Margret: 'I cannot believe that you didn't do it.'

Mil: 'You didn't ask me to do it.'

Margret: 'Why should I have to ask you to do it?'

Mil: 'So I know you want me to do it.'

Margret: 'But I have to ask you to do everything.'

Mil: 'But I do everything you ask me to.'

Margret: 'But I have to ask you to do everything.'

Mil: 'But I do everything you ask me to.'

Margret: 'No — listen — the point is, I have to ask you to do everything.'

Mil: 'Yes — and I do everything you ask me to.'

[Some hours later….]

Margret: 'I … have to ask …. you … to do everything.'

Mil: 'And I… do everything… you ask me to.'

Margret: 'Arrgggh! Listen! I …'

And so on. You see the problem, yes? The problem is that, for some reason, Margret is completely unable to grasp point that I do everything she asks me to. You'd think that'd be a simple enough concept, wouldn't you? Tch.

85

I'm not even going to try to dissect this. Why tie up both our mornings on a futile hunt for understanding, eh? I'm surely not going to be able to pick out anything — my searching fingers are now too callused, from running them along Margret's reasoning in an attempt to identify the scar where it's been imperfectly welded to reality. So, here we go, then.

I shuffle into the living room. It's first thing in the morning; I'm still in my night clothes, the children are circle-eyed and oval-mouthed — their faces distorted by the gravitational pull of the television screen — Margret is opening some post. I flop down on to the sofa.

Margret glances over at me. 'Have you got butter in your ear?' she asks, casually, before returning to her letters.

Briefly, I wonder if this is dream… too close to call, I decide — may as well just press on regardless.

I reach up and touch the side of my head. My finger returns with some shaving foam.

'It's shaving foam,' I reply.

Without looking up, Margret nods. 'Oh, right. It's so early — I didn't think you'd had time for a shave already.'

She thinks it's too early for me to have had a shave, everyone, yet easily late enough for me to have butter in my ear.

Move along, now. Nothing more to see here.

86

The pre-eminently captivating thing that Conan Doyle hit upon with Sherlock Holmes was, as you know, Holmes's ability to infer a rich world into existence using only the tiniest piece of evidence. A chipped fingernail, a certain blend of tobacco or the uneven wear on a heel would be enough for England's finest consulting detective to arrive at an irrefutable and revealing conclusion. Margret is rather like that. She too can pick up a minuscule detail and tease a many-layered story from it. In fact, the only real difference at all between Margret and Sherlock Holmes is that all of Margret's deductions are complete bollocks.

What do you mean, you want an example? I thought we had a relationship based on trust, here?

OK, OK.

For example, let's take a look at an incident that occurred just the other day…

We are sitting around talking with some friends. The topic is 'Yet another injury Mil has sustained through doing something profoundly unwise on his mountain bike'. (I'm drawn to ill-considered mountain bike actions with almost blurring frequency.)

'You know why this is, Mil,' my friend Mark says, grinning. 'It's your mid-life crisis.'

Everyone laughs, but through the noise Margret adds, 'No — Mil had his mid-life crisis last year.' Glancing at her, I see that she means it.

Now, I don't recall having a mid-life crisis last year and, you know, you'd think I would, wouldn't you?

So, understandably, I stare at her in confusion and ask, 'What the hell are you talking about?'

'You had it last year,' she shrugs, casually.

'No I didn't.'

'Yes you did.'

'Didn't.'

'Did.'

'Never.' (How can I have had a mid-life crisis when I've so clearly not yet breached the adolescence barrier?') 'No. No. I so did not have a mid-life crisis last year.'

'You did…' Margret draws a breath at this point, before sweeping on into the explanation — I wait; anxious fascination keeping me unbalanced on the front of my chair. 'You started wearing T-shirts. You never used to like T-shirts,' she says.

And that's it, everyone. T-shirts. There's no 'Well — the first sign was…' here. There's no 'Looking back now, it's obvious that this was the start of the road that ended with Mil running naked through the woods, his body smeared with pork fat and his raw, feral voice howling, "I am Man and my seed is yet vital!".' No, no, no — the thing, entirely, is 'T-shirts'.

Now, call me picky, but I think with this Margret might be extrapolating beyond the point where even a Freudian would begin to feel they were pushing it. In the total absence of any supporting evidence, her whole case appears to rest completely on wearing a T-shirt being widely acknowledged as 'a crisis', right? And I'm not entirely sure that it is. I've never seen a newspaper lead on a front page filled with nothing but a photo above the stark headline "Elbows!". Mad as he undoubtedly is, I can't imagine even GW Bush issuing at executive order for a Delta Force extraction team to be sent into Central America where — the CIA has reported — a US citizen has been seen wearing cap sleeves.

"You started wearing T-shirts." Jesus. Good job I didn't buy a pair of unusual shoes or anything — Margret would probably have been straight on the phone and I'd have woken up restrained and sedated in a secure hospital.

87

As you know, this page attracts idiots. We sit here in the gentle glow of thousands of work hours being burned away, and passing idiots are bewitched by the light. They fly towards us and peer in, only to become disorientated and upset. They attempt to enter, but succeed no further than repeatedly banging their poor, bemused little faces against the glass: trying, trying, trying… but never quite grasping the situation. These tiny, tragic creatures — who missed the English lesson that dealt with 'subtext' because they were at home shooting beer cans off a fence all that year and who can do no more than guess, in panic, that 'irony' is probably the name of a character in The Bold and the Beautiful — make many embarrassing mistakes. One such mistake — interestingly, one that brings together the otherwise disparate idiot types 'Teenage Girl' and 'Bitter Divorcé' — is that I hate Margret. (I'd like to imagine that they also think Catch 22 is a pro-war book — because, you know, it's about the army — but I can't, as I have trouble with the bit where I try to imagine them reading a book.) Now, in the 'Mil Making An Effort To Care What They Think' project, the 'Idiots' are on hold right now, as I'm still working on 'Anyone At All'. So, I'm sad to say that I won't be replacing this page with 'Excellent Times My Girlfriend And I Have Had Together' or 'Syrupy And Unfunny Things That Are Great About My Girlfriend' any time soon. I am, of course, deeply sorry about this. However, a thing that came up this week simply begs to be said. But, let it be understood that saying this unambiguously positive thing about my girlfriend is in no way a capitulation to the opinions of idiots, nor does it represent a change of policy on this page. OK?

So, I got this invitation to a reception at Downing Street. (I'll wait here while you, understandably, go back to that a few times to make sure you've read it correctly.) OK, so it's not an evening with Tony or anything — it's a reception at 11 Downing Street. [For the America readers, the UK Prime Minister's official residence is 10 Downing Street — the Chancellor of the Exchequer lives at Number 11. Downing Street is in London; which is in England; which is part of Europe. Europe is a continent roughly three thousand miles east of Buffalo.] But, well, come on, eh? A letter flopping through my door, out of the blue, inviting me to a reception at 11 Downing Street simply howls 'CATASTROPHIC ADMINISTRATIVE ERROR', doesn't it?