'Hello. I'm trawling for business on behalf of a parasitic company that happily feeds the special and delightful sense of greedy, self-centred victimhood that so elevates contemporary society. You can be confident of my noble legal stature because — look — I'm wearing a corporate waterproof jacket.'
Hold on, let me start that again. I think I may have edged, just slightly, into editorializing.
OK. Fact: I cannot walk through town without one these people heading me off. Their eyes shine the moment I stumble into their line of sight — they'll push other shoppers out of the way just to get at me. What does that say? What kind of lift to your self-confidence does that provide, eh?
Salesgit: 'Excuse me. Have you had an accident within the last three years?'
Me: 'No. I always look like this.'
I mean, it's basically someone coming up to you and saying, 'Hi — you appear to be the result of some terrible catastrophe,' isn't it?
Maybe I should reassess my haircut or something.
Anyway, as I was saying before you set me off on that tangent, a question I get asked a lot is 'What's the most frequent argument you have?' I can't imagine why people ask me things like this. That is, I can't imagine why people ask me this — why don't they ask other people? If you want to ask about arguments, then ask an argument expert. I can't claim to be an expert, because I lack the vital aspect of depth — I can't provide a balanced answer, because I've simply no experience of what it's like to be in the wrong. I'd like to have that experience, obviously. In some ways I even feel vaguely cheated by my consistent rightness but, well, we have to play the hand we're dealt, right?
However, though I can't really say what the most frequent argument is, I can have a stab at the definitive one. This argument illustrates a fundamental theme — a core issue. Because of that, it can be used in all kinds of situations. The details are unimportant; the following example may be 'about' domestic chores, or shopping arrangements, or 'sorting out of children', or any number of things. Below those superficial, ephemeral points is the true heart of the matter. The argument goes:
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?
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 mistake
n. 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.
Things my girlfriend and I have argued about (online version) Page 7