Things my girlfriend and I argue about
By Mil Millington
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
Guardian Profiles
Saturday March 23, 2002
Mil Millington
Mil Millington began writing his Things My Girlfriend And I Argue About column
for Weekend in 2001. The column began life on a website, which Millington set
up while working in the IT department at the University of Wolverhampton library
last year; within two weeks, he had been offered book deals by two publishers. 'I
remember sitting in the loft and looking at this offer on my computer, reading it
again and again, because it was several years' worth of a University of
Wolverhampton salary and I thought there must be some mistake. I went
downstairs and said, "Margret, I've been offered a book deal", and she said,
"Never mind that. Look at the state of this towel you used to dye your hair."'
Millington's book, Things My Girlfriend And I Have Argued About, a fictional
version of the column, centres on Pel Dalton, a university librarian, Ursula, his
physiotherapist partner, and their two sons. 'All people argue,' says Millington,
'and we all argue about the same things. It doesn't mean that a relationship is
crumbling or weak. Sometimes I can't believe I'm writing an argument down - it's
so ridiculous, so irrational - and then other people will have had it, word for
word.'
But what does Margret make of her formidable alter ego, Ursula? 'She never
minded about the website because that was on the computer and none of her
friends use one, so it didn't count. I didn't show her the book while I was writing
it, because she doesn't think anything I say is funny, and doubt would have set
in.'
Writing a book was not something he had ever thought about until he got the
publisher's call: 'I don't come from that sort of background. I wouldn't have
dreamed of it.' Millington, who is 38, has lived most of his life in Wolverhampton,
and narrowly missed working alongside Jed Mercurio at the city hospital 10
years ago: 'I arrived there and everyone was talking about this young doctor
who had gone to work in television.'
Millington is currently adapting Things... for the screen, and there have already
been vague discussions about casting. 'I've been asked, "Who do you see as
you? Do you see Ewan?" It's strange. The female role will be the hardest to
cast: it's a great role, but she has to shout and be really attractive.'
YEAR ONE
Saturday April 21, 2001
Nothing keeps a relationship on its toes so much as lively debate. Fortunate, then, that my
girlfriend and I agree on absolutely nothing. At all. Combine utter, polar disagreement on
everything, ever, with the fact that I am a textbook Only Child, and she is a teeteringly unstable
psychopath, and we're warming up. Then factor in my being English and she German - which not
only makes each one of us personally and absolutely responsible for both the history and the
social and cultural mores of our respective countries, but also opens up a whole field of subarguments grounded in grammatical and semantic disputes - and, well, just try saying anything
and walking away. Margret and I can weave an argument out of the air itself; the warm, curling,
ribbons of our own breath are all the material we need.
You doubt me? 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.
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 bar of that size - ie, without feeling the
need to snap them into two individual fingers first. Margret accused me of doing this 'deliberately
to annoy' her.
Stick with me, there's more. Oh yes...
Saturday April 28, 2001
Just before the fire curtain came down last week, you'll recall that Margret and I were in the
middle of exchanging opinions about various matters. To bring you up to speed, let me tell you
that while you were away Margret and I have argued about:
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 internet. (A couple of minutes a week, it surely can't be more
than that.)
First Born's name (Jonathan). Then, when that was settled . . .
How to pronounce First Born's name.
Our telephone number.
Which type of iron to buy (price wasn't an issue, it was the principle, dammit).
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'.
Immediately after every single time Margret touches my computer I have to spend 20 minutes
fixing crashes, locked systems, data losses, jammed drives, bizarre re-configurations and things
stuck in the keyboard.
There then follows a freeform discussion with, in my corner, 'It's your fault' and, in hers, 'It's a
curious statistical anomaly.'
Until next week, then. When we may be asking you to take sides.
Saturday May 5, 2001
Welcome again, my dear, dear friends, to Britain's Catharsis Superstore. This week's specials
include:
Margret enters the room. The television is showing Baywatch. Margret 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.
Margret doesn't like to watch films on the TV. No, hold on - let me make sure you've got the
inflection here: Margret 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.'
I'm off to stand in the cupboard under the stairs and scream for the next seven days. Can
someone video Buffy for me?
"She leaves the loo seat down. I hate it when women do that"
Saturday May 19, 2001
We're staying at a German friend's flat in Berlin 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
Margret and a few friends several years previously. And consists pretty much entirely of shots of
Margret naked. 'Hah! So, here's another photo of your girlfriend nude! Good breasts, no?'
I sat on a sofa for hours of this - I think I actually bit through my tongue at one point. Fortunately,
though, everything turned out all right, because Margret, me and one careful and considered
exchange of views revealed it was 'just [my] hang-up'. Great. I'm sooooo English, apparently.
She leaves the lavatory seat down. I hate it when women do that.
Margret 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 Margret 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 Margret had left the house.
Saturday June 30, 2001
I get accused of hoarding things by Margret. 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 Margret who
fills our house with crap. And I'm not talking here about by the omission of crap-throwing-away,
but by insane design. While sorting out the stuff in the boxes, these are some of the things I've
discovered that Margret 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.
Just for reference: if Margret 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,
okay?
Romance
Saturday July 14, 2001
I am far more romantic than Margret - Fact. Unprovoked, Margret will sometimes ask 'Do you love
me?' I'll reply, ' What ? I go out with you, don't I?' - proving I'm more romantic than she is. My love
is not some temporary thing that needs to be stated repeatedly lest it slip my mind; I have
constancy. That Margret invariably gets annoyed with my reply is because she hasn't thought her
enquiry through; she's not sure what she means. (Whereas, when I say to Margret, 'Do you love
me?', we're both perfectly clear that it means, 'I've just bought myself a rather expensive piece of
electrical equipment that you haven't seen yet.')
We were watching a TV programme the other week about intelligent children. People could send
away for high achievers' sperm - complete with a little syringe and a page of instructions. To
protect the identity of these elite onanists, the samples were named after colours - 'Azure', say, or
'Hyacinth'. Margret beamed, 'Oh, that's so nice.' Now, having put a good deal of effort into
impregnating Margret the conventional way - twice, I may add - it's something of a smack in the
face for her to go misty-eyed because a tube of anonymous sperm is named after a pretty colour.
I would never be enchanted by a woman who said, 'Look, forget dinner and a movie, okay? I've
got an ovum in this Tic-Tac box; I call it 'Gamboge' - off you go.' Because I'm romantic.
Saturday July 21, 2001
Margret is not only a hypochondriac, she's a competitive hypochondriac, and a theatrical
hypochondriac, and a theatrical hypochondriac by proxy.
1) If I say: 'I think I've got a cold coming,' Margret will reply: 'I've got one coming, too. And it's a
really bad one.' I'll say: 'I have a headache.' She replies: 'I've had one for days.' Me: 'Ouch, I've
just banged my knee.' Her: 'I banged mine yesterday - chipped the bone, I think.' If we were both
flung from a disintegrating aircraft, I'd scream: 'I'm going to die!' and Margret would scream back:
'I'll hit the ground first!'
2) Never: 'I feel tired.' Always: 'I think I have myalgic encephalomyelitis.' Yet Margret isn't ever ill.
If the kids and I come down with some horrendous bug, Margret's just an onlooker. While we're
shivering and sweating and retching, and great, surging abdominal cramps are bending our
ashen bodies double - we've had to paint a big cross on our door and burn all our clothing - she
might mention that her stomach feels a bit 'odd', then carry on eating her huge bowl of bacon and
melted cheese.
3) She's notorious for unwanted diagnoses. A friend stands up and says she has pins and
needles in her foot; Margret is right there with: 'I knew someone who had that, it turned out to be
a fatal heart defect.' Don't stop reading my magazine and stare, rapt, into her face when she
starts to say something? Then I 'have Asperger's syndrome'. Obviously.
Arguments
Saturday July 28, 2001
There are many arguments we have over arguments. 'Who started argument X, ' for example, is
an old favourite that has not had its vigour dimmed by age or 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 sibling (in the sense that it relishes an audience - parties, visiting relatives,
parents' evenings at school, in shops, etc), 'Right, so we're going to get into this argument here,
are we?'
An especially frequent argument, however, is the result of Margret NOT STICKING TO THE
DAMNED ARGUMENT, FOR CHRIST'S SAKE. She jackknifes from argument to argument, jigs
direction randomly and erratically, like a shoal of Argument Fish being followed by a Truth Shark.
It is fearsomely difficult to land a blow, because by the time you've let fly with the logic, she's not
there any more. A row about vacuuming gets shifted to the cost of a computer upgrade, from
there to who got up early with the kids most this week and then to the greater interest rates of
German banks via the noisome sexual keenness of some former girlfriend, those-are-hairscissors-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?'
'Get your hands off me - you're freezing.'
Saturday August 11, 2001
On the subject of phones:
If I called my friend Mark to ask, 'What time's the train tomorrow?' it'd go:
Me: 'What time's the train tomorrow?'
Mark: 'It's 9.20, Mil.'
Me: 'Okay, cheers.'
Mark: 'Bye.'
If Margret calls a friend to ask, 'What time's the train tomorrow?' it might come in a shade under
three hours. If our house ever catches fire and Margret makes the call, the embers will be cold by
the time the fire brigade arrives. Though doubtless they'll all arrive knowing that Margret thinks,
'Not a dark colour for the bathroom, because she feels it'll make it look small.'
Margret flooded the kitchen.
Turned the taps on, put the plug in 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 roaring, '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 in the kidneys. As it is, however,
there's a shout, I run down and stand for a beat in the doorway - taking in the scene, waves
lapping at my ankles - and she turns and roars, 'Help me, then! Can't you see I've flooded the
kitchen - you idiot! '
Saturday August 18, 2001
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 a past argument. 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, many years ago, we're having this argument and somehow I find myself inhabiting
a place where saying, 'Okay, okay - I'll do all the cooking and all the washing-up all the time,
then!' seems like a hugely cunning gambit.
Now, the thing is, if you're an English male, what you do when you leave home is: go to the
shops, buy a Pot Noodle (chicken-and-mushroom flavour), feast on its delights, swill out the
plastic carton it came in, then use this carton for all your subsequent meals until you get married.
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 all the
stops to dazzle visiting royalty, perhaps a spoon. After a Margret-generated meal, it's very
different.
'How the hell did you use all these to make that?'
'It's just what I needed.'
'What? How did the lawnmower get involved?'
Saturday September 1, 2001
Margret went to a gardening exhibition and I went shopping.
We each bought ourselves a present. Margret bought an insect breeder, I bought an insect killer.
I remarked how well we complemented each other - without me she'd have no practical items that
did pleasing things yet were still interesting and clever, while, without her, I'd have no pointless,
overpriced crap. She demanded I take the insect killer back. I refused. The insect killer is still
here. Precisely where here I have no idea, because she's hidden it. Still, I think I win on points,
eh?
The key to a successful relationship is communication.
That's the First Rule. Margret's corollary to the First Rule is the Timing clause. This says that the
best time to initiate a complex and lengthy talk about, say, a loft conversion is (in reverse order of
preference):
a) When you see that Mil is playing a game online and is one point away from becoming
champion of the world, Mil is racing out of the house to catch a train, Mil is in the middle of trying
to put out a kitchen fire, etc.
b) During the final minutes of a tense thriller Mil has been watching for the past two hours. Ideally,
at the precise point at which someone has begun to say, 'Good Lord! Then the murderer must
be... '
c) Just at the moment, late at night, when Mil has finally managed to fall asleep.
d) While having sex.
Saturday September 15, 2001
A vasectomy. Don't care how many arguments it causes, quite frankly, it's Not Going To Happen.
My vas deferens has done sterling service for me over the years and I won't betray it to someone
who's got a pair of scissors in one hand, some catgut in the other and nothing but his golf
handicap on his mind.
To hell with cutting holes in your body as a method of contraception - I like condoms, okay? Half
of me has sex only as an excuse to get condoms, they're the marvel of the age.
It's not just the vasectomy itself that primes me for a row, though. There's the fact that she tries to
sell it by saying, 'Well, [one of her idiot friends]'s [stupid] husband had it.' Like that's going to carry
any weight. How far would I get with, 'Go on - lots of women do it... ' ?
Worse is that Margret calls it 'the snip'. 'Why don't you have the snip?' she'll say. 'The snip.' An
incision is made in your flesh and through the underlying muscle. Then part or all of the tube
between the epididymis and the ejaculatory duct is excised, and the ends tied up before sutures
are used to seal the hole that's been cut in your body to gain access. 'The snip.' Let's give dinky
little names to other medical procedures then, eh? Let's call the whole giving birth process 'the
pop', shall we? That just about conveys the minor discomfort of it all, doesn't it?
Saturday September 29, 2001
We've developed short cuts to a lot of our arguments, so we can get more in each day.
For example, Margret once said to me, 'Am I your favourite woman in the world? The world? I
mean, really. You see how it's done? Sometimes she will lay mines so we can instantly detonate
an argument later. She'll go out and, as she closes the door, call back, '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?' Bemused, I'll 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 there.
Another winner is when I can't find something - the TV guide, my elastic band rifle - and the
exchange goes:
'Gretch? Have you seen my sunglasses?'
'Have you looked for them?'
(Oooooooo... I ... it ... when... argggh! My teeth are gritted just typing that.)
Margret, typically efficient, has even discovered a way of ensuring an argument using no words at
all. The technique is: 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, when she'll abruptly and conspicuously stop what
she's saying, mid-sentence.
Yep, one of us will be sleeping in the spare room tonight.
Saturday October 13, 2001
I'm the newest of New Men. Left-of-centre, angst-ridden liberal that I am, I nearly die of shame if
I eat a Twix when half the world is starving - I mean, you get two fingers in each wrapper, for
God's sake! I fret. I dwell. I probably read the Guardian. Thus, when premenstrual tension was
identified, I took it on board as yet another area in which my sex had been ignorant, boorish and
insensitive for centuries, and modified my behaviour and outlook accordingly. 'Of course, my
God, of course a woman should not be convicted of murder if she had PMT - no one should be
blamed for things they did when driven by hormones! Well, unless they're men and the hormone
is testosterone, obviously - that's their own damned fault,' I'd say, stamping my Birkenstocked
feet.
So, when Margret gets PMT, I stoically excuse all her explosions. The trouble is checking. I'll ask
Margret if she's seen the Sellotape and she'll punch me in the face. 'Ah-ha,' I'll think. 'PMT.' So,
New Man, readying to make allowances, I'll say, casually, 'When are you due on?'
Boom!
'What's that mean? What are you trying to say?'
'I'm just asking.'
Boom!
Now it seems I'm being dismissive or reducing her feelings and opinions to physiology or, um,
something - I'm not quite sure what the thrust is, actually, but it does include my shoes being
hurled out into the street.
Saturday October 20, 2001
My selfless desire to expand the vocabulary of medical science means it would delight me to the
toes if everyone could adopt the use of the phrase 'Margret's Syndrome'. This would signify a
condition characterised by chronic 'point blindness'. Allow me to give you a case study for
diagnostic purposes. I bought a mobile phone. I then spent the best part of an afternoon entering
the names and numbers of people I know - an activity roughly as much fun as performing
emergency dental surgery on yourself. The picosecond I'd finished, Margret walked in and said,
'Let's have a look at it.'
'Don't touch anything,' I begged.
When I returned a minute later, Margret glanced up at me from the sofa and chattily asked, 'Can
you get back things that you've deleted?'
My lips became the thinnest of lines.
She doesn't know what she's deleted, but does offer the solution: 'Tsk - you'll find out eventually if
it's important.' 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 Margret had deleted something, without even knowing
what it was, after I'd spent hours setting up the phone and had specifically asked her not to touch
anything. Margret's assessment, however, was this: 'You know what the trouble is? You're a
gadget freak.'
Saturday November 10, 2001
Right, you tell me whether I'm wrong to be starting to get seriously worried about this, okay? You
tell me. I shuffled out of bed into the bathroom this morning to have a shower. I took off my
clothes, innocently pulled aside the shower curtain and there was a ficus. A 3ft high ficus, thin
green leaves pouring from the end of its stems like the bursting of firework rockets, in its pot, was
standing in my shower. I was knocked completely on to my back foot. More than that, as I stood
there motionless staring at it, I felt vaguely embarrassed; like I'd bumblingly intruded and any
second now the thing was going to turn round to me and say, 'Do you mind? I'd like to take a
shower here.' I pulled the shower curtain back quietly and crept away. But, tell me, is Margret
placing a tropical shrub there the act of a rational human being?
You know what I think? I think she's having an affair with it. In retrospect, that's exactly the
shudder of realisation I felt as I pulled back the shower curtain. I mean, it's not like the clues
weren't there, is it? I can perfectly picture myself unexpectedly coming home early from work one
day, walking into the bedroom and, with a cold slap of shock, discovering them in bed together underwear and foliage flung carelessly across the floor by their impatient passion.
'You! Of course - what a fool I've been!'
Saturday November 17, 2001
Naturally, to list all the things I love about Margret would require a weekly column going from here
to Malcolm Gluck. However, one of the things I love about her is her zest. You probably won't
have picked up on this, but in actual fact I'm a sullen kind of character, while Margret hisses with
energy and is excited by 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 Margret only has to walk through the doors at Homebase to achieve orgasm.
Anyway, fascinated and charmed though I might be by it, this whippy outlook of hers can
sometimes be a bit wearing. Example: the other day, 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 - as I leave rooms, I often hear behind me the words, 'Christ! There's a man who
needs a haircut URGENTLY' - but let's not confuse understandable alarm with imperativeness.
When Margret said this, it was about 11 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.
Saturday November 24, 2001
I slide into bed. Just to provide you with the kind of background detail that famously sets the
Guardian apart from its competitors, I'd come to bed late as I'd been watching a video of The Top
Ten... Guitar Heroes programme.
(Jimi Hendrix is massively overrated, by the way. That's not strictly relevant here, but no one on
Earth appears to be mentioning it. And I'm beginning to worry that - great innovator and showman
though he may have been - at some point they'll actually make it illegal to say that, for a good
deal of the time, he was making a terrible bleeding row on a guitar that, although it didn't seem to
matter to him, had slipped wince-inducingly out of tune. Write furious, caustic reactions to my
saying this to the letters section as you see fit; you will not still my voice on this matter. Also,
you're wrong. And ugly.)
Anyway, Margret is already asleep. I put my head on the pillow and am just about to inch warmthseekingly closer to her when she suddenly elbows me full in the face with stupefying force. My
howl of pain wakes her and she glances over her shoulder at her elbow, still embedded in my
skull. 'Oh,' she says, 'I was dreaming I was having a car crash.' And instantaneously falls back
into a rasping sleep.
If Elizabeth Hurley's reading this, I wonder if I might ask if that's the kind of thing she does? Just
out of interest.
Saturday December 1, 2001
First Born cut his hair. 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 - he got a
pair of scissors and cut his own hair; he now looks like a tiny Howard Devoto. Margret was the
one to spot that Jonathan appeared to be the first eight-year-old to be suffering from male pattern
baldness and marched into the room where I was sitting.
"Jonathan's cut loads of his hair off."
"Tsk," I replied.
She's unable to find herself entirely satisfied with this.
"All parented out now?"
"You think I should wrap it in frozen peas and race to the hospital to see if they can do an
emergency weave?"
" I think that you should go and speak to him."
Margret always thinks I should "go" and "speak" to the children when they have done something
idiotic. The implication is that Idiocy is my area, that I can speak The Language Of Fools. Sighing,
I plod into the other room. Jonathan is drawing a picture.
"Don't do stuff like that, Jonathan. 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? So, it doesn't matter that everyone else in the world thinks it looks
stupid? That's, um, really good, actually." I ruffle (what's left of) his hair. Margret enters behind
me. Quickly, I furrow my eyebrows.
"So? Is that clear, Jonathan?"
"Yes."
Leaving past Margret, solemnly, "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,
Papa said ..." I have my bags packed ready.
Shower issues
Saturday December 8, 2001
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 Margret's longest held desires has
been to get a shower like those in Germany. Thus, she got one fitted when we moved here and it
is, indeed, German.
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', only 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 Margret's shower of choice, therefore, 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 because not only does Margret leave our shower set to maim, she also
leaves the temperature gauge switched to cold.
Margret has cold showers first thing in the morning. How unsurprising is that? In fact, I should
have written nothing but 'Margret has cold showers first thing in the morning' for the very first of
these columns and then simply gone on holiday until now - everyone would have been able to
infer the rest.
I, it won't surprise you to learn, don't like mornings to begin with, and I definitely don't want to find
a cold shower lurking anywhere within one. Today, then, I stumbled sleepy-eyed into the shower,
wrenched it on, and was immediately hit by a roar of icy water travelling at 1,200mph.
I scrambled at the settings - urgently, as (after an initial, reflexively abrupt intake of air) it
appeared that Margret's preferred settings had arrested my breathing.
My 'O'-eyed, teeth-bared face is going to be stuck like this for a week.
Saturday December 15, 2001
The Terror Of Lids. Sometimes Margret, after grunting with it herself for a collection of 'hnggh's,
will hand me a bottle or a jar with an impatient 'Open that for me'.
If the gods lie content in the skies above England, 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 palms of my
hands. Then I wrap the lid in a tea towel and strain some more to equal effect.
It's at this point that I begin using the jam of the door as a vice to hold the lid while I twist at the
container.
Margret 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. "Give it back," Margret 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 with effort.
But, eventually, Margret will manage to get the thing off me. This is the darkest moment. If she
tries to open the jar again and it remains fastened, I am saved. "It's just completely stuck," she'll
say then.
I'll say, "It is. Stop trying now. Stop. Stop it."
However, there are times - and my stomach chills even as I write this - when, with one last
Satanic effort, she manages to spin the lid free. A slight smile makes a home on her face.
"What?" I say.
"Nothing."
"No - what?"
"Nothing."
"I'd loosened it."
"I didn't say anything."
I dissolve with shame.
Saturday December 22, 2001
There are these German incense things that Margret burns at Christmas: little cones that
smoulder inside a variety of amusing containers - smoking woodsmen being a particular favourite.
I believe that the German word for them translates as, "Vile, stinking demons' droppings that
belch out great eye-watering, throat-searing fogs of acrid stench."
Obviously, I can't put my foot down and say "No" to her, because it leads down that road where I
eventually come round to a blurred figure leaning over me, saying, "Mr Millington? Can you hear
me? Just try to stay still. You're bleeding internally." But also, more annoyingly, because she
plays the homesickness card.
"It reminds me of a traditional German Christmas. It's just..." she'll say, complete with the ellipsis.
You'd assume that the traditional German celebration involves someone saying, "Indeed, it is
Christmas; let us all go and stand in a greenhouse that's being fumigated for fungal infestations."
Moreover, the other side of the matter is that when we happen to be spending Christmas in
Germany, never - not once - have I ever said, "How I miss England at this time of year... Please
may I sit in front of the TV brushing bits of nutshell off my lap and watching another repeat of Only
Fools And Horses.
Margret and I don't even agree on when Christmas is. Father Christmas will come to delight both
our children and JK Rowling's accountant on the morning of the 25th. His frugal German cousin
Nicolaus already stuffed fruit into their shoes on the night of the 5th. Then the Christkind turns up
on the 24th, also bearing gifts.
But none of this causes an argument. The Spirit of Christmas, eh? If even Margret and I aren't
arguing right now, anyone who is ought to be ashamed of themselves, quite frankly.
Saturday January 5, 2002
We were watching Hannibal on DVD and Margret was sitting beside me, looking at the screen,
right from the moment I hit "Play".
Mil: "Are you ready?"
Margret: "Yes."
Mil: "No you're not, you're clearly not. Sit down here."
Margret: "I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm just cutting out this magazine article and putting the kids' toys
away in an order based on the psychological warmth of their respective colours and making a cup
of tea and looking through the Ikea catalogue, but I'm ready - go ahead, start the film."
Mil: "No. I'll start the film when you're sitting here. If I start it 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." Margret, grudgingly, sits down and I hit "Play".
[Titles. Darkness. Hushed, unsettling music gives way to unseen characters having a
conversation. Finally, appearing first as a small box, the opening scene expands to fill the
screen.]
Margret: "I've just remembered, I need to phone Jo."
Mil: "Arrrrggghhhkkkkk-kkk-kk-k!"
Margret: "I'll just be a second - carry on."
Mil: "No. Make the call. I'll wait."
[Three hours later, Margret returns; I'm still on the sofa, remote control in my hand, but now
visibly older and covered in a light film of dust.]
Margret: "Okay, done."
Mil: "Right."
[I wind back 15 seconds for the intro again, Margret complains we've already seen this bit. I reply
it's important for setting the mood, she thinks it's a stupid thing to do, it degenerates into a 20-
minute row about foreplay, and then we finally begin to watch the film. Titles. Darkness. A face
appears.]
Margret: "Who's that?"
Saturday January 19, 2002
Margret's four-hundred-and-fifty-second most annoying habit is stealthily to turn off the central
heating. The secretiveness of her doing this is key to her MO. She doesn't tell me to do it - this is
significant, as usually she never misses the chance to order me about ("Will you stop sitting there
and get the shoes on these children."). It's almost as if she believes that I'll fail to notice if she
doesn't draw my attention to it.
Thus, sitting typing at the keyboard, I'll suddenly become aware that I can see my own breath
while from the bedroom one of the kids will call out "Papa - I can't feel my legs" and I'll shiver
down the stairs to find the central heating set to Summer/ Hypothermia/Cryogenic Suspension.
Sometimes, after killing the life-support for the rest of the house, she'll light the gas fire in the
room she's in. So, when I try to tackle her about her actions, she's there watching the TV in a
doorframe-warping furnace, and the sheer, oxygen-leeching intensity of the heat at her location
means that I get as far as, "Margret, I... " before my eyes roll back into my head and I lose
consciousness.
She won't always give herself an alternative source of heat, however - and when she doesn't it's
far worse. Because, you see, Margret's admirably fierce opinions on gender stereotypes and the
tiresome falsehoods of society's notions of masculinity stop right at the point where I begin. If an
actor in some film gives his jacket to the heroine on a wind-savaged moor, a derisive laugh is
sure to issue from Margret. If she catches me turning the heating back on, when she considers it
unnecessary, though ...
"Why are you doing that?"
Shaking too much to speak, I'll simply raise my hands, which the cold has curled into claws.
"Tsk," she'll snort. "Wimp."
Saturday January 26, 2002
Our sink is blue and we're not talking about it. A week ago, I was leaning over the sink, minding
my own business and brushing my teeth, when I noticed that there was a sort of lazuline patina
that had seeped over most of the surface. Quite beautiful, really.
It's always useful, in a bathroom, to have a few things that can be stared at in an absent, dreamy
fashion. In fact, if you happen to have a stain on the wall opposite the toilet, that, looked at one
way is a lion rampant, another way more resembles Topol's face, I understand it can add as
much as £4,000 to the value of your house.
But anyway. Margret hasn't mentioned anything about it. 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 cirriped
colonies from the hulls of submarines or something - they were probably offering three bottles 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 any more, 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?"
Margret: "Yes. I did. I used a jungle exfoliant produced by the Taiwanese military to clean it, and it
discoloured the surface."
Me: " Ooooooookay."
Margret: "Well, maybe, just maybe, if you deigned to clean the sink once in a while..."
You see what she did there? Now I'm facing a whole day of, "When did you last do ...?"
Well, not this canny fellow - not this time, my friends. Our sink is blue and we're not talking about
it.
Saturday February 2, 2002
Margret 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 taking holidays in the sun, my favourite meal is a
Pot Noodle, and the leather jacket that I'm currently wearing was bought while I was still in the
sixth form.
Quite honestly, I suspect that if Jess Cartner-Morley and I were ever to touch, the resulting
explosion would destroy the universe. Sometimes, however, practical demands mean I need to
buy a digital camera, say, or another guitar. I'll try to sneak it into the house (Margret 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 ", with an airy, dismissive wave, 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 much? 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. Margret bought a sideboard. A second-hand sideboard that cost
at least twice as much money as I would ever part with for a graphics accelerator card for my PC.
"How much did that cost?" I asked.
"It's an antique. Well, not a proper antique, but I think it was made in Poland."
"Uh-huh."
I took the moral high ground - from where I purchased the Buffy Series 3 DVD set. Outrageously
expensive, yes, but a thing that, under the circumstances, I am not at all afraid to reveal to
Margret. You know, reveal now, here. In this column.
Saturday February 9, 2002
Risible as it might sound, I have an agent. I don't have the time to detail the outrageous set of
circumstances that backed me into that particular corner, so please just mock and despise me
until you fall to the floor, exhausted but happy. Anyway, due to the outrageous set of
circumstances I haven't detailed, I went from agentless to agent-ed very quickly. Racing through
London en route to Germany, I met her for the first time ever, ate some chips, signed some
papers and sped away again, all inside about 30 minutes.
I got to Germany, and Margret and I headed off for some skiing. We are going up a mountain,
side by side, on a drag lift. The white noise of the snow under our skis is the only sound until
Margret begins to speak.
Margret: "This woman - Hannah, is it? What's she like?"
Mil: "Um... she seems okay."
Margret: "How old is she?"
Mil: "About 30, I think."
Margret: "What colour is her hair?"
Mil: "Black."
Margret: "Does she smoke?"
Mil: "Yes."
Margret: "YOU WANT TO SLEEP WITH HER, DON'T YOU?"
Splendid. Margret: forensic psychology's loss is, also, my loss.
We went to the cinema. The film was being shown on a tiny screen at the multiplex; one not even
big enough for us to have a dispute about how close to the front to sit and end up sitting 12 rows
apart. That robbed us of a disagreement, so we disputed who should have the aisle seat instead.
Only solution: Margret takes one aisle seat, I take the one in front of her.
That sorted, the music rose and I slid down to watch the film. At this point, a fleshy thing
appeared by my head and, from behind me, I heard Margret hiss: "Massage my feet."
Saturday February 16, 2002
Just listen to this. This shows why Margret will always have me whipped. Yesterday morning I
was lying in bed struggling to orientate my newly-awoken self in the standard manner - "What day
is it?", "Who am I?", "Where did Andrea Corr go?", etc, etc. Margret was lying next to me and had
also just woken up. As she melted into focus I saw that she was staring at my face with a shifting
blend of confusion and alarm. She spoke. The words she used were these: "Why have your
eyebrows gone white?"
At this point you, too - with your endlessly enquiring, Guardian-reader minds - are, no doubt, also
wondering how it was that my eyebrows had gone white. Dear me; have you come so far, my
friends, yet learned so little? Take one moment and "Consider - The - Source". Margret said my
eyebrows had gone white; my eyebrows, of course, had not really gone white. How the hell could
they? That's just madness. But their actual colour doesn't matter. It's a dummy, a bluff, a feint to
the left before swerving to the right. The important thing is that now, right at the start of the day,
I'm on my back foot. In mere seconds I've gone from fast asleep to the panicky disarray of a man
who's awoke to discover his eyebrows have spontaneously blanched while he slept.
It doesn't matter that when I checked my eyebrows in the bathroom mirror (and returned to check
them again, and kept returning, throughout the day, to keep rechecking them) that they were
precisely the same as they've always been. No, the real impact is to destabilise me emotionally;
it's gamesmanship, it's psyching out your chess opponent by suddenly starting to bark like a dog.
There, at 7.15am, the mental battle is already won. I am broken. The day is Margret's.
Saturday February 23, 2002
Imagine that you're holed up in a Wyoming basement surrounded by automatic weapons,
livestock and racks of cassettes filled with analysis of the Book of Revelations you've recorded off
talk radio. Snuggle yourself into the role, then have this fantasy: you go and take a look in the
freezer.
That's how Margret stocks our freezer, too. She doesn't buy one of anything. She waits until it's
"Buy Two - Get One Free" and then 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, say), there's 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 Margret employs two ruses.
The first ruse 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. Jonathan pretty much expects his turkey dinosaurs to be a
collection of misshapen body parts; they're turkey dinosaurs, but turkey dinosaurs as modelled
from the scenes of carnage the day after the comet hit earth. It only really becomes an issue
when he has friends round, asks them if they'd like a Cornetto ice cream and is then bemused by
their look of stark horror when he returns holding something that looks like it's been trampled by
horses.
The second freezer packing ruse I'll discuss next week...
Saturday March 2, 2002
The second freezer-cramming ruse is that Margret throws away the cardboard boxes in which
everything's packed. And thus the cooking instructions. I know you won't believe this, but I'm just
the tiniest bit anal. I like to have cooking instructions; instructions that I can follow precisely. (A
regular argument we have springs from my setting the oven timer for, say, seven minutes, then
going into the living room and pacing back and forth, checking my watch, while I wait. Eventually,
my crackling nerves take me into the kitchen, to find that Margret has reset the alarm to 45
minutes because she's using it to time some glue drying. A discussion will follow.)
It's worse, however, when she decides that the cooking instructions are vital. She'll cut them out
and throw them into the freezer as she's loading it. I'll find them years later. There's no clue as to
what they belong to. My shaking hands merely hold a slip bearing the words "Leave to stand for
three minutes before serving", and I've not the smallest idea to what it's referring. I'd be happier,
frankly, if it read, "There is a bomb somewhere in your house."
Anyway, last Saturday the oven was on. Margret, in a worrying development, was cooking.
"What's in there?" I asked, as off-handedly as the situation allowed.
"Your pizza."
I made a lunge for the oven door. Margret became bellicose. "I can cook a frozen pizza."
"I know," I bluffed. "I just want to add some extra ham." Margret's taking on a frozen pizza - and
she's flying blind! I remove it from the oven. I add extra ham. I return it to the oven.
On a whim, I amend Margret's arrangement and remove the polystyrene base from under the
pizza before continuing to cook it.
Saturday March 9, 2002
Hanging Things. Margret simply cannot stop hanging things from every defenceless lampshade,
rail or drawing pin-able piece of ceiling space. Things. Any things, as far as I can make out.
Mobiles built from small, wooden, peasant figures, baskets of plants, 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 found some sick
outlet that sold her a suspended helix of hollow clay doves that produces an arpeggio of dull,
ceramic 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 here in the attic and thought, "Hmm... 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, attempted to fathom the eerie, psychological imperative at the
root of it. Thankfully, I have now identified its cause: she's nuts.
I was watching Good Will Hunting with Margret the other day, and she squeezed my arm and
said, "That's how I'd like you to look."
"Ahhh," you're all sitting there saying, "but Mil, you're already practically Ben Affleck's double."
True enough. But Margret was talking about Robin Williams. Aged 45. With a beard. Kill me.
Saturday March 16, 2002
We were having a standardly fierce and fortissimo argument last week (it may have been about
muesli, or perhaps that one was earlier in the day, I can't quite remember now), and Margret took
the opportunity to make a general point. With the kind of passionate conviction that drives her
voice to excel in the field of volume, she stated how this is typical of the way "I cause all the
arguments". She had her arms knotted tightly in front of her while, a short distance away, I stood
with my hands outstretched and a face reading, "Hold on - have I just woken up in the middle of
an entirely different relationship? Your name is 'Margret', right?"
More fool me, though, as she had done her research. She provided evidence for her statement
thus: "You don't say anything, and you know how that makes me wild."
Well, I could study the clearly complex logic of that analysis from now until the children are old
enough to have me put safely into a home but, by way of reaching out to her, I decided not to.
Better to light a candle than sit cursing the darkness and all that, so I felt it was more useful to
build bridges. As it was my "not saying anything" that was causing the problems for Margret, I
knew the worst thing I could do was remain silent at this point, so I was quick to reply: "Bollocks."
I can only assume it must have been because she didn't hear me that this so spectacularly failed
to work. Next time I must remember to speak louder.
Guess what? I've just returned from the shops with the "anti-frizz", relaxing shampoo Margret had
asked for. So, at least her hair will be relaxed and manageable now, eh? Eh? EH? Ahhh - I crack
myself up, I really do.
Saturday March 23, 2002
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, "Margret, 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 Margret'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. And yes, seeing as you ask, I am thinking of something specific.
You don't know me, right? We've never met. You're aware, perhaps, that my hair's currently Post
Office red. You know, from the section of my head that survived the edge of the page this week,
that I look as if I haven't slept since 1982. You have a certain suspicion that, in my 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 been a couple for something over 13 years and have had two
children and decorated a landing together.
Given all 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? You've never even met me, and yet you
know. So, if Margret, 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.
Saturday March 30, 2002
Valentine's day.
"Nice one, Mil," you huff. "Very topical." But, you see, this has matured over time, like a fine wine.
Or a stinky cheese. We were in Germany on Valentine's day. Margret had already flown out, and
I was going to join her. On my way, I stopped for a quick drink with Hannah (chaotically-haired
agent) and Helen (harp-playing publisher). After a brief, giggly discussion about boys, and as
though reacting to a cue I can't hear, they suddenly turn into Crabbe and Goyle. "Don't forget to
get Margret a Valentine's card," they growl at me simultaneously. Like I'm some kind of uselessstyle boyfriend, or something.
"Tch," I reply, hurt, "I've already sent it from here, so it arrives romantically by post." They shrink
back across the table, satisfied.
It's VD, then. Margret gives me her card and waits, drumming her fingers, for mine. It doesn't
arrive. Nor the next day. Nor has it turned up more than a week later. Nor by March, when we're
back in England. Margret has, over the course of these many weeks, gone from a brusque, "So,
did you get me a card or what?" to cross-armed, bedtime harangues: "You didn't even get me a
Valentine's card. You bought your friend Tracey a chocolate-bear-on-a-stick back from Fussen,
and you didn't even get me a card." I can't tell her I did, because that would ruin the romance. I
know when it finally does appear, she'll say, "Heavens! So you remembered after all! How even
more meaningful! Please, Mil, use my body to gorge your aberrant desires! Start, um... here."
Eventually, the day comes: the card arrives! Margret shrugs, "I wasn't bothered, really. Sending
cards just commercialises the day, doesn't it?" and lopes off to put the kettle on.
Romantic climaxes aren't what they used to be, eh?
Saturday April 6, 2002
Robbie Williams is a singer. Formerly a member of Take That, since he left he has divided his
time fairly equally between music and rehab. I mention this because you might not have heard of
him; he's not in the papers much. The reason I bring him up at all is that Margret has "A Thing" for
him.
I have no problem with that, of course. I quite like Robbie Williams myself and, anyway, as
someone who still hopes that one day he'll have the opportunity to roll about covered in Corr
sisters, I'm hardly in a position to criticise.
What causes the sucking of teeth and narrowing of eyes is that, while she tuts and sneers at the
scruffiness of my base desires, she dresses hers up in finery. If we're watching a movie with Gina
Gershon in it, she'll constantly be peering at me, making faces or asking, "What are you doing
with your hand?" Yet I get told to pack it in if, when Robbie Williams is on TV, I examine the
dopey grin stuck immovably on to her face.
The real point of contention, however, is her denial that she does fancy Robbie Williams. This is
what she says: "Tch - I don't fancy him. Yes, he is good-looking and sexy and funny and has lots
of charisma. I'd like to meet him - spend time with him and really get to know him, find out what
he's like, what he feels and thinks. But I don't fancy him."
Splendid. I'd like Neve Campbell to surprise me in the shower; our wet, naked bodies sliding and
pumping against each other as we become dizzy and breathless, lost in desire. But I don't want to
have sex with her. Okay?
(I was just making a rhetorical point there, Ms Campbell. Obviously, I do really. Call me.)
Saturday April 13, 2002
Bleurgh - I'm ill. Worse, Margret has this cold, too. Her succumbing is extraordinary enough hardly any germs bother Margret. But the real problem is that she's trying to prove the thesis, "I'm
more ill than you are. . .but I'm struggling on bravely. I am excellent. You are cowardly and weak."
Last night, for example, I was huddled on the sofa and she walked in and started to do the
ironing.
"Tchah - I'm worse than you are, and I'm doing the ironing."
"You are not worse than me."
"Yes, I am."
"You are not. If you were as bad as me, you wouldn't be doing the ironing. The fact of you doing it
proves that you're not as bad as me. In fact, in some countries doctors use ironing as a
diagnostic tool to assess the severity of an illness. My condition has passed the ironing barrier,
yours has not."
(Regular readers will be aware that I generally do all the ironing. Margret starting to do ironing
can only be because she's making a point - something emphasised by there being only two items
to iron.)
"Every time you're ill you become a baby. I'm worse than you are. . ."
"No, you're not."
"But the ironing has to be done."
"Why? Eternal vigilance? If we don't iron tonight, will Red China seize control of our laundry?"
"It has to be done because I want it out of the way."
She irons the two things and sits next to me on the sofa.
"Make me a cup of tea."
"Ooooooh. . ."
"Make me a cup of tea. I'm worse than you are, and I've just done the ironing, for God's sake ."
7#183; Join an online chat with Mil Millington on Guardian Unlimited at
2pm, on Friday, April 19 (www.guardian.co.uk/liveonline).
Saturday April 20, 2002
Insomnia.
The thing with... hold on, before I start - guess which one of us hung a dreamcatcher over the bed
at some point on Friday? And which one of us walked in sometime later and said, "Wow - great!
I've often thought how not at all irritating it would be to have a bunch of feathers dangling just in
front of my face all night, and I've also frequently been overcome with a sudden sadness that I
had no means of a casual, nocturnal arm wave somehow entangling itself in ribbons and a
suspended hoop so as to bring a halogen lamp crashing down on to my sleeping face. Yet, I've
never thought of bringing the two together - now, that's genius."
So, as I was saying, "insomnia". The thing with insomnia is, you never know when to give in. Do
you stay there, trying to get to sleep? Or do you say, "Well, I'm not going to get to sleep anyway might as well get up and do something"? Generally, I try all the standard things: I try to relax, I try
to clear my mind, I try to think of something pleasant. 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 Margret 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,
"Pheeeeeeeeee - I can't sleep" and, "I don't know what it is; I'm tired, but 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.
YEAR TWO
Saturday April 27, 2002
The Germans are waging an undeclared war on sex. That Margret has been caught up in this
isn't her fault - she's been indoctrinated since birth - but with such an issue at stake I have to put
aside personal feelings for the greater good. To quote Halle Berry, this is "so much bigger than
me" - she was talking about something else, I forget what, but here, too, is a moment that is,
indeed, so much bigger than Halle Berry.
When Margret is given to proselytise, as she repeatedly is, that "red or black aren't sexy colours,
that's simply brainwashing - brown underwear is just as sexy", then it is my duty to save her from
herself. I've lived in Germany and I've seen the world that will result from inaction; a frightening,
bleak landscape where libido is ostracised or crushed by millions of young women in desirerepelling dungarees, and where men with moustaches walk the streets without attracting
comment. Will you find a German woman wearing heels? The very idea is practically
blasphemous, but they've gone way beyond that in their grim fanaticism. Not content with
sensible shoes, they've pushed on into the adoption of Birkenstock - a piece of footwear
developed by scientists to be used in conjunction with cropped, bother-free hair as an anti-sexual
weapons system.
If ensuring the survival of desire for future generations means having a row in Asda, then I
mustn't shy away from it. Especially if, say, I'm holding up a pair of black suspenders, saying,
"Shall I buy you these? Eh? Shall I? Shall I buy these for you?" and Margret is unmoved and
preoccupied. Until, her face suddenly ebullient, she says, "You can buy me that," and points over
my shoulder to what, turning, I discover is . . . A CARDIGAN.
Cue the Jaws music.
Saturday May 4, 2002
When I'm driving the car, Margret will reach across and operate 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? This kind of thing isn't allowed 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, in the "male" sense. If we were in a rally, Margret 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, blameless, crash. Margret has hit countless things: hedges, bollards, a public
electricity exchange, walls, other cars, an ambulance (yes, "honestly"). And she doesn't so much
ignore speed limits as have trouble with them conceptually - "What? There's a speed limit here ,
too?" She drove a hire car, pedal-to-the-floor, for over 200 miles one time; the temperature gauge
strained against the end of the scale. Margret eventually pulled over for a few minutes, but the
wind coming through the radiator was the only thing that had kept it going. When we stopped
moving every single electrical wire in the engine melted away. Fortunately, there was rescue
cover so we were picked up and given a replacement car. Margret, clearly humbled, said, "Oh
brill! This one's got a cassette player!"
So, Margret's a better driver than I am (and a better map reader, too, incidentally). But I get there
eventually and can operate my own indicator , thanks very much.
Saturday May 11, 2002
Music. I'd like to say that Our Tune is the Sex Pistols' Anarchy In The UK, but that's just because
I'm a tremendous wag and much-in-demand after-dinner speaker. We have no Our Tune. We
also listen to music in different rooms, and in the car there's a constant low-level scuffle as
Margret uses her other hand (i.e., the one she's not using to operate the indicator) to war with me
over the radio station.
Just as she does when I'm watching a Nastassja Kinski or Angelina Jolie movie, if she ever walks
in and I'm listening to Kate Bush or Alanis Morissette or Björk, Margret will tut, "Chhk - one of
your Mad Women, eh?" (Which, you know - Stones? Glass houses?) She appreciates neither
White Zombie nor Clawfinger, nor even Black Grape. And yet she can put on a Moby CD without
any hint of irony. Moby. Jesus - how close have you got to be to not caring whether you're alive or
dead to listen to Moby?
But music itself doesn't generally cause any arguments. What does start warming things up is this
habit she has, this reflex, of turning down the volume of whatever I'm listening to as she passes.
It doesn't matter that she's not going to be in the room - she might just have popped in to collect
something immediately before leaving for a month in Egypt. Neither does it matter how loud it is quite possibly, I could be listening with headphones on - she will always pause as she moves by
and reduce the volume by a third.
The only civilised response to this, of course, is for me to rise and pointedly turn it back up, to a
third louder than it was originally. I think you can save me time by predicting for yourselves how
events progress from this point.
Saturday May 18, 2002
The other day someone asked me, "Is there anything you and Margret 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, Margret doesn't drink all that much nowadays. No, we don't argue about that, we argue
about something else.
We argue about cash.
That's cash, specifically. Despite the fact that Margret's earning power is comfortably twice mine,
she never has any cash. If you can conveniently pay by cheque or credit card, that's fine, but
otherwise it's: "Miiiiiiiil - 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
genuinely think that the second I key my Pin number into the cashpoint it texts her mobile phone.
The result is that I never have any cash, because Margret has it. Except, she doesn't. Margret is
endemically cashless to the size of two people.
Saturday May 25, 2002
This is what I have to do to get into trouble: stand there. We went to hire a van; Margret had
arranged it. (As I've mentioned, I know less about motor vehicles than the average four-year-old,
while she has an encyclopaedic knowledge: she'll point excitedly at traffic and say stuff like, "Hey,
look, there's the new five-door Fiat Tampon!".) Anyway, the van hire bloke - open shirt, riotous
body hair, multiple gold chains - starts telling me about it.
Telling me about it. Despite the fact that Margret had begun the conversation, while I just shuffled
behind her. "Yeah, this is the two-litre model..."
"Mmmm..." I nod, noncommittally.
"There is a three-litre, V6 version, but..." He laughs. I echo his laugh, weakly, in response.
Margret asks technical questions. He answers to me, not looking at her. I can feel her starting to
sizzle. I'm innocent here. I'm terrified he's going to corner me with something like, "Do you favour
ABS?" and I'll burst into tears. Still, Margret is nearing the point where she's going to be unable to
prevent herself from disembowelling him and standing over his torn body - her bloodied hands
outstretched, howling to the sky. That's his problem, but I sense she sees me as his tacit
accomplice. I flee the office and put 300 miles between Bloke and Margret, but it's gnawing at
her. The only way I've kept it under control has been by constantly rerunning variations of:
Margret: "He was talking to you!"
Me: "He was 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."
Saturday June 1, 2002
What are you doing? - Part 1.
If I'm sitting on the sofa reading a book and Margret 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 children'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 mysterious and deep now and then, but there are limits. It's
not even as if I can use these moments to exercise my impressively sardonic (yet, at the same
time, profoundly attractive in a deeply sexual way) wit, either. Because Margret regards large
sections of what we on Earth call humour as nothing but shameless mendacity.
Margret [spotting Mil picking with his fingernail at the goo left on a CD case by the price label]:
"What are you doing?"
Mil: "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."
Margret: "No you're not, you liar. You're lying. Why do you always lie?"
Mil: "It works by resonance. You just have to practise to feel the plastic oscillating - go over and
get that Black Grape 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 10 minutes - "What about this, then? Press it on your
face harder" - having quite simply the best of times... but then she grunts.)
Margret: "Liar. You're just a liar."
We shall see where all this leads next week.
Saturday June 8, 2002
What are you doing? - Part 2.
Those of you who haven't spent the past week in an orgy of narcotic excess will remember that
Margret is unable to interpret my movements and so must ask me, "What are you doing?"
whenever I happen to be in her line of sight.
How she can see me, for example, screwing a new bulb into a light fitting and not be able to see,
immediately and with huge, reverberating, limpid clarity, precisely what it is that I'm doing, I don't
know, but that's the situation. It's like living with Mork. Mostly, however, it's not an issue as 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, and we go on about our business.
This morning, though, she came upstairs to the attic while I was sitting in front of the computer
doing some work on the net.
"What are you doing?" she asks.
Trying to concentrate, distracted and harassed, I reply with a degree of snappy aggravation.
"What does it look like I'm doing?"
There's a beat, during which we hold each other's 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 on hearing it. As an image, however, it did rather undercut my sarcasm. Margret - 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 13 years for this moment."
Saturday June 15, 2002
This is how clothes work with me: I need a pair of trousers, I go out and buy a pair of trousers, I
wear that pair of trousers for 15 years, or until a court order compels me to buy a new pair.
Buying new trousers is very quick, because it's simply a matter of walking into a shop and saying,
"I'd like a pair of trousers. I'd like them to be precisely the same as the pair I have on now, except,
you know, with knees in them."
Margret is different. Perhaps part of the reason that she has spent so much time wandering
around naked is that she finds it next to impossible to buy clothes.
She goes to the Clothes Show at the NEC every year - and every year it's exactly the same. She
spends a whole day at the biggest clothes exhibition in the world and comes back with nothing.
("There were a couple of things I almost bought... ") She has what I believe is called "an inability
to commit".
Even if she does manage to get something, it doesn't last. The other day, she sought me out to
complain that she didn't like the jacket she'd just bought.
"Why did you buy it, then?" I asked.
"I liked it in the shop."
"Maybe you could pay them a retainer so they'll keep it there, but you can visit it every so often."
"You're not funny, you know."
Given this, what chance do I have (unaided, of course - "You should know what I like") of buying
her presents successfully? Each birthday and Christmas, I'm placed in an impossible situation,
clothes-wise. All I can do is hedge my bets and buy stuff she can wear in the house - a latex
basque, say, or a dental hygienist's uniform.
What other choice do I have, right?
Saturday June 22, 2002
What Margret and I have, essentially, is a Mexican standoff with love instead of guns. (Okay, yes,
sometimes there are guns, too.) The important thing, though, is the mindset. Let me illustrate. On
the table is a roast chicken in an incredibly hot baking tray - which I haven't placed precisely
centrally on the coaster.
Margret becomes loudly agitated that heat might creep past the coaster, through the tablecloth,
through the protective sheet under the tablecloth, and affect the second-hand table beneath. I
nudge the tray into the centre but, in doing so, about half a teaspoon of gravy spills over the side.
Outside, birds fall mute. Inside, frozen in time, the camera swings around us sitting at the table,
like in The Matrix.
"Why the hell did you do that? Quick, clean it up," says Margret.
"No," I reply. "I'm eating. I'm going to eat. Then I'll clean it up."
"No, clean it up now. "
Amateurs might have worked this up into a shouting match, but I am not about to stoop to childish
name-calling. Instead, I pour some more gravy on to the table. "Okay?" I say. "Now stop it. I'll
clean it up after."
"Clean it up now."
I tip a little more gravy on to the table. "I'm simply going to keep doing it every time you say that."
"Do it now." More gravy. "Now." More gravy. This continues until we run out of gravy.
As my actions seemed perfectly rational at the time, I am pleased with my ability to make good
decisions under pressure. Margret glows with an enraptured smile due to the belief that I'd done
something hugely stupid she could use in any number of arguments later - possibly years later.
Everyone wins. We eat, united in contentment. I clean up the table.
Saturday June 29, 2002
Mathematics. I'm sure every couple has the occasional row about mathematics, but Margret and I
are something of a mathematics argument black spot. She's forever handing me bits of paper
covered in chaotic waterfalls of figures and saying, "Check this for me. Now. Stop doing that thing
that you're clearly enjoying immensely, and check this for me."
"Awwww - why do I have to do it?" I'll reply, but she'll just tap the paper insistently and say,
"Because you're better at this kind of thing." Which isn't any sort of compliment, incidentally, it's
just her way of saying, "You can apply yourself more effectively than me to this because you're
dull."
The next stage is that never - ever - will the figure I arrive at be the same as the one she got. But,
despite the fact that she hunted me down in the first place because I'm "better", she'll insist hers
is correct. And they're always terrible calculations - work hours (base 60, there, so fun already)
accommodating shifting patterns and odd holidays and allowances, comparisons of English and
German bank accounts taking in variable exchange rates and compound interest... fuel
consumption. In Britain this was given in miles/gallon, in Germany as litres/100 kilometres. Work
out a conversion for that. Go on, try it. Go on. GO ON. It's the kind of equation that can only be
solved by shouting, "No, here - here - this figure here, look. Oh, for God's sake, let's start again;
I'll go... very... slowly." I'll try to explain the figures in my calculations to her more clearly by writing
them on the paper very hard, and perhaps underlining them, perhaps several times. Oh - and
Germans write a "1" so it's easy to confuse it with a "7": mathematics and cacography can leave
Margret and I not speaking to each other for a week.
Saturday July 6, 2002
Good morning, everyone. The first thing Margret said to me today: I went down to the kitchen and
she handed me a yoghurt and said, "Here, eat this, it's out of date." Excellent.
We have some friends round. They've been on a skiing trip with their new digital camera. I'm sure
you know what's the first thing you do with a digital camera. No, not that - go to the internet if you
want that kind of thing. The other first thing you do with a digital camera is to take pictures of
simply everything because you don't have to pay to get them developed. There are countless
dizzying 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, etc.
Margret 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."
In the evening, Margret is sitting at this computer (which is in the attic) typing something. I'm
flopped in a chair close by with a pen and pad. 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 Birkenstocks, throws it down through the
trapdoor (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. Good night, everyone.
Saturday July 13, 2002
We're watching the tennis on TV and, as the players are sitting down for a change of ends, the
camera idly pans around the crowd, pausing on a woman eating an ice cream.
And Margret says? Louder - I can't hear you... Yes, yes she does.
"Who's that?"
I'm here to make an appeal for the population of the earth to wear name tags at all times. (Six
tags if you're an actor: your character's name, your real name, a list of things you've been in
before, your character's name in all those things, the other actor who - "Oh, come on, you know "
- you look a bit like and the things that other actor has been in.) Please, do it. They cost only a
few pence and you'll save me an awful lot of time.
Oh, and talking of programme confusion, see if any of you care to draw a telling psychological
insight from this - I was watching Band Of Brothers once and Margret walked in and asked, "Is
this Killing Private Ryan?"
It's the nights I fear the most.
Anyway, I've spoken before of the fact that Margret prefers me to tell her about the film we're
watching rather than, you know, Watch It. And that she doesn't regard a movie as 90 minutes of
entertainment so much as simply a basis for discussion.
The thing is, as she slips gently into middle age, this isn't confined to the duration of the
programme any more. As though she's been set, like a video recorder, she goes through the
same cycle nearly every time a film is shown on TV: she watches it with me, she falls asleep
seconds into the bit that comes after the news, then precisely at the point when the end credits
start to roll, she wakes up and says, "What happened?"
Saturday August 3, 2002
So, I used Margret's toothbrush. Its changed position revealed this to her, and she woke me up
by the use of bellowing the next morning, so she could fume that not only had I done this, but that
I'd done it after she'd gone to the trouble of marking my toothbrush so it would never happen. We
had quite a bracing, early morning row in which she reviled me for using her toothbrush and I
poured contempt on her toothbrush-marking abilities. (As I've noted before, bathrooms are
always popular for rows - we discovered early on that tiles provide a wonderful ring of tight
resonance that adds something to even the most trivial of shouting matches.)
The toothbrush row itself isn't the real issue, though. Readers sharp-brained enough to remember
back to last week's opening of this will have realised that I'm the one who hates my toothbrush
being used. So what Margret did here was, quite shamelessly, steal my pet hate. Is nothing
sacred? Margret and I not liking any of the same things not only lends our relationship a glorious,
sparky symbiosis but, in fact, is educational, too - without Margret, there are many, many things I
wouldn't have fully experienced, having been put off at an early stage by their sheer, punishing,
tedious awfulness.
If Margret were to begin sharing my interests - looking around the internet for pictures of Mindy
Clarke, say, or reading about new computer graphics cards - I'd have no problem with that at all.
My pet hates, however, are who I am. What would she say if I suddenly started upbraiding myself
for not unrolling my socks before I put them in the washing basket, eh? I am the sum of
everything I hate, by taking those she's... My God! This is Single White Female, isn't it?
Saturday August 10, 2002
Potpourri. The hatred I have for potpourri is genuinely spectacular. I hate everything about
potpourri: the containers designed to hold it, the kind of shops that sell it, the magazines that run
features on how to make it. It goes far beyond a reasoned dislike - it's a distorting, irrational
loathing that makes me want to round up half a dozen drunken mates and go off burning down
the barns of potpourri farmers and terrorising their families.
Guess what? Margret likes potpourri. The most fundamentally infuriating thing about potpourri is
its truly outstanding failure to do the single thing for which it exists. "Why not pleasantly fragrance
your room with a bowl of potpourri?" Well, let's start with the fact that potpourri gives off almost no
scent whatsoever, shall we? The only way it's possible to get the tiniest indication of how a bowl
of potpourri smells is quite literally to press your face into it . Have you ever walked into a room
and said, "I - hold on... you've got a bowl of potpourri in here somewhere, haven't you?" No, you
haven't. Potpourri is effectively undetectable using the human olfactory sense: it is Stealth Air
Freshener. And yet - and yet - you often get your plastic bag of off-brown detritus as part of a deal
that includes a special potpourri container - one with just a few holes in the lid lest, without this
partial guard, your potpourri overwhelms dizzied visitors with its suffocating blanket of aroma.
Absolute definition of "doomed optimism"? A bowl of potpourri in the toilet.
You accept my point, then, that potpourri is useless to the point of moral evil? Yet Margret buys
this stuff. Why? Why? I'll tell you why: it's just one more way of getting bloody plants into the
house, that's why. Dead plants. Bowls of dusty, dead, plant parts. In my house.
Saturday August 17, 2002
Dreams. Margret suffers from a recurring dream. A dream in which she must locate a mysterious,
faceless man, steal his duvet and then kick him to death. Every night. But never mind about that;
today, I just want to muse on a purely hypothetical situation. OK. Suppose a man - er, Bill - has a
dream in which his girlfriend - um, Birgit - does something horrible. It would be ridiculous for him,
when he wakes up, to be annoyed with Birgit about this. It's not even her dream, is it? It's
something she did in his dream, so it's completely indefensible for him to take that position. We
can all agree on this, I'm sure.
However, suppose that, in his dream, Birgit didn't do just a single thing, but a whole selection of
them? Suppose that, in his dream, Birgit behaved quite appallingly, over and over again. I'm sure
that, once again, we all agree here. In those circumstances - when Birgit, in his dream, had
behaved so outrageously, so repeatedly - I know you'd all consider it perfectly justified that Bill go
into a sulk with her for four days. Yes, it was in his dream, but you have to draw the line
somewhere, don't you? Certain behaviour is unforgivable - its occurring in his dream is no
excuse, because the sheer, alarming audacity of it makes that irrelevant.
Bill, in fact, has to go into a mood because of Birgit's actions, in his dream. He has to spend most
of the next week giving her brooding looks and replying with either monosyllables or short, dry,
bitter laughs. Because, you know, what is he? A doormat? What Birgit did, in his dream, was
inexcusable. That's the real issue, isn't it? Isn't it?
Thank you. Sadly, it seems, there are people around who can't grasp this concept.
Saturday August 24, 2002
I am ultra-unpatriotic and also fully believe that Germany is a better place than Britain, populated
by far nicer people. Margret, in turn, never misses an opportunity to inform her German friends
that, compared with Britain, their comedy is embarrassing, their teabags risible and their civil
service run by maniacs. It's interesting, then, that when Margret and I are interacting with each
other, out goes, "I reject thee, oh fundamentally spurious, largely 19th-century construct, the
nation state" and in comes, "Where you grew up is rubbish compared with where I grew up, and
no one's leaving this kitchen until you admit it."
For example, a while ago I bought a Teflon sheet - it can be placed in any receptacle to confer
nonstickness. A boon. Margret had never seen one before. Hurriedly, she conferred with her
sisters and, from Germany, was sent a German Teflon sheet. With an assurance that they'd had
them there for ages. It was also bigger. And it didn't cost as much. One's thoughts naturally turn
to Metternich's forcing through the "principle of intervention" over British objections at the
Congress of Troppau in 1820.
Between us, it reaches the point where even the crapness of your own country becomes a matter
of pride. Margret will claim she fully supports, as a principle of workers' rights, the fact that in
Germany the shops like to close at any point when you're able to visit them, and that it's only with
the most bad-tempered reluctance that the banks agree to open at all. While I'll scoff, "Yes,
Margret, yes - all British builders are liars and thieves. And you fell for it, again. You - made soft
and effete by your exposure to proficient, trustworthy German builders - are no match for the
plucky incompetence and bare-faced deception of our British variety. Ha!"
Saturday August 31, 2002
There's an area, a moment, that Margret has made her own. It's a special place that exists
between 15 and 30 seconds after the light's been turned out in bed at night. It is into this space
that she will drop any statement that she wants to be delivered with the benefit of a home
advantage. Sometimes she'll use it just to increase the impact, like the measured formality that
immediately precedes an execution; it's the etiquette of the firing squad. "Goodnight." "'Night."
Click. Tick. Tick. Tick. "Did you take the bin out?"
At other times she'll employ the darkness as cover for an attack by words that would surely stand
little chance of survival if they approached in good visibility. She was trying this tactic last week
when, calming night flowing over me and my breathing just begun to fall slow and steady, she let
escape the sentence, "I think I'll decorate a room." The noise of these words sounding in my ears
like the shattering of glass, my eyelids snapped open. There's the three sharp needles that are
"I'll", of course; I'm sure it's clear to everyone that this is an anti-royal "I'll" that actually means
"We'll". At the very least I'm going to be sitting across a table from Margret, a book of wallpaper
samples open between us, for long, long hours without access to a lawyer. More tellingly, listen to
that "a room". She doesn't even know where she's going to decorate yet, which clearly shows that
she isn't aiming to repair a room that's reached a point at which, if social services happen to see
it, they'll take away our children (and why else would you decorate?). No, the reason she
announced this during her special 15 seconds is to try to cover up that she's given in to addiction
again, and is decorating for kicks.
Saturday September 7, 2002
I'm not against what I believe is called "Personal Improvement" in all its various forms. Dear me,
no. I can see that a lot of (other) people could benefit from great salvaging infusions of Personal
Improvement and am all in favour of their becoming whispery-voiced converts to some exotically
meaningless oriental art, shouty American pseudoscience available as a four-part programme on
video, or pretty much anything that keeps them off the streets.
Margret's employer, however, has started offering her free t'ai chi sessions. Oh, not just Margret,
incidentally. The idea that Margret's bosses huddled in emergency session to focus on her alone
is certainly compelling: "How can we make her calmer?" "T'ai chi?" "Whale song?" "One of those
tranquilliser gun things they use to take down rogue elephants?" "OK, get her t'ai chi sessions in
a room filled with whale song. I can't sanction the dart gun... But leave one in the room with the
t'ai chi instructor - don't say anything that can come back on us. Just, you know, let him see it's
there ."
The offer of free t'ai chi was made to everyone. However, it's Margret who concerns me, and she
came home the other week and said: "My instructor says my emotions are in my calves." I,
naturally, replied: "Then your calves are leaking. Quite badly." But it turns out that this wasn't just
some location identifying exercise. No, the intention was actually to free the emotions locked in
Margret's legs. Hell fire! I say that they were probably imprisoned in there by chanting priests
using arcane magic, and for a very good reason. Now some fool is trying to free them. THEY
ARE MEDDLING WITH FORCES THEY SIMPLY DO NOT UNDERSTAND.
Saturday September 14, 2002
Table tennis. We find ourselves in a basement with a table, a ball, two paddles and 10 years'
worth of miscellaneous scores to settle. It begins, of course (qv "Pool", "Monopoly", "Any
computer game ever", "Entirely everything else"), with Margret asking me to repeat the rules over
and over again. Once she's got me into a state of clouded near-fury by this tactic, we begin the
match...
We probe each other for weaknesses - both technical and psychological. The onlookers fall silent
as they slowly realise the scale of what's taking place. Margret disputes everything. She cackles
as net-caughts go against me. She loudly ridicules my sexual performance in the middle of long
rallies. Still, we remain locked together; seesawing between the lead. The tension twists ever
tighter. Someone drops a pin: everyone hears it.
Eventually, we reach the stage where we're 23-23; just two consecutive points will decide it. It is
then I shift up to a gear Margret never suspected I had. With whistling ferocity, I begin spinning
the ball off my paddle - the shots curve through the air or hit the table and bounce away at odd
angles. Margret bursts, "That's cheating!" "What?" "You're not allowed to spin the ball." "What? Of
course you are - it's pretty much mandatory... at the level at which I'm used to playing."
Amid grunts and curses, she clings on desperately for a few more points but in the end,
inevitably, I triumph. Thwack! The ball dashes away, wide of her lunging arm, and I stand there.
Victorious. Like some kind of god. Margret slams her paddle on to the table and stomps from the
room, barking, "You always have to win, don't you? You're so stupidly competitive." It is still the
high-water mark of my life. Margret doesn't speak to me for the rest of the day.
Saturday September 21, 2002
I can't pretend that coming out here is anything but deeply traumatic for me. However I try to
rationalise it and tell myself it's actually perfectly OK, perhaps even a positive thing, I'm swept
with shame about the way I am and I truly wish things were different. But, well... I cry at movies.
No, not cry, in fact - I sob. Uncontrollably. I'm not talking about just "tear-jerkers", either. I cried
during The Abyss. And The Sixth Sense. And Shrek. I even... ugh. Yes, OK... Deep breath... I
even cried during Pokémon: The Movie.
As that demonstrates, the film can also be comprehensively rubbish and it still takes me down. If
the film is good then, well, God help me. A Matter Of Life And Death leaves me unable to breathe
properly for about four days, and if I ever saw, say, On Golden Pond I'd probably die.
Now, then - guess what? Margret is not one of the world's foremost weeping movie viewers.
Didn't see that coming, did you?
Margret is more likely to let her emotions overflow to the extent of, "Tch." Or, more likely still,
"What's happened? I didn't see - I was reading the advert for KFC on the back of the ticket stub."
It's not this that's going to lead to a furious row in the car park later, though. What will see to that
is that, if we're sitting in the cinema watching a film, every five minutes or so Margret's face will
appear directly in front of mine. Her eyes will be searching wildly, there'll be a huge grin on her
face and her voice - which, incidentally, has a volume control on which the minimum setting is
"Stadium Rock" - will thunder out, "ARE YOU CRYING YET?"
I really could kill her. If, you know, I weren't too occupied with blubbing like a little girl.
Saturday September 28, 2002
Breaking things. There are various levels of communication in a fully rounded relationship. OK, a
few couples do have a level that they maintain pretty much constantly:
"How was your day?"
"Fine. How was yours?"
"Also fine, thank you for asking. I love you."
"I love you, too. Let's have another wedding."
But I think we all recognise that this couple has quite serious problems with intimacy, and it's
almost certain that he drinks and she shoplifts.
Normal couples have greater range - and throwing a Simpsons mug out of a first-floor window,
say, is merely part of this natural richness; to adapt Clausewitz, "Breaking things is the
continuation of a discussion by other means". Yet one must shun destructive tantrums. That's not
communication, that's just shrieking.
No, you must carefully choose what you're going to break. Margret would never be so glib as to
hurl down the thing that, by chance, was closest to hand. She will pause, and I will wait, while her
eyes scan around for precisely the right thing.
Sometimes, she'll even leave the room; I'll remain there, expectantly, to see what treasured
object of mine she returns with - she can be away for anything up to 20 minutes on these
searches.
Then, I will respond by raising the stakes just enough (never jump to the end of the breakage line
right away, it's simply gauche). And so on, in measured increments, until one of us torches the
house.
That is the proper way to go about breaking things - anything else is just childish.
Saturday October 5, 2002
People invariably say to me, "Why, Mil - you recall to us some abnegating medieval saint, and we
are humbled." But one luxury I do dream of is being left alone, you know, just for a few minutes,
while I'm on the lavatory. Margret has made it her mission to see that I haven't been to the
lavatory without interruption for 13 years.
It's possible to unlock our bathroom from the outside. Margret does this. Margret - put your coffee
down - Margret keeps a special tool to gain entry to the bathroom while I'm in it. What in the
name of God did I do in my previous life?
What's more, the catch alone does not hold the door shut. She will effect entry, thrust a catalogue
in front of me, ask which set of coasters I prefer and then stride off - leaving the door wide open.
What's more, anyone arriving at our house sees directly and immediately up into our bathroom ...
where I am sitting.
"Hi, Mil."
"Hi, Stella."
"On the lavatory, then?'"
"Yeah."
But listen to what Margret did the other day - I'm sure it must be illegal. I sneaked away to the
lavatory (believing she would not notice). I sat down and opened my magazine but, before I'd
finished a paragraph, a skilled movement flicked the door lock and Margret burst in. "Hey! I
wanted to read that!" she said. She snatched the magazine from my hands and swept out again.
Just leaving me there. On the lavatory without anything to read. With the door swinging open.
Mil Millington's novel, Things My Girlfriend And I Have Argued About, is published by
Hodder & Stoughton at £10.99.
Saturday October 12, 2002
Obviously, when I analyse my actions coldly, I discover that I am surprisingly correct nearly all the
time. However, there is one odd impulse I can't explain. I have an irrational, yet irresistible, desire
to scare my girlfriend. This, wholly ill-advised, compulsion will swarm over me, pushing out all
logic, whenever I see an opportunity.
I don't need an opportunity to be hinderingly in my path for me to see it, either. I can be walking
through the hall - calm as you like, perfectly adult, musing vaguely to myself about the moral
implications of gene mapping - when my ears pick up Margret heading out of the living room.
Immediately, the only thought in my head is, "Quickly, Mil! Hide in the cupboard and then you can
leap out at her, shouting!"
Sometimes there's not even the minuscule trigger of her approach. While sitting watching TV,
from nowhere, I'll start to think, "Mmm - if I were to crouch down behind this sofa... " I'll lie behind
it for ages , waiting for her to come in and sit down, just so I can jump up - "Waaarh!"
One time I lay in bed, in ambush, for 40 minutes with glow-in-the-dark vampire teeth in my mouth
- I had to recharge the damned things with a torch a dozen times while I waited for her to turn up.
Why?
I'm wasting half my life lying in wait to scare Margret, in the full knowledge that, if I succeed, all
that will happen is that she will hit me really, really hard. What am I thinking?
Saturday October 19, 2002
I should have known. There had, God knows, been enough warning signs, but... well, I suppose
you're always the last person to see it. The fact is, I came home and the house was empty. Filled
with emptiness. Choking with it. Margret should have been there, but she wasn't. I noticed
immediately; her absence had caused a vacuum that had sucked in a kind of officious silence.
The silence grimaced and affected winces at every sound I made.
A note was in the kitchen. It was taken from a promotional pad - the page torn out hastily, so that
the bright logo at the top was half missing. On it Margret has written, almost casually, a single
sentence: "I've gone to the garden centre."
I toppled back against the sink as though hit by a physical force. My mind roared. Was there
anything I could have done to prevent this? Anything I could have said? Was it, in some way, my
fault ? I read the note over and over again. Perhaps looking for clues, perhaps simply trying to
make it meaningless - false - by repetition.
I was still doing this when I heard the click of the lock opening. Slowly, I walked into the hall and
looked at Margret, standing there by the door. She looked back. Neither of us spoke. Neither of
us needed to speak, because she wasn't alone. Standing beside her - noticeably taller than me was a box labelled "Deluxe Garden Obelisk".
What can I do, though? I love her.
This is Mil Millington's final column
His new novel, Things My Girlfriend And I Have Argued About, is published by Hodder &
Stoughton at £10.99.