occasion, 'Oh, I've seen this - he gets killed

at the end.'

Rachel thinks I'm vain because... I use a mirror when I shave. During this

argument in the bathroom - our fourth most popular location for arguments,

it will delight and charm you to learn - Rachel proved that shaving with a

mirror could only be seen as outrageous narcissism by saying, 'None of the

other men I've been with,' (my, but it's all I can do to stop myself

hugging her when she begins sentences like that) 'None of the other men

I've been with used a mirror to shave.'

'Ha! Difficult to check up on that, isn't it? As all the other men you've

been with can now only communicate by blinking their eyes!' I said. Much

later. When Rachel had left the house.

The TV Remote. It is only by epic self-discipline on both our parts that we

don't argue about the TV Remote to the exclusion of all else. It does the

TV Remote a disservice to suggest that it is only the cause of four types

of argument, but space, you will understand, is limited so I must

concentrate on the main ones.

1) Ownership of the TV Remote: this is signified by its being on the arm of

the chair/sofa closest to you - it is more important than life itself.

2) On those blood-freezing occasions when you look up from your seat to

discover that the TV Remote is still lying on top of the TV, then one of

you must retrieve it; who shall it be? And how will this affect (1)?

3) Disappearance of the TV Remote. Precisely who had it last will be hotly

disputed, witnesses may be called. Things can turn very nasty indeed when

the person who isn't looking for it is revealed to be unknowingly sitting

on it.

4) The TV Remote is a natural nomad and sometimes, may the Lord protect us,

it goes missing for whole days. During these dark times, someone must

actually, in an entirely literal sense, get up to change the channel;

International Law decrees that this, "will not be the person who did it

last" - but can this be ascertained? Without the police becoming involved?

We're staying at a friend's house in Sandbach and he brings out the photo

album, as people do when conversational desperation has set in. It's

largely pictures of a holiday he went on with Rachel and a few friends

several years previously. And consists pretty much entirely of shots of

Rachel naked. 'Hah! So, here's another photo of your girlfriend nude! Good

breasts, no?' I sat on the sofa for hours of this - I think I actually bit

through my tongue at one point. Fortunately, though, everything turned out

all right because Rachel, me and one careful and considered exchange of

views revealed it was, '...just (my) hang-up.' Great. I'm sooooo English,

apparently.

See if you can spot the difference between these two statements:

(a) "Those trousers make your backside look fat."

(b) "You're a repellently obese old hag upon whom I am compelled to heap

insults and derision - depressingly far removed from the, 'stupid, squeaky,

pocket-sized English women,' who make up my vast catalogue of former lovers

and to whom I might as well return right now as I hate everything about

you."

Maybe the acoustics were really bad in the dining room, or something.

She keeps making me carry tampons around - 'Here, have these, just in

case.'

'Oooooooh, why can't you carry them?'

'I've got no pockets.'

Then, of course, I forget about them. And the next time I'm meeting The

Duchess of Kent or someone I pull a handkerchief out of my pocket and

shower feminine hygiene products everywhere.

Now, what you have to realise is that this was from nowhere, OK? Don't

think there were previous conversations or situations that put this in

context. Oh no. Just imagine the, 'What the f...?' moment you'd have been

standing in if your partner had said this to you, because you'd have had as

much preparation as I did. So, it's just after Christmas and Rachel's

moaning about her present (I forget what it was, a Ferrari, I think - but

in the wrong colour or something), um, actually, let me come back to this,

that reminds me...

Presents. Before every birthday, Christmas or whatever I'll say, 'What do

you want?' And Rachel will say, 'Surprise me.' And I'll reply, 'Noooooo,

just tell me what you want. If I guess it'll be the wrong thing, it's

always the wrong thing.' And then she'll come out with that, 'No, it won't.

It'll be what you chose, and a surprise, that's what's important,'

nonsense. And I'll say, 'Sweetest, you say that now, but come Christmas

morning it'll be, "What the hell were you thinking?" again, won't it?' And

she replies, 'No. It. Won't.' And I say, 'Yes, it will.' And she says,

'Don't patronise me.' And the neighbours freeze in their seats for a moment

next door, before jumping up and removing anything they have on the shelves

on the adjoining wall. And, in the end, Rachel gets her way. And I hunt

around in utter desperation for two months for something before finally

finding the one item that will work at 7.30pm on Christmas Eve for a cost

of twenty-three-and-a-half thousands pounds. And on Christmas morning it's

, 'What the hell were you thinking?' But anyway.

Back at the previous item, it's just after Christmas and Rachel's going on

about her present, which was, you'll recall, a necklace of a single diamond

suspended on a delicate chain of white gold and sapphires. And this is what

I hear come out of her mouth - 'Why didn't you get me a bubble bath, I

dropped enough hints?' You what.....?

I get accused of hoarding things by Rachel. Now, this is entirely unfair -

electrical items never die, you see, I am merely unable to revive them with

today's technology. In the future new techniques will emerge and, combined

with the inevitably approaching shortage of AC adapters and personal

cassette players, my foresight will pay off and the grateful peoples of the

Earth will make me their God. Anyway, never mind that now, because the real

point is that it's Rachel who fills our house with crap. And I'm not

talking about doing so by the omission of crap-throwing-away here, but by

insane design. While sorting out the stuff in the boxes, these are some of

the things I've discovered that Rachel actually packed away at our last

house and brought to our new one:

A dentist's cast of her teeth circa 1984.

Empty Pringles tubes.

Rocks (not 'special ornamental rocks', you understand, just 'rocks' from

our previous garden).

Old telephone directories.

Two carrier bags full of scraps of material.

Those little sachets of salt and sugar you get with your meal on planes.

Some wooden sticks.

Last year's calendar.

And yet, were I to throw her from a train, they'd call me the criminal.

Damn, damn, damn washing up. Now, in the normal course of things I do all

the cooking and washing up. (This is partly due to a tactical error I made

in an argument many years ago. You know when you're so angry you start

blurring the line between masochistic hyperbole and usefully hissing

threat? 'Well, maybe I'll just microwave all my CDs - look, look, there

goes my Tom Robinson Band - feel better now?' Been there? Splendid. So,

several years ago we're having this argument and somehow I found myself

inhabiting a place where saying, 'OK, OK, OK - I'll do all the cooking and

all the washing up all the time, then!' seemed like a hugely cunning

gambit. In fact, though, this is not too bad a deal. You see, if Rachel is

cooking turkey (unstuffed, three-and-a-half-hours) and oven chips (20

minutes, turn once), then she'll begin putting them in the oven at

precisely the same time. If Rachel's preparing tea, then its style will be

her variation on Sweet 'n' Sour that runs Burnt Beyond Recognition 'n'

Potentially Fatal.) Can you remember what I was saying before I opened those

brackets?

Hold on... ah, right - washing up. Now, the thing is, if you're an English

male, what you do when you leave home is go to the shop nearest to your new

place, buy a Pot Noodle (Chicken and Mushroom), feast on its delights

slumped on the sofa in front of the TV, swill out the plastic carton it

came in, then use this carton for all your subsequent meals until you get

married. (At college we used to live on chicken nuggets... They were the

dogs bollocks.... No... Really, they were.... )There's a beauty of economy

to it. Thus, when I cook a meal for

four, the aftermath left in the sink as I carry the gently steaming plates

to the table is a single saucepan and, if I've pulled out the all stops to

dazzle visiting Royalty, perhaps a spoon. Rachel cannot make cheese on

toast without using every single saucepan, wok, tureen and colander in the

house. Post-Rachel-meal, I walk into the kitchen to discover a sink

teetering with utensils holding off gravity only by the sly use of a

super glue.

'How the hell did you use all these to make that?'

'It's just what I needed.'

'What? Where did the lawnmower fit in?'

Arguments. There are many arguments we have over arguments. 'Who started

argument x', for example, is a old favourite that has not had its vigour

dimmed by age nor its edge blunted through use. Another dependable

companion is, 'I'm not arguing, I'm just talking - you're arguing,' along

with its more stage-struck (in the sense that it relishes an audience -

parties, visiting relatives, Parent's Evenings at school, in shops, etc.)

sibling, 'Right, so we're going to get into this argument here are we?' An

especially frequent argument argument, however, is the result of Rachel NOT

STICKING TO THE DAMN ARGUMENT, FOR CHRIST'S SAKE. Rachel jack-knifes from

argument to argument, jigs direction randomly and erratically like a shoal

of Argument Fish being followed by a Truth Shark. It's fearsomely difficult

to land a blow because by the time you've let fly with the logic she's not

there anymore. A row about vacuuming gets shifted to the cost of a computer

upgrade, from there to who got up early with the baby most this week and

then to the greater interest rates of German banks via the noisome sexual

keenness of some former girlfriend,

those-are-hair-scissors-don't-use-them-for-paper and, 'When was the last

time you bought me flowers?' all in the space of about seven exchanges.

'Arrrrrrgggh! What are we arguing about? Can you just decide what it is and

stick to it?'

The key to a successful relationship is communication. That's the First

Rule. Rachel's corollary to the First Rule is the Timing clause. This

states that the best time to initiate a complex and lengthy talk about,

say, exactly how we should go about a loft conversion is (in reverse order

of preference):

- When you see that Mort is playing a game online and is one point away

from becoming Champion Of The World, Mort is racing out of the house to

catch a train, Mort is in the middle of trying to put out a kitchen fire,

etc.

- During the final minutes of a tense thriller Mort has been watching for

the past two hours. Ideally at the precise point when someone has begun to

say, 'Good Lord! Then the murderer must be...'

- Just at the moment, late at night, when Mort has finally managed to fall

asleep.

- In the middle of having sex.

When Rachel used to go shopping and she'd see, for example, a pair of jeans

in a department store, do you know what she used to do? Try them on. I

think you're with me here,.... I don't mean she'd go to the changing rooms

and try them on. That would be a preposterous idea wouldn't it? No, she'd

just get undressed there in the middle of the sales floor to try them on. It

took me some considerable time to persuade her that this wasn't normal

behaviour in Britain, despite what she might have seen on Benny Hill. Even

then, she only stopped - amid much eye-rolling and, 'You and your silly

social conventions,' head shaking - to humour me. It rubs a tiny circle from

the misted-up window through which you can view the tormented, horizonless

landscape that is My World to mention that I'd entirely forgotten about all

this until someone sent me a email yesterday that accidentally exhumed the

memory. With Rachel this kind of thing just gets drowned out by the general

noise. I wouldn't be surprised if, a few months from now, I'm here writing,

'Ahhh - that reminds me of Rachel's role in the John Lennon shooting...'

Wherever I'm standing is where Rachel needs to be standing, and vice versa.

Doesn't matter where we are - the kitchen, the bathroom, Scotland - we each

infuriatingly occupy the space where the other one wants to be, urgently.

Over the years we've developed signals for this situation. Mine is to stand

behind her and mutter under my breath. Rachel's is to shoulder-charge me

out of the way.

Rachel flooded the kitchen last week. Turned the taps on, put the plug in

the sink, and utterly forgot about it (because she'd come upstairs and we'd

got involved in an unrelated argument). She goes back downstairs, opens the

door and - whoosh - it's Sea World. The interesting thing about this is, if

I'd flooded the kitchen, it would have been a bellowing, 'You've flooded

the kitchen, you idiot!' and then she'd have done that thing where I curl

up in a ball, trying to protect my head, and she kicks me repeatedly in the

kidneys. As it was, however, there's a shout, I run downstairs and stand

for a beat in the doorway - taking in the scene, waves lapping gently at my

ankles - and she turns round and roars, 'Well, help me then - can't you see

I've flooded the kitchen, you idiot?'

There are certain verbal shortcuts to a lot of our arguments. Sure, we

could ease into things, build up momentum slowly, but that's so wasteful

when you can fit in three arguments in the time the slow-burn approach

would take to brew only one. So, we often favour more of a dragster-style,

zero-to-argument in 1 second approach. Thus, over the years, ways of

ensuring a spitting, scratching row with just one sentence have been

polishing to a high shine.

For example, Rachel once said to me, 'Am I your favourite woman in the

world?' The world? I mean, really.

Other times she'll lay mines so we can explode into an argument later with

the minimum amount of run-up. She'll go out and, over her shoulder as she

closes the door, call, 'You can vacuum the house if you want.' I'll settle

down on the computer for a couple of hours. When she returns she'll stomp

up the stairs, crash open the door and growl, 'Why didn't you vacuum the

house?' I, naturally, will reply, 'You said I could if I wanted to. And,

after thinking about it, I decided I didn't. Obviously, it wasn't a

decision I took lightly...' and we're already there.

Another dead cert is when I can't find something - the TV Guide, a shirt,

Holsten drinking Glove, whatever, it doesn't matter - and the exchange

goes:

'Rach? Have you seen my sunglasses?'

'Have you looked for them?'

(Oooooooo, I, it, when, argggh! My teeth are gritted just typing that.)

Rachel, of course, has done the ultimate and discovered a way of ensuring

an argument using no words at all. The technique is this:

She'll have one of her friends round and they'll be chatting away

animatedly in the living room - until I happen to walk in, at which point

Rachel will abruptly and conspicuously stop what she's saying,

mid-sentence... Yep, one of us is going to be sleeping in the spare room

tonight.

Rachel's four-hundred-and-fifty-second most annoying habit is to stealthily

turn off the central heating. I'll suddenly notice that, sitting typing at

the keyboard, I can see my own breath while from the bedroom Dylan will

call out, 'Dad, I can't feel my legs...' And I'll shiver down the stairs to

find the central heating set to 'Summer/Hypothermia/Cryogenic Suspension,'

and Rachel is safely tucked up in bed under four feet of 28.9 TOG duvet.

A Few Concepts Rachel Continues To Have Trouble Assimilating:

It's possible to stop buying plants.

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

Ikea is just another shop.

I asked you if you wanted any, I asked you - now stop eating it off my

plate.

One may have a thought and not say it. This does not make me insular, it

merely separates me from you and that mad woman who's always shouting at

the pigeons outside the supermarket.

They're just nail clippings. Nail clippings must be the most inert thing on

the planet, how can anyone seriously have a problem with nail clippings?

You might as well freak out with, 'Bleuuuurrggh - helium!' Really - just

get a hold of yourself. So you've walked barefoot across the bathroom and

you find this has resulted in a nail clipping or two sticking to the bottom

of your foot; well, simply brush them off into the bin - they're just nail

clippings.

Just for reference; if Rachel returns from having her hair cut and says,

'What do you think?' and you reply, 'I'd love you whatever your hair was

like,' well, that's very much The Wrong Answer, OK?

'Get your hands off me - you're freezing.'

So, let me tell you Hannah is someone with whom I recently started to work

- remotely, I've met her in person once, for about ninety minutes. You now

have all the information you need.

Rachel and I are in a pub in Chester. Rachel begins to speak.

Rachel - 'This woman - "Hannah", is it? - what's she like?'

Mort - 'She seems OK.'

Rachel - 'How old is she.'

Mort - 'About thirty, I think.'

Rachel - 'What colour is her hair?'

Mort - 'Black.'

Rachel - 'Does she smoke?'

Mort - 'Yes.'

Rachel - 'YOU WANT TO SLEEP WITH HER, DON'T YOU?'

Perfectly put into practice there, you can see, Sherlock Holmes's rule

that, "Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however

improbable must be the truth."

I came home from work on Friday and, as I wearily opened the door into the

house, Dylan heard me entering and poked his head out of the living room.

'Hello, Dad - I've missed you,' he shouts. I smile at him... From within the

living room Rachel's voice calls out to him 'No you haven't, Dylan.'

This is how Rachel stocks our freezer. She doesn't buy one of anything. She

waits until she finds it, 'Buy Two - Get One Free,' and then she buys nine.

Moreover, she can't manage to suppress an indulgent smile - as though I'm a

father telling my teenage daughter that her skirt might give boys all the

wrong signals - when I suggest that checking to see how full the freezer is

before she starts buying extra stuff for it might be a good idea. Beyond

the simply obvious - they'll have terraformed Mars before our family runs

out of oven chips, for example - there is another consequence of this. The

sheer volume of food that needs to be crammed into the freezer means it's

only possible at all because Rachel employs two ruses.

The first is brute force. Basically, she just hammers things into the

drawers with the heel of her shoe. Which works, but at the expense of

horrifically deforming whatever she's storing. We're all used to this now,

naturally. Dylan pretty much expects his turkey dinosaurs to be a

collection of misshapen body parts: they're turkey dinosaurs, as modelled

on the scenes of carnage the day after the comet hit Earth. It really only

becomes an issue when he has friends round, asks them if they'd like an

Cornetto ice cream and is then bemused by their expression of stark horror

when he returns holding something that looks like it's been trampled by

horses.

The second point is that she only has any chance whatsoever of jamming all

the things in if she throws away the cardboard boxes in which everything's

packed. The boxes which, of course, bear the cooking instructions. Now, I

know you're not going to believe this, but I'm just the tiniest bit anal.

No, no, really - it's true. Anyway, one of the symptoms of this - very

slight - finickiness on my part is that if the instructions say, 'Pre-heat

the oven. Cook at Gas Mark 7 for 23 minutes. Turn once at 13 minutes,' then

that - precisely that - is what I do. And I become rather agitated if

anything prevents this. (A regular argument we have springs from my setting

the oven timer for, say, 7 minutes then going into the living room and

pacing backwards and forwards, additionally checking my watch, while I

wait. At about 9 minutes, and still not having heard the beeper go off, my

crackling nerves will take me into the kitchen, where I'll find Rachel has

reset the timer to 45 minutes because she's using it to time some

glue drying or something. A discussion will follow.) Not having any

cooking instructions leaves me in a fearful swirl of uncertainty. Even

worse is when Rachel decides the cooking instructions are vital, so she'll

cut them out, and throw them into the freezer as she's loading it. I'll

find them some years later. There's no clue as to what they belong to, of

course. I'm merely left there with my shaking hands holding a slip of

cardboard that has instructions ending with - in bold - 'Leave to stand for

two minutes before serving,' and not the smallest idea what it's referring

to. I'd be happier, quite frankly, if it read, 'There is a bomb somewhere

in your house.'

So anyway, I came downstairs at lunchtime on Saturday and saw that the oven

was on. Rachel, in a worrying development, was cooking something.

'What's in there?' I ask, as off-handedly as the situation allows.

'Your pizza.'

I make a lunge for the oven door. Rachel becomes bellicose.

'I can cook a frozen pizza, you know?'

'No, it's not that,' I bluff, 'I just want to add some extra ham. They

never use enough ham.'

Rachel taking on a frozen pizza is a chilling enough prospect under any

circumstances, but when you remember she's flying blind here - no cardboard

box bearing cooking instructions to light the way - well, I'm sure you can

imagine my terror. I take the pizza from the oven. I add extra ham. I

return the pizza to the oven.

On a whim, I amend Rachel's arrangement by removing the polystyrene base

from under the pizza before continuing to cook it.

Sometimes you'll be sitting in McDonald's and Rachel will say, 'You just

deliberately dropped that napkin so you could look up the skirt of the

woman over there, didn't you?' - everyone's had that conversation and it's

perfectly healthy. There'll be some loud, German invective, a degree of

storming out, perhaps mayonnaise may get thrown at some point - we've all

been there. The crucial thing to keep in mind about Rachel, though, is that

she is playing by rules no one else understands. Every exchange with Rachel

holds the potential to result in my spending several weeks in traction.

There is no way of judging which will and which won't, because the laws

that govern her thought processes have resisted all my analysis. Not even

the tiniest thing can be taken for granted, because it assumes one knows

how Rachel's head works. The proof is in the details, not the broad sweeps,

so let me illustrate the, 'Do not fall into the trap of believing you exist

in the same universe,' idea by the smallest moment, on the unremarkable

Saturday that has just past. We are sitting together on the sofa. I say

'Brrrr - I'm cold.'

Rachel replies

'Where?'

Our sink is blue and we're not talking about it. It happened over a week

ago; I was leaning over the sink, brushing my teeth, when I noticed that

there was a sort of lazuline patina that had seeped over most of the

surface. Rachel hasn't mentioned anything about this. Why she hasn't is

that she's obviously tried to clean the sink with, well, I don't know, some

fluid used for stripping entrenched cerriped colonies from the hulls of

submarines or something (they were probably offering three bottles of the

stuff for the price of two at Aldi). She is waiting for me to mention it.

But I am a wily fox, and will be doing nothing of the sort. I'm no

wet-behind-the-ears, naive youth anymore, not by a looooong way, and I can

perfectly see the spiked pit the seemingly innocent words, 'Did you know

the sink's blue' are covering. It would go - precisely - like this:

Me: Did you know the sink's blue?

Rachel: Yes. I did. I used a jungle exfoliant produced by the Taiwanese

Military to clean it, and it discoloured the surface.

Me: Oooooooo. K.

Rachel: Well maybe, just maybe, if you cleaned the sink once in a while...

You see what she did there? Now I'm facing a whole day of 'When did you

last...?' Well, not this canny fellow - not this time, my friends.

Our sink is blue and we're not talking about it.

Because of my selfless desire to further the vocabulary of medical science,

it would delight me to the toes if everyone could adopt the use of the

phrase 'Rachel's Syndrome'. This affliction being used to signify a

condition characterised by a profound and chronic 'point blindness'. Allow

me to give you a case study for diagnostic purposes:

I bought a mobile phone the other day. Yes, I'm aware that this revokes my

human rights and I won't disgust you further by attempting any kind of

wheedling justification. We all become what we hate (raising the disturbing

possibility that one morning I'll awake to discover I'm Andie MacDowell,

but let's avoiding looking there) and so I've naturally mutated in that

direction. Anyway, I spent the best part of an afternoon entering the names

and numbers of people I know into the internal address book via the phone's

keypad - an activity that's roughly as much fun as performing emergency

dental surgery on yourself. The picosecond I'd finished, Rachel walked into

the room and said, 'Let's have a look at your phone.'

'Don't touch anything,' I replied with sombre gravity.

About two minutes later when I returned from the kitchen with a cup of tea

Rachel glanced up at me and chattily asked, 'Can you get back things that

you've deleted?'

My lips became the thinnest of lines.

Rachel doesn't know what she's deleted, but does offer the solution, 'Tsk -

you'll find out eventually if it's important.' I have to admit that this

phrase would be rather good to recite repeatedly, singsong fashion, as I

danced around a swirling bonfire in the centre of which Rachel was staked.

Now, had we handed out a simple questionnaire to the population of the

Earth, almost everyone would have replied that the point - the point - of

the argument that was now racing through volume levels was that Rachel had

deleted something, without even knowing what it was, after I'd spend hours

setting up the phone and had specifically said not to touch anything.

Rachel's assessment, however, was this:

'You know what the trouble is? You're a gadget freak.'

Rachel's birthday. I bought her this oriental, geisha-style pyjama thing

(Rachel - 'Hey! I could do that massage they do, I could jump on your

back.' Me - 'Walk, they walk on your back.' Close call there.) while I was

down in London. She liked it. Simple. Clearly, I've been a fool and all I

needed to do to get Rachel a present she likes was make sure I asked nearly

every single woman who works for The Guardian newspaper what the hell I

should buy. It wasn't her favourite birthday present, though, not by a long

way. There were almost tears of delight when her best friend turned up at

the birthday party and surprised her with two bags full of horse manure. I

mean, it seems so obvious now, of course.

The Terror Of Lids: Yes, the rewards are high, but it's a game where the

price of defeat is savage. Sometimes Rachel, after grunting with it herself

for a collection of 'hnggh's, will hand me a bottle or a jar that has a

screw top along with an impatient, 'Open that for me.' If the gods lie

content in the skies above Mellor at that moment, then what follows is a

rapid flick of my wrist, a delightful 'click-fshhhh' gasp of surrender, and

my handing the thing back to her FEELING LIKE A HERO OF NORSE LEGEND.

Generally, though, what happens is that I strain for a while and strip the

skin off the palm of my hands. Then I wrap the lid in a tea towel and

strain some more to equal effect. At this point I'm on to using the jam of

the door as a vice to hold the lid while I twist at the container; Rachel

will be saying, 'Give it back here, you'll wreck the door,' and I'll be

swearing and twisting and saying, 'I'll repaint that bit in a minute.' The

Fear is upon me. If it's a fizzy thing, you can sometimes puncture th

e lid to relieve the pressure and then get it open, but you're not often

that lucky. 'Give it back,' Rachel repeats, reaching around me, trying to

take the item from my hands. I swivel away - 'Just a minute' - and

desperately twist at the lid again, now not even attempting not to squint

up my face as I do so. At last, though, Rachel will manage to get the thing

back. This is the darkest moment. If she tries again and it remainsfastened,

then I am saved. 'It's just completely stuck,' I'll say, 'It is.

Stop trying now. Stop. Stop it.' However, there are times - and my stomach

chills now, even as I write this - when she gets it back and, with one last

satanic effort, manages to spin the lid free. A slight smile takes up home

on her face.

'What?' I say.

'Nothing.'

'No - what?'

'Nothing.'

'I'd loosened it.'

'I didn't say anything.'

And I'll have to drag the tiny, damp shreds of my manhood away into the

reclusive garage until the slight, slight smile disappears from her smug

face some thirty-six hours into the future.

Hanging Things. Rachel simply cannot stop hanging things from every

defenceless lampshade, rail or drawing pin-able piece of ceiling space.

Mobiles built from small, wooden, peasant figures, baskets of plants or

vegetables or toiletries, angular crystals or tiny, twirling shards of

coloured glass, wind-chimes - oh, pale, waltzing Lord, the wind chimes. Not

just those tubular bells affairs that generate a sound like a modern jazz

orchestra rolling biscuit tins of ball-bearings down a stairwell either.

No, she actually found some evil outlet that sold her a suspended helix of

hollow clay doves. This produces an arpeggio of dull, ceramics clungs

whenever it's struck. And it's struck, many times a day, by my forehead

whenever I pass into the living room. My head is a Somme of wing-shaped

indentations. Where does she get this Drive To Hang? Admittedly, I've

sometimes looked at an empty bit of wall in my computer room in the attic

and thought, 'Mmm... Winona Ryder would look good there.' - occasionally

even, 'Mmm.

.. A poster of Winona Ryder would look good there.' - but that's a hugely

sensible distance from a compulsion to attach dangling bits of

pointlessness to everything, house-wide. I have, for many years, tried to

work out what lies behind her behaviour in this area, but it wasn't until

recently that I was sure I'd found the reason for it. Thankfully, though, I

have now identified its cause: She's nuts.

One of the many things I love about Rachel is her zest. You probably won't

have picked up on this, but in actual fact I am a sullen, cynical kind of

character - honestly, it's true - while Rachel hisses with energy and finds

taut excitement in everything that passes through her field of vision.

Perhaps this is why, in a Garden Centre, I just shuffle around sighing,

'Red pot, blue pot; whatever you want - can we go home now?' yet Rachel

only has to walk through the doors at Sainsbury's Homebase to achieve

orgasm.

Anyway, this whippy outlook of hers can sometimes be a bit wearing. As an

example, yesterday, her brow creased with anxiety, she said, 'I need a

haircut, urgently.'

Now, I just can't imagine a world where people need a haircut urgently.

Quite possibly, this explains a lot - those of you who have looked

elsewhere on the site will surely have thought, 'Christ! There's a man who

needs a haircut URGENTLY!' - but let's not confuse understandable alarm

with imperativeness. When Rachel said this, it was about eleven o'clock at

night, and she really did look like she expected me to dash to the phone

right away. 'Hello? Shapes? Prepare a chair, we'll be there in two minutes.

Yes, it looks bad. I... Oh my God, it's frizzing! Clear!'

Tch - wear a hat until the weekend.

The quality with which I am identified most closely is probably fairness.

There's an almost breathless speed about my disposition, when appropriate,

to say, 'Rachel, I am clearly in the wrong here. Please smash up my stuff.'

However, there are times when the Shield Of Justice gleams on my arm and

all of Rachel's shouted accusations merely strike it and fall, lifeless, to

the ground. Averted eyes and a slowly shaking head tell that I am in a

place where she cannot touch me. Yes, as you ask, I am thinking of

something specific.

You don't know me, right? You're aware, perhaps, you have a certain

suspicion that in quiet moments I speculate on what it must be like to be

rubbed all over with Nastassja Kinski - but that's it. It's not like, say,

we've being going out with each other for something over twelve years and

have had two children and decorated a landing together. Given that, let me

place before you a scenario: You are leaving the house to go shopping for a

number of hours. Just before you go, you poke your face towards me (I,

hunched and unblinking, am playing a computer game of the most frantic and

intricate kind) and say, 'If it starts to rain, get the washing in off the

line.'

Now, you know what's going to happen, don't you? So if Rachel, with whom

I've lived for well over a decade, doesn't bother to employ painfully basic

foresight to see what's obviously going to happen... well, the Shield Of

Justice is mine, I reckon.

By this point , you will think I have gone utterly mad or you may

think that I may not have written any of this. Well I'll not

say yet if this is a massive plagaristic facade because you are obviously

enjoying this read so I will let you continue. Im not mad or obsessed.... Im

just repressed... meeting you via email after all these years is like

releasing a coiled spring.... it catapults me back to my youth when life was

so much simpler ... Don't worry you are only half way to the end.......

When I'm driving the car, Rachel reaches across and operates the indicator.

How annoying is that, ladies and gentlemen? At the distance from the turn

that she considers to be appropriate she'll lean over and flick the

indicator lever on. Be honest now, would any one of you prefer to be in a

car with someone who did that over, say, being trapped under rubble for

four days with a person who writes the verses for greetings cards? It's

rumoured, in fact, that certain people are working on the Being In A Car

With Rachel Experience so that it can be recreated in the punishment wing

of Alabama jails.

That's not to say that she's a bad driver. She's a better driver than I am,

certainly. But a better driver in, um, well, by the 'male' definition of

better, let's say. If we were in a rally, Rachel would leave me in the

dust. She is never more alive than when reversing into a tight space. Gears

matter to her. However, I've only had one crash, and that was indisputably

not my fault (someone drove through a red light into the side of me).

Rachel has hit countless things. Hit them in Mellor. Hit them in Stockport.

(I was in a car with Rachel in Stockport once, when she'd been back and

forth between there and Mellor quite frequently, and she's racing along the

centre of a road. A car appears heading straight for us and Rachel shouts

at me, 'Which side should I be on!?' A nice moment. If I'd been out to

score points I'd have remarked that, if you're asking that question, then

perhaps slowing down at all might be a thing to do also. I didn't say

anything at all, however, as at that point I was busy findin

g religion.) Rachel has hit stationary things - bollards, a public

electricity exchange, walls - and moving things - other cars, an ambulance.

(Yes, 'honestly'.) One time we hired a car. Rachel doesn't so much ignore

speed limits as have trouble with them conceptually - 'What? There's a

speed limit here too?' She drove from Mellor to South Wales (about 200

miles) flat out. And I mean 'flat' 'out', her foot was on the floor the

whole way. The hire company obviously expected their cars to be driven by

the sane, and it just couldn't cope. The temperature gauge strained against

the end of the scale and Rachel eventually pulled over to let it cool down

for a few minutes. But the wind coming through the radiator due to the

forward motion was the only thing that had kept it going. When she pulled

over every single electrical wire in the engine melted away. Fortunately,

there was rescue cover so we were picked up and given a replacement car.

Rachel, clearly humbled, said, 'Oh brill! This

one's got a cassette player!'

So, Rachel's a better driver than I am, and a better map reader too,

incidentally. I get there eventually and can operate my own indicators,

thanks very much, but am, sadly, far less likely to make my fortune

endorsing airbags.

The thing with insomnia is you never know when to give in. Do you stay

there, trying to get to sleep, or do you give in and say, 'Well - not going

to get to sleep anyway, might as well get up and do something.' It's a

tricky one and no mistake. When I get insomnia, I generally try all the

standard things: I try to relax, I try to clear my mind, I try to think of

something pleasant (often this turns out to involve Courteney Cox and, in

the 'encouraging a condition where sleep is likely' stakes, backfires

massively). If none of these works, I'll quietly get up, go downstairs and

read Pinter until insomnia's spirit breaks. What I don't do is turn to

Rachel and, at intervals precisely judged to be 'just long enough to have

allowed the other person to have got to sleep again', keep saying, 'I can't

sleep' and, 'I can't sleep' and, 'Really, I just can't sleep' and, 'I'm

still awake, I just can't sleep' and, 'Pheeeeeeeeeeeeee - I can't sleep'

and, 'I don't know what it is; I'm tired

, but I can't sleep' and, 'I can't sleep' and, 'I can't get to sleep' and,

'I'll be so tired in the morning - look at the time. But I can't sleep'.

Because that's the kind of behaviour that can lead... to... someone...

snapping.

Dylan cut his hair on Friday morning. Apparently the casual notion that his

fringe was too long and didn't look sufficiently wicked strolled through

his head, so - without the use of anything as lame as a mirror, naturally -

he got a pair of scissors and cut his own hair; he now looks like a tiny

Howard Devoto. Except blond. And without the spectacles. ("So, not very

much like Howard Devoto at all, then. Also, we were born in 1987 and have

entirely no idea who Howard Devoto is." - Everyone.)

Now, Rachel and I don't do that widespread thing of transferring ownership

of the children depending on the situation; 'My son is a neurosurgeon,'

'Your son has just poured byriani behind the radiator,' that kind of thing.

We do another thing. Rachel, who is the one to spot Dylan appears to be the

first seven-year-old to be suffering from male pattern baldness, marches

into the room where I'm sitting, reading the paper, and, looming over me

with her arms knotted tightly across her ribs says:

'Dylan's cut loads of his hair off.'

I look up at her and, after a few moments of thought, naturally reply:

'Tsk.'

She's unable to find herself entirely satisfied with this.

'So, that's it then, is it? You're all parented out now?'

'What am I supposed to do?' I ask, bewildered. 'He's cut the hair off. Do

you want me to wrap it in frozen peas and race to the hospital to see if

they can do an emergency weave?'

'I think,' she replies, 'that you should go and speak to him.'

And there it is. There is only one specific type of occasion when Rachel

feels I should 'go and speak to' one of the children, and that's when they

have done something forehead-slappingly idiotic. The implication she is

making is that Idiocy is my area. That only I can speak to the children

when they've done something comprehensively crackbrained because, unlike

her, I can speak The Language Of Fools. 'Maybe you can get through to him,'

she's saying, 'Because you know how the asinine mind works.'

I drop the newspaper with a sigh, resigned, now, to the fact that I'll

never get to find out what Kevin Spacey's favourite pasta dish is, and plod

into the other room. Dylan is happily drawing a picture at the table.

'Dylan?'

'Yes?'

'Don't do stuff like that. Your hair looks stupid.'

I see his eyes flick, for the briefest moment, up to my hair. I'm dead in

the water and we both know it.

'I like it,' he says.

'Oh, you like it, do you?' I laugh. 'So, it doesn't matter that everyone

else in the world thinks it looks stupid? You like it? That's... Um, that's

really good, actually. That's good.' I ruffle (what's left of) his hair.

Rachel walks in behind me. Quickly, I furrow my eyebrows and point a sharp

finger at Dylan.

'So? Is that clear?'

'Yes,' he replies.

I walk out past Rachel. 'Let's not say another word about this, then.'

Of course, next week he'll probably get into homemade tattoos, and his

defence will begin, 'Well, Dad said...'

I have my bags packed ready.

We have shower issues. Today I had a shower and she's put out some kind of

weird cosmetic soap. I flinch at the idea of guessing how much this soap

must have cost because it's utterly rubbish, which is usually a good

indication of knee-buckling expense (Cotton flannel - 50p, Skin-lacerating

wad woven from dried bark and nasal hair by Amazonian tribeswomen who will

use whatever money they make from the sale to buy cotton flannels -

£12.50). This soap did not wash, but instead covered me in an iridescent

film of grease - and, sadly, I'd made a last minute change of plans and

decided to spend today sitting in front of the TV rather than swimming The

Channel. Tch - irony, eh? Anyway, I had to have another wash to remove this

oleaginous soap from me. This was the Third Thing. I'll come to the Second

Thing in a moment, but the First Thing is the ferocity of our shower.

British showers are risible, this is a fact. Most people's noses run faster

than the average British shower and one of Rachel's longest held desire

s has been to get a shower like those in Italy. Now, as much as I'm

against the feebleness of British showers, I must ask if it's entirely

necessary that a shower should hurt? This thing has a setting called

'massage' and it's not a massage. A massage involves relaxation, the soft,

enquiring hands of a 22-year-old Scandinavian woman, and possibly an

exchange of cash. The setting on this shower ought more accurately to be

labelled 'Jumped By Thugs', you could mount the thing on top of a truck and

use it to crush riots. This is all the more horrific when we approach the

Second Thing. Because not only does Rachel leave our shower set to maim,

she also leaves it on cold.

Rachel has cold showers first thing in the morning. How unsurprising is

that? In fact, I could have just left the rest of this page blank and

merely put at the top 'Rachel has very cold showers first thing in the

morning' and everyone reading would have been able to infer the rest. I, it

won't surprise you to learn, don't like mornings to begin with, and

definitely don't want to find a freezinging shower lurking anywhere in them.

Today, then, I stumbled sleepy-eyed into the shower, wrenched it on, and

was immediately hit by a roar of molten lead temprature water travelling at

twelve-hundred miles an hour. My 'O'-eyed, bared-teeth face is going to be

stuck like this for a week. Then, once I'd scrambled the settings back to

within human limits, I got to cover myself in grease.

Words will be exchanged.

It's getting worse. I've mentioned this, in passing, before, but it's

getting worse. We were watching Hannibal on DVD the other week, and Rachel

was sitting beside me, looking at the screen, right from the moment I hit

'play'. This, incidentally, is because before we watch any DVD or video we

have this ritual.

Mort - 'Are you ready?'

Rachel - 'Yes.'

Mort - 'No you're not, you're clearly not. Sit down here.'

Rachel - 'I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm just cutting out this magazine article

and putting the toys away in an order based on the psychological warmth of

their respective colours and making a cup of tea and wondering if we should

move that mirror six inches to the left, but I'm ready - go ahead, start

the film.'

Mort - 'No. I'll start the film when you're sitting here. If I start the

film now, you'll sit down in three minutes time and say, "What's happened?"

and I'll have to do that thing with my mouth. Not going to happen. You sit

here right from the beginning.'

[Rachel makes an injured pantomime of dragging herself over to the sofa and

sitting down beside me.]

Mort - 'Thank you.'

[i press 'play'. The FBI copyright warning comes up and, knowing full well

it won't work, I repeatedly try to fast forward through it for the annoying

amount of time - precisely long enough for me to fully hate the FBI and the

entire motion picture industry - it takes to fade. A logo swirls around the

screen. Darkness. A single, threatening, bass note rumbles low. Swelling in

volume as the first image seeps into life.]

Rachel - 'I've just remembered, I need to phone Jo.'

Mort - 'Arrrrggghhheeeiiiiiieeeeerrrrgghhhhhhhhgkkkkk-kkk-kk-k!'

Rachel - 'I only need to ask if she has a text book - carry on.'

Mort - 'No. Make the phone call. I'll wait.'

[Three hours later. Rachel returns; I am still on the sofa, remote control

poised in my hand, but now visibly older and covered in a light film of

dust.]

Rachel - 'OK, done.'

Mort - 'Right.'

[i wind back four or five seconds to have the moody intro again, Rachel

complains we've already seen this bit and - as it's getting late now -

there's no need. I reply it's important for setting the mood, she thinks

it's a stupid thing to do, the exchange degenerates into a twenty minute

row about foreplay, and then we finally begin to watch the film.]

So, that's what happens, every time, and thus on this occasion as with all

others, Rachel has been sitting beside me since the very beginning of the

film. Which, casting your mind back, you'll recall is Hannibal.

Titles. Silence. A face appears.

Rachel - 'Who's that?'

Getting worse. I was watching the Wimbledon on TV and, as the players are

sitting down for a of change ends, the camera idly pans round the crowd,

pausing on a woman eating an ice cream. Rachel says?... Louder - I can't

hear you... Yes, yes she does.

What Rachel and I have, essentially, is a Mexican stand-off with love

instead of guns. OK, yes, sometimes there are guns too. The important thing

is the mindset, though. Sure, people can argue about important issues,

that's fine, good luck to them I say. But where, I ask you, are those

people when you take away the meaningful sources of disagreement? Lost.

Utterly lost. Let me illustrate the common mistakes amateurs might make

using something that happened the other week. You will need:

Rachel.

Me.

A roast chicken.

We're having tea and on the table are the plates, a selection of vegetables

and a roast chicken in an incredibly hot metal baking tray. Getting this

chicken to the table (see 'cloth taking-things-from-the-oven-things',

above) has been an heroic race that ended only fractions of a second short

of a major skin graft. Due to this haste it is, however, not sitting

precisely centrally on the coaster. Some kind of weird, hippie,

neo-Buddhist couple might have failed even at this point and simply got on

with eating the meal. Fortunately, Rachel is there to become loudly

agitated that radiant heat might creep past the edge of the coaster,

through the table cloth, through the protective insulating sheet under the

table cloth, and affect the second-hand table itself. She shouts and wails.

I nudge the tray into the centre of the coaster, but, in doing so, about

half a teaspoon of the gravy spills over the side onto the table cloth.

Outside birds fall mute, mid-song. Inside, frozen in time, the camera

swings around us s

itting at the table, like in The Matrix.

'What the hell did you do that for? Quick, clean it up - quick,' says

Rachel (where an amateur would have, say, shrugged).

'No,' I reply (at the moment that another amateur would have been returning

from the kitchen with a cloth), 'I'm eating my tea. I'm going to sit here

and eat my tea. Then I'll clean it up.'

'No, clean it up now.'

'No.'

'Yes.'

'No. I'm going to eat my tea first.'

'Clean it up now.'

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, so a couple of semi-pros might

have worked this up into a shouting match. But I am not about to stoop to

childish name-calling. Instead I lift up the tray and pour some more gravy

onto the table.

'OK?' I say, 'Now stop it. I'll clean it up after.'

'Clean it up now.'

I tip a little more gravy onto the table.

'I'm just going to keep doing it every time you say that. I'll clean it up

later.'

'Do it now.'

More gravy.

'Now.'

More gravy.

This continues until we run out of gravy.

I must make it clear that my actions here seemed perfectly rational at the

time. I've mulled them over since, of course, and am relieved to find that

they still hold up to examination - it's pleasing to know I can make good

decisions under pressure. Anyway, we eat the meal from a table awash with

gravy. I am happy to have argued my point persuasively. Rachel has a smile

fixed to her face from the belief (incorrectly, of course, but it's only

her enjoyment that matters) that I've clearly done something hugely stupid

that she can bring up later in any number of arguments - possibly years

from now. Everyone wins. We eat, united in contentment. I clean up the

table.

Do you see? I want everyone to try this out at home and write me a report

for next week.

This is what I have to do to get into trouble:....

We went to hire a van last week. Rachel had phoned and arranged everything

and I was there simply because we arrived in one vehicle but had to return

in two. As I think I've mentioned before, I am not interested in motor

vehicles and know less about them than the average four year old child. If

people ask me what car we've got I reply, 'A red one.' I can drive OK, just

as I can operate a photocopier perfectly well but feel no need at all to be

able to recognise the make of each one from a distance or to look at

magazines full of pictures of the latest models. Rachel, of course, has an

encyclopaedic knowledge and will point excitedly at traffic and say stuff

like, 'Hey, look - there's the new-style, five door Fiat Tampon,' or

something while I sit unable to care less. So, anyway, we've gone to pick

up this van and the bloke there - open shirt, riotous body hair, multiple

gold chains - starts telling me about it. Starts telling me about it,

despite the fact that Rachel has gone in and begun the conversation,

while I just shuffled along behind her. He keeps talking to me about

stuff.

'Yeah, this is the 2 litre model...'

'Mmmm...' I nod, noncommittally, as I have no idea what he's talking about

- ('2 litre'? What's that? The amount of petrol it can hold?)

'There is a 3 litre, V6 version, of course - but...' He laughs.

'Hahaha,' I echo his laugh weakly in response; as if my 'V' knowledge

having stopped at the Nazi WWII rocket the V2.

Rachel keeps cutting in with questions about technical things. He answers

to me, without looking at her. I can feel her starting to sizzle. (The sole

question I've been able to come up with has been 'Um... Eh... Has it got a

radio?')

I'm completely innocent here. In fact, I'm terrified he's going to corner

me by saying something like 'Do you favour ABS or not?' and I'll just burst

into tears. I can see, however, that Rachel is approaching the point where

she's going to be unable to prevent herself from disembowelling him before

standing over his torn body with her bloodied hands outstretched, howling

to the sky. That's his problem, but I sense she also regards me as his

tacit accomplice. I have to get Rachel away before he sets her off and I

get caught in the explosion.

As we were in a rush, I managed to get out of the office and put over 300

miles between Bloke and Rachel as quickly as possible (I'd have liked to

insert more distance, of course, but we were beginning to run out of

Britain). Still, it's gnawed at her stomach for well over a week now and

the only way it's been kept under control has been by constantly rerunning

variations of:

Rachel: 'He was talking to you. To you - it's unbelievable.'

Me: 'Yes, he was an idiot. Because he was talking to me. And I'm an idiot.

He revealed his idiocy by talking to me, an obvious idiot. He was an idiot.

Forget about him. The idiot. He was an idiot. That's right... just give me

the fork now.'

At 2pm one Wednesday afternoon I went to the cinema with a friend of mine to

see Lord of the Rings - Two towers. Around 8.30pm I came downstairs from

putting the boy to bed and started flicking through video cassettes.

Rachel, on the sofa, lowered the magazine she was reading on to her lap and

asked suspiciously, 'What are you doing?'

'Trying to find a movie,' I said.

Rachel sighed and shook her head. With a mixture of incredulity, anxiety

and admonishment she replied, 'You've already seen one film today.'

Phew. Lucky we caught that habit before it spiralled out of control, eh?

Which reminds me; test your own self-control by reading this and seeing if

you can resist the urge to draw any telling psychological insights from it:

Rachel walked through the living room on Friday as I was watching 'Band Of

Brothers'. Absently, she asked, 'Is this "Killing Private Ryan"?'

It's the nights I fear the most.

Rachel is sitting at this computer typing something. I'm flopped in a chair

close by with a paper and pad, scribbling away at a bit of work.

I pause and say to her, 'Tortoise and turtle is the same word in German,

isn't it?'

She stops typing, reaches over, pulls off one of my Birkenstock shoes,

throws it down through the door (I hear it thud below, then flip-flop down

the stairs) and returns to her typing. All in a single, silent movement.

Your guess is as good as mine, frankly.

Have you seen 'Good Will Hunting'? Of course you have. I was watching it

with Rachel the other day and she squeezed my arm and said, 'That's how I'd

like you to look.'

'Ahhh,' you're sitting there saying, 'But Mort, you're already practically

Ben Affleck's double.' True enough. But Rachel was talking about Robin

Williams. Aged 45. With a beard. Kill me.

Relatedly - in the sense that the rest of the world's thought process is

here, while Rachel's is standing just over there - we had some friends

round at the weekend. They'd just been on a skiing trip and took a digital

camera with them. You will know what the first thing you do with a digital

camera is.......er...... Well, let's put that aside; you can go off to the

newsgroups if you want to look at that kind of thing. The second thing you

do with a digital camera, though, is take pictures of just everything. You

know you're not going to have to pay to get the photos developed, so you

snap away constantly. Our friends had taken loads of pictures. Huge vistas

of oscilloscope-trace mountain ranges misting into the distance, people

hissing down the piste at precarious speeds, glistening snow settled into

creamy piles on the aching branches of trees, and so forth.

Rachel is leafing through the photos when she stops abruptly. 'Wow! That's

beautiful...' Her eyes as big and as shiny as CDs, she turns the picture

round to show me. It's the inside of a chalet. 'Just look at that kitchen!'

she breathes. Sometimes I have to reach forward and touch her, just to

check that my hand doesn't pass straight through - 'Ah-ha! She's a hologram

generated by an invading alien race - I knew it.'

The other day someone asked me, 'Is there anything you and Rachel don't

argue about?'

I stared up at the ceiling and patted my lips with my index finger,

thoughtfully. A clock ticked. It snowed. The light began to fade.

Eventually, I had to go out to buy more milk.

However, just when I was about to give up and resign myself to addressing

another one of the backlog of thoughts I have to deal with, I light-bulbed,

'Ah-ha! Money! We don't argue about money!' and was tremendously pleased

with myself for the five or six seconds it took to realise that this was

demonstrably untrue. Oh, we don't have the standard, 'What the hell are you

doing? We're behind on the mortgage and you've gone out and spent all our

money on beer!' rows. In fact, Rachel doesn't drink all that much nowadays.

We have, however, found others.

One of them flows from the fact that Rachel asks me how much everything

I've bought for myself has cost. Now, I'm not one for the high life: I

don't own a car, I'm not interested in holiday

[hotdog]

'Kin 'ell!

I bet your fingers are sore after that lot

[Mort]

in the sun, my favourite

meal is a Pot Noodle and the leather jacket I'm currently wearing I bought

while I was still in the Sixth Form.

(All this doesn't make me bohemian and fascinating, by the way; people

don't happen upon me and exclaim to each other, 'My! Imagine how intriguing

he must be on the inside.' That kind of thing only happens in movies. In

real life... well. Well, I was walking through the city centre a while ago

and Rachel called me on my mobile. With all the noise of people and

traffic, it was hard to hear so I sat down with my back against the wall of

McDonald's, bowed my head and, with the phone in one of them, cupped my

hands over my ears to try and listen properly. As I sat there - I swear to

you this is true - someone who was walking past looked down at me and threw

change. But anyway, back to the point...)

So, I'm hardly what you'd call extravagant. Sometimes, however, very, very

practical demands mean I need to buy a digital camera, say, or another

guitar. I'll try and sneak it into the house (Rachel will discover it

eventually, of course, and say, 'Where did this come from?' but I'll be

able to reply, 'Oh, I've had that for ages,' which - one day, I'm sure -

will be the end of the discussion), but often I'll get caught.

'How much did that cost?'

'It was on offer.'

'For how muchS I'm just asking.'

'Look - it has a built-in clock!'

She simply won't give in until she's made me feel like she and the children

have looked up from their eighth consecutive meal of lard to see me stride

in with a handful of magic beans. But recently the shoe swapped feet.

Rachel bought a sideboard. A second-hand sideboard that cost at least twice

what I've ever pay for a graphics accelerator card for my PC.

'How much did that cost?' I asked.

'It's an antique. WellS not a proper antique. But I think it was made in

Poland.'

'Uh-huh.'

I take the moral high ground. From where I purchase the Lord of the Rings -

Extended edition DVD set. Outrageously expensive, yes, but a thing that,

under the circumstances, I am not at all afraid to reveal to Rachel. (I

revealed it via a written piece of paper I buried in the garden, knowing

she couldn't say anything because of the sideboard.) (Surprisingly, I was

wrong.)

The other money-related argument is about cash. That's cash, specifically.

Despite the fact that Rachel's earning power is comfortable, she never has

any cash. If you can conveniently pay by cheque or credit card, that's

fine, but otherwise it's, 'Mort ? - have you got any cash? Only, I haven't

and I need to go to the hairdresser's/pay a builder/have The Mob carry out

a hit for me.' Every time - Every. Time. - I go to the cashpoint she'll

appear within minutes with her nose wrinkled up pleading, 'Got any cash?'

I'm just a courier; cash is only ever in my wallet for the walk back home

from the bank - I think that the second I key my PIN number into the ATM

machine it texts her phone. The result of this is that now I never have any

cash, because Rachel has it. Except, she doesn't. Rachel is chronically

cashless to the size of two people.

If I'm sitting on the sofa reading a book and Rachel enters the room she

will say this: 'What are you doing?' If I'm peeling potatoes in the kitchen

when she happens upon me, or pushing batteries into one of the Dylans's

extensive range of screeching toys, or writing on the side of a video

cassette I've just pulled out of the recorder, the same thing: 'What are

you doing?' I mean, a fellow likes to feel he's a bit enigmatic now and

then, a tad mysterious and deep, but how can a person see me, for example,

screwing a new bulb into a light fitting and not be able to see immediately

and with huge, reverberating, chill clarity precisely what it is that I'm

doing? It's like living with Mork. It's not even as if I can use these

moments to exercise my impressively sardonic (yet, at the same time,

profoundly attractive and alluring in a deeply sexual way) wit either.

Because, as previously mentioned, Rachel regards large sections of what weon

Earth call humour as nothing but shameless mendacity.

Rachel [spotting Mort picking with his fingernail at the goo left on a CD

case by the price label]: 'What are you doing?'

Mort: 'I'm talking to Mark using Morse code - he's at home right now

holding one of his CD cases, picking up the vibrations I'm making.'

Rachel: 'No you're not, you liar. You're lying. Why do you always lie? You

liar.'

Mort: 'It works by resonance. You just have to practise for a bit to be

able feel the plastic quivering - go over and get that Bob Dylan case,

press it on to your nose, and we'll see if you can pick up anything.'

(There's the briefest flicker of indecision in her eyes; offering me, for

one tantalising moment, the possibility that I'm going to spend the next

ten minutes - 'What about this, then? Press it on your face harder.' -

having quite simply the best of times... but then she grunts.)

Rachel: 'Liar. You're just a liar.'

Mostly, however, we've got it smooth and efficient now. We don't have to

think. She says, 'What are you doing?', I peer at her with irritation and

expel air, we go on about our business. This morning, though, she came

upstairs to the attic here while I was sitting in front of the computer

doing some work on the net.

'What are you doing?' she asks.

Trying to concentrate on something, distracted and harassed, I reply with

some degree of acerbic aggravation.

'What does it look like I'm doing?'

There's a beat, during which we hold each others eyes, unblinking.

It's immediately after this beat has passed that I realise I'm wearing no

trousers.

There is, it's opulently redundant of me to add, a perfectly reasonable and

innocuous explanation for why I'm browsing the web alone in my attic with

no trousers on, but you're all busy people and I know you have neither the

inclination nor the time to waste hearing it. As an image, however, it did

rather undercut my sarcasm. Rachel - in a brutally savage reversal of

tactics - didn't speak. She merely raised her eyebrows and there, revealed,

was a face that read, 'I have been waiting thirteen years for this moment.'

I was watching Mission Impossible and it was making me uneasy. Tom Cruise

was doing something - infiltrating, probably, you know what he's like - and

he was continuously describing the situation to his distant support buddies

via his headset radio. For a while, I naturally assumed that it was simply

Tom Cruise's big nose that was unsettling me and tried, using soothing

visualisations and breathing exercises, to move myself, mentally, to a

place where it wasn't an issue. But then - the realisation freezing my arm

and abruptly halting a crisp's journey from bag to mouth - I had a small

epiphany: 'Lawks,' I thought, 'This is my girlfriend.'

"Rachel, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to wander around

constantly articulating precisely what it is that you're doing at that

moment, as though relaying it to an unseen control team somewhere.

Possibly, on an alien mother ship, secretly orbiting the Earth. For

example."

She does this all the time. 'Get some eggs from the fridge... here's the

butter... and now a frying pan... What's in the cupboard? OK, we've got

oregano... some basil... I'll go for the mixed herbs... Now I need some

scissors...' Who is she talking to? It's certainly not me: for one thing, I

can see what she's doing - and, further, am not interested - and for

another, I sometimes hear her doing this while she's alone in a room in

another part of the house. And - though, admittedly, there's often a huge

temptation to think she functions like this - I don't believe it's because

she simply has no idea what she's going to do until it's actually occurring

and I'm merely listening to her keeping her mind informed about what it is

that her body appears to be doing right now. Sometimes we'll be sitting

down watching TV and she'll get up and say, 'I'm going to the toilet.' Why

would anyone say that? Does she think I'm keeping a log for research

purposes? Is she intimating that she needs help? Does she have reason to

expect that she may be abducted halfway up the stairs and thus wants me to

at least be able to tell the police, 'Well, the last time I saw her I know

she was on her way to the toilet.' What?

Surely, it can only be that she's an undercover member of the M.I. team.

Every time a van is parked near our house now, I imagine Ving Rhames is in

it; 'OK, the toilet's at the top of the stairs - it's unguarded, but has a

slightly bent hinge...'

Oh, and the first person to say, 'Well, if she's doing an impossible

mission, then that'd be 'living with you', Mort, wouldn't it?' gets a very

slow handclap, OK?

The other possibility is that she's simply talking to the air. 'But that,'

you say, 'would make her mad.' Yet, isn't there an idea that everything -

water, rocks, fire, etc. - has a spirit, that everything is, in some way,

'alive'? Isn't that believed by some people? 'Yes,' you say, 'mad people.'

Well, I certainly can't argue with you there but I raise it as a

possibility. Because, if we're looking for a mystic answer, she certainly

regards the television as the Magic Box Full Of Tiny People Who Can Hear

Her. If an actress says - as actresses seem highly prone to - 'I'm just

going down into the cellar,' she'll often call out to her, 'Don't go down

into the cellar!' Or she'll offer lengthy and detailed personal advice:

'No, don't send him that letter. He's just using you. Leave him and go back

to Brian.'

I can watch a film many times. Rachel thinks watching a film more than once

(even worse - buying the DVD so that I can watch it whenever I want) is,

well, I'm not sure there's a word to describe it. If she discovers me

watching a film, says, 'Haven't you already seen this?' and I reply, 'Yes,'

and continue to watch, she looks at me like I'd just confessed to being

sexually aroused by livestock. A swirling mixture of incomprehension,

contempt and with just a hint of, 'I knew it...' I realise now that this

might be because she doesn't feel she's watching a film, but rather guiding

the Tiny People through actual ordeals - a strain she doesn't want to have

to endure twice.

I've tried telling her that TV doesn't work like that. That the people are

just actors. But she just doesn't seem to get it. She throws back some

nonsense about me compulsively sitting there, flooded with adrenaline,

barking out the answers when University Challenge is on - clearly unaware

that this is exactly what has made humankind so successful: the desire to

test oneself against oceans, mountains, one's own deepest fears, or a

selection of general knowledge questions. More disastrously, she also

completely misses the point and starts going on about me shouting at the

tennis on television or something. Incredibly, it seems she's unable to see

the difference between her talking to actors, recorded on film, and my

shouting, 'Go down the line!' while watching the television broadcast of a

live match when, of course, in those circumstances there really is the

possibility of my altering the course of play by vocalizing the sheer

focussed power of my will. She still has an awful lot to learn about

science, I'm a

fraid.

Rachel was away with her friends the other weekend. It was a hen party

thing. I hesitate to mention that, as English women on hen nights are quite

the most repellent spectacle it's possible to encounter - if we happen

across a group of hen night women when we're out together, Rachel will

invariably point at them and dare me to defend a culture that has incubated

such an embarrassment. So, let me stress that, though it was technically a

hen weekend, it wasn't the whooping, cackling, "Look! We have a huge

inflatable penis and an openly desperate desire to have you think we're

fearless unfettered rebels so don't let the fact that we clearly all work

at a local building society and are trying way too hard!" kind of affair

that you'll often see congoing through Brannigans in ill-advised skirts. It

was still hen, though, there's no escaping that. I stayed here with the

boy; if he asked where she was, I had planned - to avoid inflicting on him

the psychological damage of knowing his mother was at a hen weekend - to say

that she was simply away serving a short sentence for shoplifting.

Before she went, she asked me to record a couple of gardening programmes

that were going to be on the TV. The first night she was there she rang me.

She'd had a row with some bloke in a bar. He'd apparently pinched her

bottom and then, when she responded, um, 'unfavourably' to this, had tried

to smooth the waters by saying he couldn't resist as she was the best

looking woman there - a point which Rachel found really quite an

insufficient reason for being pinched by somebody; she expressed this

concept to him. Now, as I was a good two-hundred miles away and, in any

case, had a big pile of drinking to do, there wasn't really very much I

could do to support her. I did think of demonstrating that I shared her

contempt for him by pointing out that the bloke was clearly also a

calculating liar: 'There's no way you could have been the best looking

woman there - I mean, what about Jo, just for a start?' Some tiny alarm

rang deep in my head, however, and told me that not saying this would work

out better for me in the long run. She continued to talk for a while, and

finished by reminding me to video the gardening programmes.

The next day, right on cue, I forgot to video the gardening programmes.

I can't quite convey to you the icing I felt on my skin and the

claustrophobic tightening of my chest that occurred when I idly glanced

down at the clock on my taskbar and realised I'd forgotten to record them.

I know you think I should have set the timer on the VCR, but I deliberately

didn't. The timer on our VCR has poor self-discipline and vague life goals

and will often fail to work, just for kicks. So, rather than risk giving

the job to a recidivist video recorder, I decided it was far safer to do it

manually. And to fill in the time until that point by going up on the

computer, entering 'Alice Butcher' in Google and, you know, just seeing

where that led. It was obvious I was going to have to tell Rachel what had

happened and - although it was just 'one of those things', for which no one

was really to blame - I knew very soon, and with a clarity of understanding

that bordered on the spiritual, that the best time at which to inform her

about the situation was while she was still two-hundred miles away from me.

Therefore, I immediately texted her mobile - knowing she wouldn't

have it switched on, because she never has it switched on, but that she'd

see it before too long. Only, the second I'd sent the message, I began to

worry. I'd assumed that letting her know now would give her a chance to

cool down before she returned. But, equally likely, it would just give her

a chance to work up a head of steam. And, if Rachel's playing a, 'The

trouble with Mort is...' riff, then the very worst place to ensure that it

doesn't build and build is in the company of a load of exclusively female

friends on a hen night. And she was in London. She was going to come back

after a day and a half of, "...well, it's not for me to say, Rachel, but if

I were going out with Mort, then...", wired on crack, and carrying an Uzi.

That night, I slept under Dylans bed.

We had an earthquake here the other week. Surprisingly, I'm not being

metaphorical. I mean we had an actual earthquake: in the geological rather

than the emotional sense. It happened at about one o'clock in the morning,

we were pretty close to the epicentre, and it was 4.8 on the Richter scale.

Now, I'm depressingly aware that all Californians are right now glancing up

from their crystals and pausing mid-mantra to snort, '4.8? Poh. That's not

an earthquake, that's just someone slamming a door.' Well, yes, I suppose

it's all relative, but here in Mellor where tectonics is less brash and

showy, 4.8 is easily vulgar enough to stand out.

The important thing is that just before 1 A.M. the whole house shook.

Naturally, this woke us up. Cupboards rattled and banged, furniture

shivered across the floor, the bed struggled like it was possessed by the

spirit of a wild animal that was trying to get out. The instant it ended,

Rachel's freshly woken face slid in front of me. Her voice irritated and

her eyes accusatively thin, she hissed, 'Was that you?'

I better note this down before I forget it again. I was reminded of it last

week - apologies if you were around at the point when my memory was jogged

but, before you start whining that you've heard me mention this observation

already, may I just point out that anyone who's sitting around watching

daytime TV probably oughtn't to get too captious, eh? So, Rachel and I were

having an argument (you'd think I'd have a shortcut key for that sentence

by now, wouldn't you?). I can't remember what we were arguing about, but

that doesn't matter here because in today's lesson we're focusing on style,

not content. Say we were arguing about, oh, lettuce (even if we weren't,

it's surely only a matter of time):

Rachel: You haven't washed all the lettuce.

Mort: I've washed the bits I'm going to eat.

Rachel: And left the rest for me to wash.

Mort: If you wash it all, it goes off quicker.

Rachel: So, we'll eat it quicker, then.

Mort: I don't want to eat it quicker.

Rachel: But I do.

Mort: Then wash it yourself if you're so bloody desperate to gorge on

lettuce. What am I? Your official Lettuce Washer?

Rachel: My last boyfriend was taller than you.

Etc.

Fairly standard stuff, clearly, but what you need to realise is something

that I can't get across on this email. It's that, as the exchanges switched

backwards and forwards between us, there was a kind of bidding war going on

with the pitch. It's not just that each one of us upped the volume a little

for our turn, but that we also changed the tone by raising our voices so

that our reply was about a fifth higher than the one that the other person

had just used. It was like two Mariah Careys facing off - pretty quickly,

we were having an argument that only dogs could hear.

I've noticed that this often happens, and I reckon Rachel secretly

initiates it as a ploy. She raises her pitch, subconsciously luring me to

respond. It's tactical. She knows it increases her chances of winning the

argument because - when I come to deliver the final, logical coup de grace

with great imperiousness and gravitas - I discover I'm doing so in the

voice of Jimmy Somerville.

Rachel bought a jacket. The purpose of this jacket, its raison d'etre, was

not to provide warmth or woo the eyes or give employment to jacket makers.

The purpose of this jacket was to demonstrate to me my place in the world.

To provide a medium through which I might gain knowledge - much like the

rustling of the leaves at the Oracle of Dodona being a means for

discovering the will of Zeus. Only, you know, except with lots more

polyester. Rachel bought this jacket and placed it on a hanger in the

hallway. Later that day, when she judged I had approximately 1,285 things

I'd rather be doing, she commanded me to view it.

She takes it down from the hanger, puts it on and says, 'What do you

think?'

'Well,' I say, 'if you like it...'

I hear the fire alarm go off and briefly glance up the stairs before

realising that the noise is actually in my head.

'What's wrong with it?' asks Rachel. Somewhat challengingly.

'Oh, you know, nothing in particular,' I shrug. This is factually correct.

It is a comprehensively appalling jacket; no particular aspect of its

extensive dreadfulness stands out as especially distressing.

'What... is wrong... with it,' Rachel replies, filling in the spaces with

facial expressions.

'Um, well, it's shapeless.'

'No, it isn't.'

'OK, then, it's cylinder-shaped. Which is not a good shape. For a jacket.'

'I like the shape.'

'Fair enough. Right, I'm going...'

'What else?'

'Did I say there was...'

'What else?'

'The material is unpleasant.'

'No it's not.'

'And the pattern is awful.'

'The pattern's nice.'

'And it doesn't appear to fit properly - look at the arms.'

'That's how it's supposed to fit.'

'Fair enough, then.'

'I like it. I'm going to wear it always.''

'OK.'

She places it back on the hanger, lets me know I'm a fool and we go on

about our business.

The next day Rachel's friend calls round to drop something off quickly. She

drops it off (quickly), they (quickly) talk for four and a half hours, and

then she has to dash. Coincidentally, I'm coming down the stairs when

Rachel is seeing her out. As Rachel is by the door she says to her, 'Oh,

look, I bought a new jacket. What do you think?'

'Well,' the friend replies, 'if you like it...'

Rachel returns the jacket to the shop, immediately.

Immediately.

Rachel: 'Mmm... Is anything in the world better than the feel of fresh bed

sheets?'

Mort: 'Yes.'

I was looking for something that should have been somewhere, and wasn't. I

asked Rachel where it was, and she said, 'It's in the bedroom.'

'No, it isn't,' I replied - having just come from searching in the bedroom

for about ten increasingly tantrumy minutes.

'Yes, it is,' she repeated.

'It's not. I've looked there.'

An expression of amused indulgence came over her face the subtleties of

which I can't quite convey, so I'll have to make do with the description of

it as, 'absolutely bleeding infuriating.'

'How much,' she said, 'will you give me if I find it?'

OK, so this operates on two levels. The first is simple sadism. Rachel

knows the agony it would cause me if - after my prolonged, stomping

insistence that it isn't there - she calmly walks over and places her hand

immediately on it. Tauntingly, she knows that just the possibility of this

happening is quite probably enough for my nerve to crack. She is well aware

that if, just one more time, my frustrated raging of, 'The nail scissors

aren't here. See? They're not bloody here. Do you understand? Not...

Here... Look! Go on! You try to find them then! Go on! Where are they then?

Eh?' receives the near-instantaneous reply, 'Here they are,' and a pair of

nail scissors, then I'm simply going to have to run away to sea. Can you

see the other level, the one which ties it in kind with the 'Shut up'

affair, though? Have a think.

That's it, well spotted: monetary gain. If I've maintained that something

isn't somewhere until I've had to jump up and down, hold my breath and

squeal that she's not my real mom, then simple, human decency should compel

Rachel to say, 'Yes, you're right,' rather than go there and find it. Going

there and finding it is what you'd expect a Colombian Death Squad to do.

What separates Rachel from a Colombian Death Squad - perhaps the only thing

that does - is subtlety. She's awfully keen to make that bet about finding

things, isn't she? Now... why could that be? Well, obviously, it's because

she's rigged the deck. The reason I can't find what I'm looking for is that

she's previously spotted what I'm looking for, and moved it.

I have innate positioning instincts, you see: like a salmon returning

thousands of miles across unmarked oceans, right to the stream where it was

born. In exactly the same way, when I've finished using it, I will place a

screwdriver on top of a bedroom radiator and - when I need it again,

perhaps eighteen months later - unerringly return to that spot to retrieve

it. Frequently, to discover that Rachel has, maddeningly, taken it upon

herself to transfer it to somewhere else. My instincts, moreover, are

incredibly precise. If I'm looking for a pair of trainers that my

astonishingly accurate positional memory remembers putting down in the

bottom left of a cupboard, then I'm not going to notice them if some fiend

has moved them to the bottom right of the cupboard during the intervening

four and a half years, am I? That'd be stupid. What's the point of having a

gift for such specific location if your visual perception is so vague as to

wander around all over the place? Eh? What's more, I place things

logically. Where are you most likely to need carpet tacks and a hammer, for

example?

Precisely. So leaving them on the stairs is simple ergonomics.

However, for some reason, Rachel is unable to respect my filing system. She

spends her day roaming the house, wilfully moving things from where I've

deliberately placed them. And that's why she's keen to make the bet. She's

hidden my stuff, and now she wants me to pay for her to retrieve it. It's

basically a form of extortion, isn't it? Let's call a spade a spade: Rachel

has kidnapped my stuff and is holding it for ransom. Really, ladies and

gentlemen, it's a sad state of affairs when your girlfriend abducts your

favourite underpants.

Simply odd. Odd. We're writing Christmas cards, and Rachel asked if I'd

print out a family photo to include with them. (I have many photos of us,

taken during every season and in numerous different locations - all,

however, show precisely the same pose: Rachel - beaming smile; Mort -

solemn resignation; Dylan - looking down at a Game Boy; Now, I'm aware

that including a family photo with a Christmas card is not at all unusual

in America, and I don't want to appear to criticise this: I'm sure it's

perfectly lovely when an American sends such a card to another American.

It's simply a tradition and no more a cause for comment, in its context,

than any other of the fine customs unique to that country, like... um...

like pie eating competitions, say, or religious snake-handling. As an

English person, though, the notion of sending out pictures of ourselves

strikes me as narcissistically brash. I mentioned this

to Rachel and, though she had sympathy with the concept that (non-American)

people who send out photos of themselves might reasonably be assumed to be

utterly dreadful, she said she thought that sometimes it was nice to get a

picture. She thought it was nice for a very specific reason. '...because

then you can see what size they are.' Now, this is clearly nonsense - 'Oh,

look - they're 8"-by-4".' - unless people are sending out photographs of

themselves next to an item of known dimensions. A bit like those kidnap

photos where the victim is holding the day's paper: ensure that they're

posing by a regulation, roadside telephone CAB box, with their arms linked

to avoid tricks of perspective. More pertinently, though - what the hell?

'So you can see what size they are'? What on earth does that mean? Am I

expected to open a card, splutter out my mouthful of tea in shock and call

out, 'Quick! Take Ted and Sarah off our list - I've just found out they're

bleeding midgets!' It is,

as I say, 'simply odd'.

I have to tell you what just happened. I'm about to cycle into town and

Rachel stops me as I'm setting off. 'Will you bring back that filing

cabinet from Argos?' she asks. Can you, ladies and gentlemen, imagine a

person cycling two miles through Christmas traffic on a mountain bike

carrying a filing cabinet?

Rachel can.

I have a huge backlog of stuff to get sorted - You'll be happy to know,

however, that Christmas this year went very well. As I think we've

established by now, providing Rachel with Christmas presents that evoke joy

- rather than massive, brutal retaliation - is something that must be

bought at a terrible cost. The fearful, Faust-blanching price of this

ability is to - quite literally - listen to everything that Rachel says

throughout the previous year. I mean, Kung Fu monks (according to the

omniscient well of knowledge that is popular 1970s television) only had to

do a decade or so of training then carry a red hot metal bowl for a couple

of meters with their bare forearms. I have to listen to everything Rachel

says throughout the entire year. Endless, endless, endless hours of stuff

about the comparative aesthetic merits of different Ikea storage units,

just so I'm there - prickling with alertness - on those occasions when she

slyly drops in a hint about what she might like as a gift when the trial of

buying one for her confronts me again. As I say, though, last year, twelve

months worth of intelligence gathering paid off. This Christmas morning she

was so thrilled that she stared at me - literally unable to form her

thoughts into words - for quite the longest time imaginable after

unwrapping her presents of a barometer and one of those 'Make Your Own

Will' kits.

Oh, as you ask, I had a pretty uneventful time over in Chester. Visiting

friends, waiting for the figure to turn green at pedestrian crossing lights

even though there quite plainly isn't any sort of moving vehicle within a

mile and a half, being shown photographs of my girlfriend naked, etc., etc.

You will be well aware that pretty much every household in modern Chester

contains at least a couple of photographs of my girlfriend naked, and also

that this is a) "Not sexual. Tch - what the hell's wrong with you?" and b)

very much My Problem. So, I'm sitting in a living room and - after tea and

cakes - out come the photographs of Rachel naked. I hold one of the

pictures in my hand and sit there, radiating heat. Alerted, perhaps, by the

grinding sound I'm involuntarily making with my teeth, Rachel looks across

at me and lets out a long, weary sigh.

'Oh, for God's sake,' she tuts, 'OK - so I'm naked. But you can't see

anything.'

I glance pointedly at her, pointedly at the photograph, and then back at

her again - pointedly. She lets out an even wearier sigh and rolls her

eyes.

'OK...' she shrugs, '...apart from that.'

In what I can only assume was an impromptu but gutsy attempt at the World

Irony Record, the other day Rachel started to lecture me on how I could

become calmer. I mean, really, eh? It's like being pitched Al Qaeda's

Little Book of Love. Her spontaneous proselytising was conjured from her

now going to yoga one evening a week.

'It's really relaxing when I'm there,' she says.

'Yes, it is,' I reply. (You see what I actually meant there, right? Lord,

but I'm arch.)

'Why don't you come to a session?'

There's a sucking, cultish gleam in her eye. The kind of, 'Join us! Join us

- the spaceship awaits!' look that you see on the faces of Moonies or

people who are telling you about homeopathy.

'No thanks.'

'But you really lose the tension.'

I consider mentioning that she always seems to find it again pretty quickly

once she gets back - maybe she might think about getting a yoga instructor

who 'loses her tension' by some method other than 'hiding it in our house',

but I keep hold of this card for a while.

'I don't need to,' I say, 'I can achieve perfect relaxation by sitting here

and watching a Buffy DVD.'

'That's not the same.'

'Yes it is.'

'No it isn't: when you're watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer,' (I promise

you these are her exact words that are coming up now), 'you're straining

your mind.'

My face briefly collapses under the effort of trying to map the internal

reasoning of a psychology that could incubate such a concept, but it's the

logical equivalent of falling infinitely into the Mandelbrot set and I pull

back, palsied and afraid. Instead, I reach for my ace.

'Well, whatever, the point is - this yoga is only relaxing you for the

precise amount of time you're doing it. Once you get back home you're just

the same. In fact, you've been moaning even more than usual for the last

few weeks.'

'No I haven't.'

'Yes, you have.'

'No, no - I haven't been moaning,' she says, rolling her eyes and tutting.

She reaches forward and ruffles my hair. 'I've just been moaning at you.'

With that, she gets up and breezes from the room.

You know... I've been thinking about it for several days now, and I still

can't figure out who won there.

Romance Masterclass.

It's Wednesday the 12th of February. It's early evening. Rachel and I are

sitting in the living room. Rachel has asked me to do something the

following day.

Mort: 'I can't, I'm afraid. I'm going into town.'

Rachel: 'Why? What do you need to go to town for?'

Mort: 'Oh, I have to get some stuff.'

Rachel: 'What stuff?'

Mort: 'Just some stuff... things.'

Rachel: 'What things?'

Mort: 'Various things.'

Rachel: 'What things?'

Mort: 'What does it matter?'

Rachel: 'What things?'

Mort: 'It's not important what specific things, is it? I have to get things

or I wouldn't be cycling into town, would I? All that's relevant here is

that I have to go, not the details of the individual items I need to get -

there's no point wasting time giving you a big list, when the only

significant point is that I need to go to town.'

Rachel: 'What things?'

Mort: 'Oh, for Christ's sake... Pizzas. I need to buy some pizzas, OK?'

Rachel: 'We've got pizzas.'

Mort: 'We've got a pizza.'

Rachel: 'So? How many do you need?'

Mort: 'Several. I want to have several in the fridge.'

Rachel: 'Why?'

Mort: 'So that we have a stock of them.'

Rachel: 'Why?'

Mort: 'So that we don't run out, obviously.'

Rachel: 'What would happen if we ran out?'

Mort: 'I'd have to go to town.'

This flings itself out of my mouth while my higher brain is still racing

along behind it frantically waving its arms and shouting, 'Wait! Wait!'

Rachel responds with just the tiniest movement of her eyebrows. Absolutely

minuscule. Sufficient in size, however, to make me wonder if I could get a

UN resolution to have her bombed.

Mort: 'I have to get other things too.'

Rachel: 'What things?'

Mort: 'What the bloody hell does it matter? Why can't I go to town if I

want to, for God's sake?'

Rachel: 'Why are you being secretive? What are you up to?'

Mort: 'I'm not up to anything.'

Rachel: 'Yes you are.'

Mort: 'Like what?'

Rachel: 'I don't know.'

Mort: 'Because there isn't anything.'

Rachel: 'Yes there is - I can tell.'

Mort: 'There isn't.'

Rachel: 'You bloody liar.'

Mort: 'You bloody mad woman.'

Rachel: 'Tell me.'

Mort: 'Stop talking now.'

Rachel: 'Tell me.'

Mort: 'I...'

Rachel: 'Tell me.'

I think we've both risen to our feet by this point (it allows for better

voice projection).

Mort: 'OK! OK! You want to know why I need to go up town, you relentless

harridan?!'

Rachel: ''Yes! You lying swine!'

Mort: 'So I can get your Valentine's Day card! So I can get your bloody

Valentine's Day card and post it to here - so it'll arrive as a nice

surprise through the post!'

A tiny flicker. It's the merest stutter of hesitation, though, then she's

back on track before the beat is really lost.

Rachel: 'You don't need to get me a bloody Valentine's Day card!'

(I can't imagine what makes her think she's going to get away with this

move - she must be getting old.)

Mort: 'Too bad! Because I'm getting you a Valentine's Day card! And I'm

posting it to you! Tomorrow! When I go to town!'

Rachel: 'THERE'S NO BLOODY NEED!'

Mort: 'WELL IT'S GOING TO BLOODY HAPPEN - GET USED TO IT!'

And, indeed, I do go to town, buy her a card, and post it. Inside I write,

'Surprise!' She gets it on Valentine's Day and says, 'Thank you,' to me,

through gritted teeth. (She gets me one too, by the way - it reads, "I'm

not interested in a nice, normal relationship... I like ours better.")

Odysseus and Penelope? Pah - lightweights.

So, the thing was, I'd cut this picture of PJ Harvey out of a magazine

(yes, the 'Lick My Legs' one, of course the 'Lick My Legs' one) and I was

framing it to put on my wall here. 'Who's that?' asked Dylan.

'That,' I replied, 'is PJ Harvey.'

'Who's PJ Harvey?' he said. (Bless.)

'She's a singer and a songwriter,' I explained. Adding, as I'm sure most

people would, 'I used to go out with her. You know - years before Mum and I

met.'

Now, you'll never guess what happened next. Incredibly, Rachel goes through

the roof. No, I'm not kidding - she goes through the roof and starts

ranting that I shouldn't say I used to got out with PJ Harvey. Can you

believe that? I mean, for one thing, I don't tell her that she can't watch

gardening shows on the TV or go swimming or whatever, so how come I can't

tell people that I used to go out with PJ Harvey? There has to be give and

take in a relationship, right? The main issue, though, is why on earth she

should object in the first place. Surely, if anyone is well placed to take

issue with my going around saying that I used to go out with PJ Harvey,then

who is that person? Damn right. It's PJ Harvey. And her record

company, maybe. Also, possibly her legal representatives have good grounds

to intervene, perhaps in a manner that leads, ultimately, to some kind of

court order against me. So, yes, all those people seem to be perfectly

justified in stepping in - but my girlfriend? God - it's getting so I can't

do anything.

Now, this is slightly scary and unsettling. I know I'm inclined to say that

quite a lot, but what am I supposed to do about it? This is slightly scary

and unsettling. You're going to get to the end of this and say, 'Ooo -

that's slightly scary and unsettling, Mort,' that's just the simple fact of

the matter. OK?.....

......The other evening we had some friends round. We were all sitting in

theliving room and I was recounting something Rachel had done a couple of

dayspreviously. Unfortunately, I can't remember what this thing was now, but

I do recall it had happened in the car. So, given Rachel and I stepping into

a car together immediately invalidates our insurance (a Zen branch of

homologous algebra states: Mort + Rachel + Car = Small Child + Hammer +

Land Mine), it could have been pretty much anything up to and including

some kind of western movie-style showdown where - instead of being atop a

train - Rachel and I scrambled for control of a Colt .45 on the roof of our

Renault Clio, as it careered, driverless, down the A6 through Hazel Grove.

As I say, I can't remember. Anyway, whatever it was, it was certainly (a)

utterly outrageous and (b) utterly down to Rachel. This is borne out by the

look of numb, stunned disbelief that trembled on our friends' faces when

I'd finished telling them the story. One of them turned to Rachel and,

incredulous, gasped, 'Did you really do that?'

'Yeah,' Rachel laughed back, with a shy, 'you know how it is' shrug. Then

she became pensive and her nose twisted a little in thought. 'But,' she

continued, half to herself, 'I don't know if I'd have done it in real

life.'

"In real life"?

What?

WHAT?

Well Im not obsessed or anything... but life was simpler as student in

London when you could pop next door for a shag.... then go to the pub.

You're going 'Ooo - that's slightly scary and unsettling, Mort' now, aren't

you?

Mort

[hotdog]

Someone's been on mind bending drugs haven't they

[M8CKN]

.....and.....relax......

[Sponge]

I managed a few paragraphs, but then Can someone provide a précis?

[davidhodgkinson]

I'm not going to read all that, but i do understand it! Luckily I don;t have that problem (yet)

[bazza_g]

the longest post ever on TSN ?

[NeilB]

http://www.thingsmygirlfriendandihavearguedabout.com/ There's also a book wrote by the webmaster.

[bazza_g]

Mort went nuts on the Search and Replace to change the names

[Guest PeterPiper]

Say hello,wave goodbye!

[TriGGa]

oh my that is just well and trully mental!

But the, "she gets annoyed when i wear her underwear" .. urm?? explanation on why this has been made public?

[Mo-S3]

oh my god!!! tried reading it but then lost it after a first hundred paragraphs.

Are you serious man ??

[Insurance Jon]

Just read Omi's copy of the book and it's piss funny. Makes a change from T Clancy

[mccombie_5]

My god

I read alot

My eyes fell out.

[Mort]

Yep... plagarism at its worst....

I used it to wind a mate up who knows us once... thought it might amuse some TSNers. Copyright M. Millington.

[DHA]

All I want to know is she good in bed? All would be forgiven I would guess if the answer to that question was yes.

[Ari]

[ QUOTE ]

Just read Omi's copy of the book and it's piss funny. Makes a change from T Clancy

[/ QUOTE ]

Yep, I've read this also, probably one of the funniest books I've ever read!

Totally recommend it to anyone.

[Calm Chris]

Here:-

thingsmygirlfriendandihavearguedabout.com/

[cruiser647]

You are perfectly matched! no probs.

Good old copy'n'paste!

[randellp]

I thought that sounded familiar. I feel sorry for you all!

[collease]

All i can say Mort is been there every evening for the last 4 years and to be honest i wonder sometimes if Mrs C is as mad as a hatter with some of the arguments she starts.

qualaty post

[Problem_Child]

Next week your neighbours will be on the news saying He was such a nice man, very quiet, I never knew he was capable of such things...

[Hector-8]

[ QUOTE ]

Next week your neighbours will be on the news saying He was such a nice man, very quiet, I never knew he was capable of such things...

[/ QUOTE ]

very funny!!!!

[Si_GTi]

Bloody hell I read all of the first post and then everything just went into one big blur!

I laughed out loud at, "Rachel jack-knifes from argument to argument, jigs direction randomly and erratically like a shoal of Argument Fish being followed by a Truth Shark", I knew a girl just like that at Uni

If ever I suffer from insomnia I shall dig up this topic and read the rest