They better discover their mistake pretty damn quickly, though — because otherwise I'm going. How can you turn down something like this? It's anecdote Nirvana. It'll be worth it if only to see, as I begin to stroll up Downing Street, every security man within half a mile frantically begin to speak up his sleeve.

Whatever. I skip downstairs and cast the invitation letter on to the table in front of Margret. She picks it up and reads it, sipping her coffee. She finishes without having said a word or changed her expression in any way at all. But then, her forehead wrinkles. She reaches across, opens her diary, glances at a page, and then closes it again. Her hand moves over to the invitation letter once more. She looks up at me, her finger tapping the page where it gives the date of the reception. 'You've already got a dentist's appointment on that day,' she says.

How could anyone not love this woman?

88

What are things? Are what we think of as 'things' objective 'things' in their own right, or simply shadows, smudges or simulacra? Unknowables presented in some kind of intelligible form only through the snake oil mediation of our limited senses, prescribed understanding and imperfect vocabulary. In a way, I'm talking about solipsism, here. I'm talking about conceptualism. I'm talking about thinking that spans the philosophical alphabet, all the way from Aristotle to Wittgenstein. In a much more real way, however, I'm talking about arguing with Margret about the hoovering.

Margret, had gone out. (It doesn't really matter where as, irrespective of her stated destination, she'll come back carrying another bloody plant.) As she'd left, she'd seen that I was sitting in front of the computer. If Margret is leaving the house and, as she's doing so, she sees me sitting in front of the computer, she will say, 'Do the hoovering.' — there's no way she can stop herself: it's Pavlovian.

Her 'Do the hoovering' had been followed by the clunk of the front door, the soft rumble of the car pulling away and then nothing but a silence in which I sat, pensive.

I glanced around. OK, the carpets weren't immaculate, that was true. They were hardly in such a condition as to demand a hoovering, though. There's a clear point at which a carpet is ready for hoovering, in my opinion, and that point is "when it's crunchy". Even then, it's not what you'd call vital. In lots of the places I've lived, especially as a student, we never had a hoover at all. Sometimes, yes, walking across the landing required snow shoes — but no one ever died or anything. I glanced around some more.

A few hours later, Margret returns.

After unloading around seventy-five new plants from the car, she hunts me down; finding me, by a fluke, sitting in front of the computer.

'Have you hoovered?' she asks, her tone swaying unsurely between conversational and murderous.

'What do you think?' I reply. (Cleverly, here, I'm indignant yet inscrutable — only my disdain for the question is clear; I provide no clue at all of the answer to it.)

'Have you? Or not?'

'Well, what does it look like?'

'Just tell me whether you've hoovered.'

'No. That's not the point.'

'What? It's completely the point.'

'No, it isn't. You thought the house needed hoovering. If you think it looks OK now, then you're happy, right? Whether I've hoovered or not.'

'And what if I don't think it looks OK?' She pauses for a moment, then adds, 'Or if I smash your laptop to pieces with a tyre jack?'

'If I've hoovered, and you still think it doesn't look hoovered… then there's no point my hoovering, is there? Ever again.'

There's a degree of glaring goes on here, but I hold my nerve and continue. 'The only other possibility, as far as I can see, is that you simply can't tell whether I've hoovered or not. And, if you can't tell, then it doesn't matter — in any real sense — whether I've done it or not, does it?' I've one more card to play, but it's a great one. 'That is, not unless the thing that concerns you isn't whether the house has been hoovered, but only whether I've been sitting here enjoying myself all this time rather than slogging around with a vacuum cleaner. But I'm sure that's not it. I mean, you'd be happy for me to sit here idle for as long as I want, wouldn't you, if there's no need for me not to? It's about the hoovering, not about my sitting here idle, isn't it?'

Margret just stares at me.

I am triumphant. A choir sings. Cherubs circle my head, scattering petals. Shafts of golden light fan out from behind me. It's an intoxicating three seconds.

'Clean out the fridge,' says Margret.

89

Before I start, I feel I ought to mention how sad it is that the Texan readers are no longer with us. As you know, the notoriously irresponsible Supreme Court has seen fit to tear down the safety barrier protecting society and thus Texas is now like a ghost state. Machinery lies idle; offices are silent; the streets of Dallas shimmer motionless in the summer sun. No one goes to work nor chats with friends nor watches television nor even browses the Internet. Because, whooping atavistically that the police are now powerless to stop them, the entire population of Texas has, since last week, been ceaselessly engaged in endless consensual homosexual sex in private so as to bring about the extinction of the vital institution of marriage.

Oh, and let me make it clear that I'm not just some dull-witted, homophobic idiot here by saying, «it's the children I'm concerned about».

But anyway — my girlfriend is always trying to take photos of me naked.

I don't mean that she walks around naked (though, God knows, that's true too), I mean that she keeps trying to take photos of me when I'm naked. Now, I'm sure that all the women reading this are thinking, 'Well, that's reasonable, Mil. You do, after all, have a languorous sex appeal that frightens and yet, somehow, still enthrals me — and your body would clearly have been immortalised in marble many times by now were this ancient Greece.' Also, quite possibly, a fair few of the men are quietly turning pictures of their wives face down on their desks, biting their lips and secretly wishing, 'Oh… if only Mil and I were in Texas…' But I have to tell you that you're mistaken. Incredible though it may seem, in the flesh I'm cadaverous to the extent of almost appearing to be on the point of actual disintegration — becoming sexually aroused by the sight of me naked is a form of paraphilia. So why does Margret, say, keep lunging into the room with a camera when I'm in the bath? The answer, of course — for those of you who apparently must have dropped into this page from nowhere about five sentences ago and have thus read not a single one of the previous entries — is that Margret is some kind of lunatic.

Cut to: The back garden of our house. It's one of the three days a year in England when it's not raining and thus a Super Soaker water fight has broken out between First Born/Second Born and me: a full-on and appallingly ruthless conflict which I'm ashamed to say I provoked. First Born — having five years more tactical experience than his brother — is organising their attacks in such a way as to turn Second Born into his shield. I, however, have the advantages both of height and of preparedness (having surreptitiously arranged a series of barricaded, defensible positions before strolling over to First Born, casually saying, 'Guess what?' and then immediately shooting him in the back on the head from eighteen inches away — a slightly ungentlemanly tactic that gave me an early advantage, but which means I now dare not allow them to take me alive). Anyway, in a turn of events that no one could have foreseen, thirty minutes later all three of us are utterly, utterly sodden. Squelching is a phase looked back on with misty affection; everything we have on is now so saturated it permanently streams water from every trailing edge. To avoid flooding the house, I hang the children's clothes over the line and then send them inside to find some fresh ones and think about the important lesson I've taught them this day. After that, I also strip off and (Poof! — like the shopkeeper in Mr Benn) Margret appears with a camera. Fortunately, I've still got my underpants on, but — unfortunately — they are soaked and clinging and are doing obscenely little to preserve my modesty. 'Standing in the back garden in nothing but dripping wet underpants' is never going to be a particularly good look, is it? But it doesn't affect Margret, who snaps away excitedly until I manage to escape her probing lens by running off into the house.