Family Natters

Last night I told James I didn’t feel like going to the Pampered Chef party a neighbour had invited me to. “I’m tired and I’ve got toothache,” I wined. “But I’ll have to go because that sounds so lame.”
“I’ll help you,” James volunteered, taking one eye off Sky Sports News. “I’ll go round and smooth things over.”

Ofcourse I should have known better. I really should have phoned up and been honest. But weak as I am, I sat back and waited for James to come back… and waited… and waited.

Five hours later I woke up to hear someone falling over the wheelie bin, which wasn’t anywhere near our front door. Then James banged on the door before he tried the handle and fell through it.

“I’ve really helped you out this time,” he slurred, the buttons on his fly undone. “Three hours I spent at that tupperware party sitting next to a load of lezzers. The food was rubbish and they ran out of tinnies, but don’t worry, I’ve brought you back a souvenir. Fuck knows what it is, but I doubt they’ll miss it.”

Yes, he really smoothed things over for me.

We haven’t heard anything about James lately,’ Amelia’s mummy said to me in an email today.  ‘Does that mean he’s been on his best behaviour?’

Tonight James said, “It’s a great line up on telly tonight.”

“Brilliant!” I answered, thinking he meant something like a good drama premiere.

“Yeah; it’s Tonga V England on ITV, and Leeds V Saints on Sky .”

And how fantastic it is! James is trying to watch both games at once, so just as I start to be slightly interested in one game, he turns it over on to the other. How annoying! I’m going to hide the remote the next time he goes for a drink.

Okay, men: you need to pay attention. I’m about to give you the best advice of your lives. To keep your woman sweet, there’s no real need to buy us fancy clothes or diamond rings. There’s lots of ways that guarantee to get you out of hot water for less than a tenner, and here’s one of them:

• Iron (that’s the small hand tool with a power cord that you’ll often have seen your woman using) a table cloth and put it carefully on the table.
• Buy 1 bunch or roses, carefully pull off the petals and throw them on the table.
• Put her favourite music on at a low volume
• When your woman comes home, take her coat off for her and pull the chair out for her. Don’t let her do anything in the kitchen.
• Dim the lights, or better still light some candles and serve a meal (can be anything, she’ll be so impressed by the rest she won’t care), pour her some wine
• Start a conversation yourself, preferably relate some gossip about the neighbours or mutual friends
• look at her when she answers and talks to you
• wash up

Bingo! You’ll be able to behave however you want for a week afterwards, she’ll be so pleased.

If it doesn’t work, you will have done something wrong.

Yesterday James said he would ‘babysit’ for our kids when I had to go to work early. He acted as if he was doing me an enormous favour, when really they’re his kids and his responsibility just as much as mine. Anyway, I did most of the donkey work: made their packups, got their clothes and Tom’s school bag out ready, even their favourite cereal in bowls with spoons in. All he had to do was wash, dress, breakfast and take them to school/ nursery. It should have been a piece of cake for him.

Instead I get a phone call from Tom’s school at 12 o’clock (naturally when I’m in a meeting) saying he hasn’t got his packed lunch and have to quickly ring a friend and ask her to make one and take it in for him. Then at 4:20 when I’m on my way to pick him up I happen to see one his shoes at the side of the road (!?) When I get to the childminder’s she’s annoyed with me because Annie’s soothing blanket wasn’t in her bag and so she’d had a difficult time getting her off to sleep, and she had to spend 10 minutes at school looking for Tom’s shoe which she spies in my hand and thinks I took out of school for some peverse reason. Then to cap it all, James breezes in late, and says as he’s helped me out by looking after the kids, he’s told a friend he can go on his stag weekend the day after. I ask him about the shoe situation and he gets all defensive.

“Last time I saw them they were in the cloakroom. I gave them to Annie to put away.”

Annie is 20 months old, for goodness sake.

Yesterday James came home with a suprise for me: a black dress from Next. Incredibly amazed and excited I rushed to try it on… then got stuck in it. Try as I might, I just couldn’t get in to it because it’s such an odd shape. James must think I am some kind of alien if he thinks it’s a good fit for me.

Have you had clothes bought for you that were completely wrong?

Surprise, surprise… James is watching football again. Yawn, yawn. I can never understand how men talk about it as if it matters. It is only a game, after all. I can honestly say I’ve had more fun tidying out James’ sock drawer than watching grown men kick a ball around a grass rectangle.

Having said that, hearing Arson Wenger’s name mentioned always makes me smile. I mean, what an unfortunate first name! Do you think his family and friends call him by the shortened version?

What other names make you smile?

This week I’ve been stalked by the rugby trophy James won on Saturday and which he carries from room to room in the house, he’s so delighted with it. When I’m cooking its on the kitchen counter, when we’re eating its on the table and when I woke up this morning the darned thing was between us in the bed!

I suspected he may have won something when he arrived back from the awards ceremony 4 hours later than I’d thought, propped up between the local neighbourhood-watch warden and the pizza delivery boy who’d been talked into delivering James home along with his order.

Of course I was expected not to mind being woken up at 4 a.m. and be deleriously happy and proud, but that didn’t happen. From long experience I suspected I would be continually woken up throughout the night by a combination of him falling over, not being able to find the bathroom and switching on the lights, but James surpassed himself with a new and novel way of waking me up.

First of all he opened the curtains then stood on me while he opened the window itself.

“What on earth are you doing?” I blinked, struggling to get his foot out of my mouth.

“Trying to get out of the plane,” he replied, whilst stood in the nude and holding the television of all things.

Honestly!

James can’t be the only one who gets silly when drunk. Let me know what your man has done?