The second point is that she only has any chance whatsoever of jamming all the things in if she throws away the cardboard boxes in which everything's packed. The boxes which, of course, bear the cooking instructions. Now, I know you're not going to believe this, but I'm just the tiniest bit anal. No, no, really — it's true. Anyway, one of the symptoms of this — very slight — finickiness on my part is that if the instructions say, 'Pre-heat the oven. Cook at Gas Mark 7 for 23 minutes. Turn once at 13 minutes,' then that — precisely that — is what I do. And I become rather agitated if anything prevents this. (A regular argument we have springs from my setting the oven timer for, say, 7 minutes then going into the living room and pacing backwards and forwards, additionally checking my watch, while I wait. At about 9 minutes, and still not having heard the beeper go off, my crackling nerves will take me into the kitchen, where I'll find Margret has reset the timer to 45 minutes because she's using it to time some glue drying or something. A discussion will follow.) Not having any cooking instructions leaves me in a fearful swirl of uncertainty. Even worse is when Margret decides the cooking instructions are vital, so she'll cut them out, and throw them into the freezer as she's loading it. I'll find them some years later. There's no clue as to what they belong to, of course. I'm merely left there with my shaking hands holding a slip of cardboard that has instructions ending with — in bold — 'Leave to stand for two minutes before serving,' and not the smallest idea what it's referring to. I'd be happier, quite frankly, if it read, 'There is a bomb somewhere in your house.'

So anyway, I came downstairs at lunchtime on Saturday and saw that the oven was on. Margret, in a worrying development, was cooking something.

'What's in there?' I ask, as off-handedly as the situation allows.

'Your pizza.'

I make a lunge for the oven door. Margret becomes bellicose.

'I can cook a frozen pizza, you know?'

'No, it's not that,' I bluff, 'I just want to add some extra ham. They never use enough ham.'

Margret taking on a frozen pizza is a chilling enough prospect under any circumstances, but when you remember she's flying blind here — no cardboard box bearing cooking instructions to light the way — well, I'm sure you can imagine my terror. I take the pizza from the oven. I add extra ham. I return the pizza to the oven.

On a whim, I amend Margret's arrangement by removing the polystyrene base from under the pizza before continuing to cook it.

46

I tend to get quite a few men writing to me saying, 'Think your girlfriend's a nightmare, well mine's worse.' Now, this always surprises me. First of all, I wasn't aware that I was giving the impression that Margret is something of a trial to live with. I'm here merely stating the facts, without bias or embellishment: a simple camera pointed at the scene, recording it with complete neutrality. I am, frankly, shocked and disturbed that anyone might think I'm here to make the case that my girlfriend is, say, as mad as an eel.

What surprises me more about the emails I get from these men, however, is that they can in any way believe their situations are similar to mine. Yes, of course, sometimes you'll be sitting in McDonald's and your girlfriend will say, 'You just deliberately dropped that napkin so you could look up the skirt of the woman over there, didn't you?' — everyone's had that conversation and it's perfectly healthy. There'll be some loud, German invective, a degree of storming out, perhaps mayonnaise may get thrown at some point — we've all been there. The crucial thing to keep in mind about Margret, though, is that she is playing by rules no one else understands. Every exchange with Margret holds the potential to result in my spending several weeks in traction. There is no way of judging which will and which won't, because the laws that govern her thought processes have resisted all my analysis. Not even the tiniest thing can be taken for granted, because it assumes one knows how Margret's head works. The proof is in the details, not the broad sweeps, so let me illustrate the, 'Do not fall into the trap of believing you exist in the same universe,' idea by the smallest moment, on the unremarkable Saturday that has just past. We are sitting together on the sofa. I say

'Brrrr — I'm cold.'

Margret replies

'Where?'

47

Our sink is blue and we're not talking about it. It happened over a week ago; I was leaning over the sink, brushing my teeth, when I noticed that there was a sort of lazuline patina that had seeped over most of the surface. Margret hasn't mentioned anything about this. Why she hasn't is that she's obviously tried to clean the sink with, well, I don't know, some fluid used for stripping entrenched cerriped colonies from the hulls of submarines or something (they were probably offering three bottles of the stuff for the price of two at Aldi). She is waiting for me to mention it. But I am a wily fox, and will be doing nothing of the sort. I'm no wet-behind-the-ears, naive youth anymore, not by a looooong way, and I can perfectly see the spiked pit the seemingly innocent words, 'Did you know the sink's blue' are covering. It would go — precisely — like this:

Me: Did you know the sink's blue?

Margret: Yes. I did. I used a jungle exfoliant produced by the Taiwanese military to clean it, and it discoloured the surface.

Me: Oooooooo. K.

Margret: Well maybe, just maybe, if you cleaned the sink once in a while…

You see what she did there? Now I'm facing a whole day of 'When did you last…?' Well, not this canny fellow — not this time, my friends.

Our sink is blue and we're not talking about it.

48

Because of my selfless desire to further the vocabulary of medical science, it would delight me to the toes if everyone could adopt the use of the phrase 'Margret's Syndrome'. This affliction being used to signify a condition characterised by a profound and chronic 'point blindness'. Allow me to give you a case study for diagnostic purposes:

I bought a mobile phone the other day. Yes, I'm aware that this revokes my human rights and I won't disgust you further by attempting any kind of wheedling justification. We all become what we hate (raising the disturbing possibility that one morning I'll awake to discover I'm Andie MacDowell, but let's avoid looking there) and so I've naturally mutated in that direction. Anyway, I spent the best part of an afternoon entering the names and numbers of people I know into the internal address book via the phone's keypad — an activity that's roughly as much fun as performing emergency dental surgery on yourself. The picosecond I'd finished, Margret walked into the room and said, 'Let's have a look at your phone.'

'Don't touch anything,' I replied with sombre gravity.

About two minutes later, when I returned from the kitchen with a cup of tea, Margret glanced up at me and chattily asked, 'Can you get back things that you've deleted?'

My lips became the thinnest of lines.

Margret doesn't know what she's deleted, but does offer the solution, 'Tsk — you'll find out eventually if it's important.' I have to admit that this phrase would be rather good to recite repeatedly, singsong fashion, as I danced around a swirling bonfire in the centre of which Margret was staked. Now, had we handed out a simple questionnaire to the population of the Earth, almost everyone would have replied that the point — the point — of the argument that was now racing through volume levels was that Margret had deleted something, without even knowing what it was, after I'd spent hours setting up the phone and had specifically said not to touch anything. Margret's assessment, however, was this: