"I SUPPOSE if my bottom sagged like a drunkard’s concertina, I would also wear baggy trousers,” said my wife, amid a melody of giggles, as she perched demurely on the stairs, warmly clutching the hall telephone – while I toiled through the washing-up in the kitchen, marvelling again at the capacity of cutlery to breed in warm detergent.
“How could we possibly have used 17 forks in a meal for three,” I grumbled to myself, darkly. An owl hunched his shoulders on a high branch of our neighbour’s tree and hooted forlornly at the moon, which had slipped from a smoky gown to reveal its full and rounded glory. “It was broad daylight when their conversation began,” I continued to myself in the same peevish tone. “Prince Charles will be king before it’s finished.”
But my wife gabbed onto her sister. “You know, I shouldn’t really say this,” she confided, “but he can be a bit of a cold fish.”
Some deep instinct advised me that I was being discussed. For those who have never seen me, the clues lay in references to the sagging buttocks and the cold fish. “Cold fish” is the admonishment used by my wife and our 12-year-old son whenever I have the temerity to thwart one of their costly ambitions.
“I think we should perhaps wait before booking a villa in Juan-les-Pines,” I suggest. “Cold fish,” they reply, scornfully.
“Should be able to get another year out of the old car,” I say. “Ceoowuuld fish,” they reply, curling their lips in a contemptuous manner and placing heavy emphasis on the pronunciation of the first word, so that you can almost feel the chilled slime slip up your skin.
“I am not a cold fish,” I say, fanning what’s left of my passion. “I am a generous, warm-hearted chap with the blood of ancient Celts coursing through my being.”
“Ancient Celtic blood is no substitute for an Aston Martin, as driven by James Bond – played, of course, by the moody and magnificent Daniel Craig, heart-throb of my dreams,” she says, squashing me as flat as a fluke. Anyway, I completed the washing up, the conversation ended, and our new phone turned into an antique.
The next morning, as I lay on plumped pillows on the bed nursing an ambition to step spry into the young year, I heard my wife heaving furniture over the fawn carpet in what we call the second bedroom – so that tourists and other visitors do not confuse it with the main bedroom or the box-room.
The box-room is about the size of a coffin. Well, that’s a slight exaggeration. It’s a little bigger than that. But it was designed on the same principle as the long and loose blazer given to a seven-year-old schoolboy – “you’ll grow into it”.
