76

I'm off to Germany for a few weeks. Apologies if my absence results in your doing any work.

77

Except, I have to pop back briefly to tell you what just happened. I'm about to cycle into town and Margret stops me as I'm setting off. 'Will you bring back that filing cabinet from Argos?' she asks. Can you, ladies and gentlemen, imagine a person cycling two miles through Christmas traffic on a mountain bike carrying a filing cabinet?

Margret can.

Right, I really must get packed for Germany now.

78

Right, I've just got back from Germany so I have a huge backlog of stuff to get sorted — the inevitable result of a short break away hissing around the Allgäu, past numberless gasping locals, all swooning, 'Incredible! He skis like some kind of god!' You'll be happy to know, however, that Christmas this year went very well. As I think we've established by now, providing Margret with Christmas presents that evoke joy — rather than massive, brutal retaliation — is something that must be bought at a terrible cost. The fearful, Faust-blanching price of this ability is to — quite literally — listen to everything that Margret says throughout the previous year. I mean, Kung Fu monks (according to the omniscient well of knowledge that is popular 1970s television) only had to do a decade or so of training then carry a red hot metal bowl for a couple of meters with their bare forearms. I have to listen to everything Margret says throughout the entire year. Endless, endless, endless hours of stuff about the comparative aesthetic merits of different Ikea storage units, just so I'm there — prickling with alertness — on those occasions when she slyly drops in a hint about what she might like as a gift when the trial of buying one for her confronts me again. As I say, though, last year, twelve months worth of intelligence gathering paid off. This Christmas morning she was so thrilled that she stared at me — literally unable to form her thoughts into words — for quite the longest time imaginable after unwrapping her presents of a barometer and one of those 'Make Your Own Will' kits.

79

Oh, as you ask, I had a pretty uneventful time over in Germany. Skiing, visiting friends, waiting for the figure to turn green at pedestrian crossing lights even though there quite plainly isn't any sort of moving vehicle within a mile and a half, being shown photographs of my girlfriend naked, etc., etc.

The Old Timers among you will be well aware that pretty much every household in modern Germany contains at least a couple of photographs of my girlfriend naked, and also that this is a) "Not sexual. Tch — what the hell's wrong with you?" and b) very much My Problem. So, I'm sitting in a living room and — after tea and cakes — out come the photographs of Margret naked. I hold one of the pictures in my hand and sit there, radiating heat. Alerted, perhaps, by the grinding sound I'm involuntarily making with my teeth, Margret looks across at me and lets out a long, weary sigh.

'Oh, for God's sake,' she tuts, 'OK — so I'm naked. But you can't see anything.'

I glance pointedly at her, pointedly at the photograph, and then back at her again — pointedly. She lets out an even wearier sigh and rolls her eyes.

'OK…' she shrugs, '…apart from that.'

80

In what I can only assume was an impromptu but gutsy attempt at the World Irony Record, the other day Margret started to lecture me on how I could become calmer. I mean, really, eh? It's like being pitched Al Qaeda's Little Book of Love. Her spontaneous proselytising was conjured from her now going to yoga one evening a week.

'It's really relaxing when I'm there,' she says.

'Yes, it is,' I reply. (You see what I actually meant there, right? Lord, but I'm arch.)

'Why don't you come to a session?'

There's a sucking, cultish gleam in her eye. The kind of, 'Join us! Join us — the spaceship awaits!' look that you see on the faces of Moonies or people who are telling you about homeopathy.

'No thanks.'

'But you really lose the tension.'

I consider mentioning that she always seems to find it again pretty quickly once she gets back — maybe she might think about getting a yoga instructor who 'loses her tension' by some method other than 'hiding it in our house', but I keep hold of this card for a while.

'I don't need to,' I say, 'I can achieve perfect relaxation by sitting here and watching a Buffy DVD.'

'That's not the same.'

'Yes it is.'

'No it isn't: when you're watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer,' (I promise you these are her exact words that are coming up now), 'you're straining your mind.'

My face briefly collapses under the effort of trying to map the internal reasoning of a psychology that could incubate such a concept, but it's the logical equivalent of falling infinitely into the Mandelbrot set and I pull back, palsied and afraid. Instead, I reach for my ace.

'Well, whatever, the point is — this yoga is only relaxing you for the precise amount of time you're doing it. Once you get back home you're just the same. In fact, you've been moaning even more than usual for the last few weeks.'

'No I haven't.'

'Yes, you have.'

'No, no — I haven't been moaning,' she says, rolling her eyes and tutting. She reaches forward and ruffles my hair. 'I've just been moaning at you.' With that, she gets up and breezes from the room.

You know… I've been thinking about it for several days now, and I still can't figure out who won there.

81

Romance Masterclass.

It's Wednesday the 12th of February. It's early evening. Margret and I are sitting in the living room. Margret has asked me to do something the following day.

Mil: 'I can't, I'm afraid. I'm going into town.'

Margret: 'Why? What do you need to go to town for?'

Mil: 'Oh, I have to get some stuff.'

Margret: 'What stuff?'

Mil: 'Just some stuff… things.'

Margret: 'What things?'

Mil: 'Various things.'

Margret: 'What things?'

Mil: 'What does it matter?'

Margret: 'What things?'

Mil: 'It's not important what specific things, is it? I have to get things or I wouldn't be cycling into town, would I? All that's relevant here is that I have to go, not the details of the individual items I need to get — there's no point wasting time giving you a big list, when the only significant point is that I need to go to town .'

Margret: 'What things?'

Mil: 'Oh, for Christ's sake… Pizzas. I need to buy some pizzas, OK?'

Margret: 'We've got pizzas.'

Mil: 'We've got a pizza.'

Margret: 'So? How many do you need?'

Mil: 'Several. I want to have several in the fridge.'

Margret: 'Why?'

Mil: 'So that we have a stock of them.'

Margret: 'Why?'

Mil: 'So that we don't run out, obviously.'

Margret: 'What would happen if we ran out?'

Mil: 'I'd have to go to town.'

This flings itself out of my mouth while my higher brain is still racing along behind it frantically waving its arms and shouting, 'Wait! Wait!'

Margret responds with just the tiniest movement of her eyebrows. Absolutely minuscule. Sufficient in size, however, to make me wonder if I could get a UN resolution to have her bombed.