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"Nothing surpasses credit card fear" - Bill Swinyard

One of the great things about His Nibs is that after all these years together, he can still surprise me.

Sometimes by unprompted romantic gestures, sometimes by coming up with mad ideas or nutty schemes that make me think I've never known him at all.

And sometimes just by lighting the fire and handing over a Fruit and Nut bar when I've had a very difficult day.

These are lovely surprises, obviously.  Any sort of romance or chocolate is always welcome.  And even his mad ideas are, at worst, entertaining.

But there’s a difference between a surprise and a fright. 

I often think it's no harm to have a secret or two in a marriage.  Not the cocaine habit and prostitute type of secret, obviously.  But the never going into the bathroom and leaving the door open type. 

His Nibs doesn't really believe in secrets.  He thinks that we're both a bit odd, and that we should disclose our oddness as much as possible, to stop it getting out of control. 

Also, he knows me very well.  He knows that when he asks me whether I have any secrets, and I mutter mysteriously "maybe one or two, a woman should always have secrets" that I'm not referring to the secret that my hair is dyed (this is not a secret.  Also, my hair is currently snow white, so even if it was supposed to be a secret it'd be a really bad one).  He knows that if I have a secret from him it's probably for nefarious reasons, and that he should not rest until all is revealed.

 Last Sunday, I was sitting in front of aforementioned fire, replete with Fruit & Nut, and watching Netflix, when my husband burst into the room.

 "We're a family" he declared.

"Yes, we are" - I thought he was about to say lovely things about how we'd always be together and how happy he was.

"And as a family we should have no secrets".  Feck.   I tried to head him off at the pass.

"Well, not many secrets anyway.  A woman should always have a few little secrets" I smiled at him.

"No she shouldn't.  What are your secrets?"

"Feck off.  I'm not telling you my secrets.  They wouldn't be secrets anymore would they?"

"Ok, how many secrets do you have?" He looked straight at me, suspicion all over his face.  I started to feel a bit uncomfortable.

"One."

"OK, well we know it's not to do with another man.”  The cheek of him!  I could have a man secret, I thought to myself.  And then I realised I couldn't.  Sure we're never apart.  We work together, we commute together, we even walk the dogs together.  When would I get to see a secret man?  Anyway, my white hair, I'd imagine, would repel anyone. 

"And we know it's not one of those silly secrets about shaving your legs or something.”

I bowed my head in shame.

A silence stretched between us.  I kept telling myself not to say anything, that he was waiting for me to talk, that if I remained silent, he might go away.  The tension was palpable. 

"Is your secret to do with money?"

Fecking fecking feck.  He'd caught me.  The thing is, I can justify the keeping of a secret.  But I try to make a habit of not lying to the man I love.  A direct question, in our house, demands an honest answer. I sighed deeply, and waited for the storm.

 "Yes."

"Do you have a debt I don't know about?"

"Yes."

"Is it a bank loan?"

"No."

"Is it a money lender?" Jesus Christ, I thought to myself.  He doesn't think I'm a bit odd. He thinks I live a whole double life and have dealings with moneylenders and criminals in one life and with office hours and dog walking in the other.

"Of course it's not a money lender.Jesus."  But when I looked at him he was grinning.

"I'm only messing.  I know it's not a moneylender.  So it's something legal.  How bad can it be?  Come on, fess up."

My secret is a credit card. 

His Nibs and I got a credit card each about ten years ago, when we were going on a big trip and thought it might be useful.  His Nibs came home from the holiday, cut up the credit card he'd never used, and never got one again.

I refused to part with mine, insisting it might be useful in an emergency, and for years almost never used it.

But then the recession came.  And unfortunately for me, my desire to own new and shiny things didn't decrease when my bank balance did.  I didn't go out and buy a designer wardrobe, but I used it for little bits and pieces, now and again.  If I wanted to go away for a night to a spa, for instance, but couldn't afford it, I'd go anyway, put it on the credit card, and put it out of my head.

And I might have allowed myself to buy something I really, really wanted when I didn't have the money, under the heading of "I work hard, I deserve a treat."

And bit by bit, the credit card bill started increasing.  Because I never paid it off in full.  So now, even though I've stopped using it completely, I'm like a ninja around the fifteenth of every month, trying to get to the post and hide the bill before His Nibs sees it.

The trouble is, I was in this exact situation a couple of years ago.  I paid the bill off eventually, and swore I'd never use the card again.  

This wasn't enough for His Nibs, who insisted, rightly, that I get rid of it, that I wasn't able to handle it.

I may or may not have very strongly implied that I'd gotten rid of the credit card.  I may or may not have, instead, taken it out of my purse and hidden it from myself in a drawer in my house, so that I could never spend on it impulsively.

And I may or may not have, after one non-impulsive purchase, completely failed to hide it from myself again and instead carried it around in my purse, as if I was grown up and reliable enough to be in charge of such a dangerous item.

The last time we did our big grocery shopping, I thought I'd handed over my debit card, and used a PIN number which proved to be incorrect.  I'd tried to use the cursed credit card.   His Nibs was right beside me, packing our shopping, when I had to explain to the assistant that I was sorry, and change cards.

To my huge surprise, he said nothing at the time.  But my guess is that he saw exactly what happened.

Then, on Sunday His Nibs decided to review our financial situation.  It bothers him greatly that we both get up and go to work every day, and yet we don't seem to have two pennies to rub together.

I blame the weather.  Had it been a sunny July afternoon, he probably would have been out gardening and my secret would have remained safe.

The sorry tale of the secret card tumbled out.  He was nice enough not to mention that I'd told him that I'd destroyed the card two years ago.  He asked me the balance, and I told him the truth.

"I suppose you're going to start shouting?" I asked him.

"No.  I don't actually shout as much as you seem to think I do."  He was a picture of calm.  Maybe, knowing me as he does, he was relieved.  He probably wouldn't have bat an eyelid if I'd told him I had a selection of maxed out credit cards, numerous loans and had remortgaged the house.

"But I'm going to need that card."

He held his hand out and waited.  I swallowed hard.  But what could I do?  The game was well and truly up.

He chopped it up into little bits, in front of my very eyes.  Then he burned the pieces in the fireplace. Just as well I suppose.  I've never been able to bring myself to get rid of the card, and I'm obviously unable to handle it.

I've always thought, in the past, "but what happens if there's an emergency?"

Well, this is becoming an emergency.  The outstanding bill is high enough now that there really isn't enough credit left on it to fund a proper emergency anyway.

So I let it go, without a fuss.

And wouldn't you know it, after I put petrol in my car this morning, I realised I didn't have my debit card with me.  The credit card would have been a lot handier than ringing His Nibs for rescue then, wouldn't it?

You Give Me Road Rage

“I’m the worst person to be stuck with in traffic” – Larry King

The last thing I want to do with this blog is to get political.  But will whoever is in charge please, please, sort out the train strike so that we can go back to our usual sustainable level of commuter misery?

His Nibs and I had absolute ructions in the car yesterday, trying to get home from work.  There was a train strike.  So all the commuters who usually take the train from miles outside Dublin had to take their cars into the city, and we all got to sit in traffic jams for fecking hours, giving each other dirty looks and swearing to ourselves that we’d get a job down the country before this time next year.

His Nibs will admit that he is an absolute martyr to road rage.  This is surprising to me, because in general he is a laid back, peaceful sort of person who wanders only occasionally into anger.  Put him in the car, though, and he turns into the Incredible Hulk.  In a traffic jam he becomes incoherent.  He shouts so many swear words that I can’t pick up the actual gist of his sentences at all.

I know all this very well.  So yesterday, when we got to the car, I decided that I should drive home from work.

“I’ll drive today.  There’s a train strike.”

“I know there’s a train strike.  Why does that mean you should drive? I want to drive.”

“You don’t want to drive.” I was so insistent as to be annoying.  “You think you want to drive, but you don’t really.  I’ve checked the internet.  The road is like a car park.  You’ll just lose your temper.  Get into my car bed there, and go asleep for yourself.”

He wouldn’t be told.  This could be something to do with the fact that he cannot bear to watch me drive his car.  I don’t know why.  I’m not saying I’m the world’s greatest driver.  But I don’t think I’m the worst either.  I passed my test years ago (first time, as I often inform my unfortunate husband, he had to have two goes).  I have no convictions or points on my licence, although he alleges this is inexplicable, the cheeky git.  I haven’t been in any accidents.  And yet my driving seems to annoy my husband to infinity and beyond.

It all starts well enough.  I get in the driver’s seat, and remind him that I have a licence, that I often drive, and that I don’t need any help.  He doesn’t usually say anything, but I can practically hear him rolling his eyes in the passenger seat.  Then I start driving.  Within minutes he’ll pipe up that “You should change lanes.  It’s faster on the other lane”.  When we’re stopped in rush hour traffic on Dublin’s quays.

Things get worse from there.  His Nibs continues to tell me what lane I should be in to avoid any problems further up the road.  And because I’m difficult and stubborn and refuse to be told what to do, I deliberately stay in the lane I’m in, even if I had been intending to move.  Then he’ll tell me to take my foot off the clutch when we’re stopped, which is apparently a very bad habit, and one I hate being caught out in.  And he’ll usually remind me to change gears the millisecond before I’m about to change up anyway.  And again because I’m stubborn I’ll refuse to be told and we end up roaring down the N7 in third gear.

But there was no chance of us roaring anywhere yesterday.  Because Dublin, and the road out of it, were in total gridlock.  And His Nibs was in the driving seat.

There’s a left turn we take to get out of the city as promptly as possible.  As we approached this turn yesterday, His Nibs started yelping because there was such a back up of traffic in front of us.

“We’ll never get through Inchicore village” he moaned.  “If it’s this bad this far from the N7, we’ll be in the car all night.”

I said nothing.  Sure, what was there to say?  When he’s right, he’s right.

“Where does this road bring you?  If we don’t turn off?”

“Ballyfermot village”.

(For any non Irish readers, Inchicore and Ballyfermot are suburbs of Dublin city.  So is Palmerstown, which we will unfortunately get to later, both literally and in this story).

“Have you ever driven down there?”

“Yes”

“And?”

“And you get to Ballyfermot village, then you turn left, and eventually you join the N7.”

The N7 was where we needed to be, so His Nibs ignored his usual left turn, and kept driving.

I should say, I was on this road once, in my entire life.  Dropping somebody home.  Somebody who then gave me very clear directions on how exactly to get back to the main road.  And this was years ago.  I wasn’t half as confident in this route as I allowed myself to sound.  But His Nibs was starting to get a bit shouty.  And for some reason I thought that moving had to be better than sitting in traffic.  And in fairness, I knew I was right.  Common sense told me.  Eventually there would have to be a left turn that would bring us to where we wanted to go.

We drove along, moving slowly, for a few minutes.

“So is this Ballyfermot Village?” he asked me.

“Yes.”

“And where do we turn off?”

“I have absolutely no idea.”

I thought it was best to stop bluffing.  I hadn’t a clue.

“What do you mean you don’t know?  You said you knew the way.”

“I said you go down here and eventually turn left.  But I don’t know where.”

Well, dear readers, my beloved His Nibs instantly became absolutely furious.  It was impressive to see, actually.  He went from driving along, keeping an eye out for signs, to screaming and swearing like something out of The Wolf of Wall Street in a millisecond.

“Stop shouting and swearing” I told him.  “It’ll be grand”.

He went bonkers.  Blathering on about he should never have listened to me, and if he’d gone the usual way, he’d be stuck in traffic, but at least he’d know where he was, and now we’d never get home, and other dramatic nonsense.

In fairness to His Nibs, I was being annoying.  I’d very strongly implied that I knew an alternative route home, then admitted that I had no idea where we were, and when he started giving out, lay down in my car bed, with my blanket and pillow, and instructed him to be quiet, that I was going to sleep.

But he wasn’t going to let me away with that.  At every roundabout he asked me which way he should go.  And at every roundabout, I instructed him to go straight through, unless the left exit was signed Limerick, The South, or the N7.  I didn’t even look up.  He must have wanted to kill me.  But instead he yelped and shouted and threatened other road users, and deliberately disobeyed me by making an alarming amount of noise.  When we reached Palmerstown he seemed to get his second wind, shouting about how we weren’t supposed to be there, and now we were halfway to Sligo.  This was a gross exaggeration.  Sligo is two hundred kilometres from Palmerstown.  I know this, because it said so on the sign we were soaring past as His Nibs was shouting this information.

“Do you know” I said, lying back down and snuggling into my car bed “I remember when you were more fun than this.  When you had fire in your belly and adventure in your soul.  There’s no need to worry just because we’re not supposed to be exactly where we planned to be at this moment in time.  How much fun would life be if we were always on the right road?”

My eyes were closed and my speech already slowing into sleep as I preached at him.

“Well being at home with coffee and toast would definitely be more fun than driving around here for hours, going around in circles, wouldn’t it?” he snarled.  “Do that yoke on your phone, where you talk to it, and it turns into a satnav.”

I don’t know why he carries on as if he doesn’t know what Siri is.  He knows better than I do, even though he doesn’t have it on his phone.  We often question her, when we’re out and about in the world.

“It has no battery.  I’m sorry about that, actually” I told him, making it sound as if I wasn’t remotely sorry for sending him off on this wild goose chase in the first place.

We got to the N7 eventually of course, and peace was instantly restored.  Apparently, I’m not as foolish as I look.

Afternoon Tea

"There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea" - Henry James

His Nibs and I were invited out lately, to afternoon tea.  I was delighted.  I never get to go out to fancy things.  We’re not very fancy in this house.  Sunday afternoons are often spent with me lying around in my pyjamas insisting it’s unreasonable to be expected to get dressed every single day, and His Nibs bribes me with promises of lunches and cappuccinos if I’ll only get fecking ready and go out and walk the dogs with him.

If I’d been born in the Downton Abbey era, I would have been one of those long suffering kitchen maids who scrub potatoes and clean fireplaces every day (and God Almighty knows that would be a fate worse than death for me).  But once I was invited to this afternoon tea I decided to become Lady Mary for the afternoon.

His Nibs had obviously worn himself out  trying to wake me up every morning that week, because he woke me up a couple of hours later than I’d requested on the Sunday morning.

He probably thought I’d wake up and get up and be ready to go.  The poor soul.  He’s so innocent sometimes.  I sat up in the bed and demanded coffee, a tweezers, and a mirror.  Then I started dragging my own eyebrows out of my head, yelping and moaning as I went.

When I got into the shower I nearly forgot to come out.  Then I had to blow dry my hair.  His Nibs was downstairs losing his mind, yelping about how we were only going for a bit of lunch, there was no need to carry on like we were getting married again.  So I yelled back that he wasn’t to shout at me when I was putting on liquid eyeliner, in case he made me ruin it.  So then he did a bit of roaring about how there was no need for makeup and I roared back about how he could save us both some time if he’d kindly iron me something to wear, but not my grey top or my red one, and not my pale jeans and on and on we went until we finally got in the car and he calmed down.

I didn’t discuss the fact that we were going for afternoon tea, and not lunch, with His Nibs.  I’ve never had an afternoon tea with him.  This is because I know him very well.  And I know that he is a good and kind man, but very, very practical. He doesn’t have any time for any sort of nonsense.  He knows the value of a euro.  And he gets very angry very quickly if he is hungry.

I quite like an odd afternoon tea.  Although I know it’s a bit of an indulgence, and that there’s probably better value to be had, it’s nice to go out and pretend to be posh every now and then.  But I usually go with a friend.  I never, ever go with His Nibs.

There was a gang of us, around fifteen, attending.  We ordered afternoon tea for all of us and waited patiently.

Eventually the food arrived.  The waitresses put a silver stand down between His Nibs and I, with sandwiches, a scone each and tiny bite sized desserts.  On top of each stand were little bottles of homemade lemonade “with a blood orange foam”, which made His Nibs’ eyes roll back in his eyes as though he was having a fit.

And then we moved onto the explanations of the food.  As we all listened and made oohing and aahing sounds and nodded and smiled, His Nibs kept up a running commentary in my ear.

“Why can’t she just say it’s smoked salmon on brown bread?  What do I care where the salmon came from or who fecking smoked it? “

“Right, so the scones come with clotted cream, lemon curd or jam, but we can’t have butter?  What’s that all about?”

Finally he was allowed to eat it.  He declared the coffee lovely, the cheese nice, the chicken weird, and the ham lovely, even if he thought the accompanying homemade apricot chutney was overkill.

“For Jaysis sake” he told me “we’re still in Kilkenny, this is getting out of hand now.”

I thought everything was absolutely gorgeous.  But the real fun was still to come.

He finished his sandwiches, and eyed his scone.

“Aren’t you going to eat it?” I asked him.  His Nibs is fond of baked goods, and God knows there’s not a lot of baking done in this house.

“I might wait” he told me.  “And have it at the end.”

“The end of what?”

“The end of lunch”.

I looked at him, he looked at me.  The time had come.  I had now to admit to my beloved husband that he wouldn’t behaving a lunch, as such.  Not as he thinks of lunch.  There would be no potatoes, no roast beef, he’d had what he’d be getting.

“This is the end of lunch” I told him.  “That’s it.”

“What do you mean that’s it?"

“That’s it.  That’s afternoon tea.  We’re finished eating now.”

“Cop on.  Sure, I’m not full.  That couldn’t be it.  It was only a sandwich.”

“Love, all jokes aside, you must have had some idea that you were getting a sandwich and a scone, followed by a roast dinner with all the trimmings, did you?”

“No.  I thought when the sandwich arrived that things didn’t look great.  But I assumed there would be enough to eat.  Sure they couldn’t charge the price of two roast dinners for a sandwich could they?”

I tried talking him around.  Which wasn’t easy.  Because I was hissing at him from the side of my mouth, but smiling at the same time, so that it didn’t look like I was giving out stink to him in front of everybody.  I got nowhere, so I had to start promising him things if he’d only be good.

I promised him I’d make him a nice dinner that night.  I promised that he was allowed to refuse to go to one function in the next six months, without question or trouble from me.  Finally I told him that if he didn’t behave himself and not complain about the food and sound as if he’d never been out before, I’d burst into noisy tears and tell everybody that he was a bad husband who had my heart broken.

“All right, all right, calm down.  I’m not saying anything.  But we might have to go to the chipper on the way home.”

It was a great afternoon.  We drank endless coffee and spent a few hours with lovely people, and had a little catch up.  We didn’t leave until we were hopping off the walls with caffeine and were worn out from laughing.

When we got in the car His Nibs told me that he hadn’t had such a good afternoon for years.  He’d really enjoyed himself, he told me, seeing everyone.  But he stated for a fact that he thinks afternoon tea is probably the Emperor’s New Clothes of meals.

“I mean to say, you pay three times more than you usually would for a coffee and sandwich, just because it comes on a fancy stand.  And we all do it because it’s the thing to do these days.  Talk about notions.  I hope you’re still making the dinner tonight?”

Brewing up a Storm.

“Happy Winds-day” – Winnie the Pooh.

I don’t think we’ve ever had a real hurricane before.  I remember our getting hit by the tail end of Hurricane Charley, when I was a teenager.  The wind frightened the life out of our dog and forced my five siblings and I to stay in the house together for twenty-four hours and get on each other’s nerves more than you would believe possible.  That was the closest we ever got.  But this time it wasn’t the tail end of a hurricane.  We were to get our very own hurricane, and it was to be the worst storm in decades.

There were two reactions to the news.  The first, people who scoffed and insisted they’d go about their daily life as if it wasn’t happening.  Like His Nibs.

And the second was from people like me.  People whose thoughts immediately went to whether we’d all be expected to go to work.  And if we weren’t, how much chocolate we should get in to get through the storm, and what films we could watch, and whether we should get the chimney cleaned as part of our hurricane preparation.  Because as everyone knows, listening to the wind howling around the house and the rain bouncing off the windows is far, far nicer if you have a fire lighting inside.

Nothing I could do tempted His Nibs to join me in my pre-storm musings.  He insisted there would be no hurricane.
On Sunday night, he was in bed before ten.  I stayed up, watching the doom-laden forecasts. He showed not a scrap of gratitude for the running commentary I was giving him on the storm reports.
When I woke him to tell him that all non-urgent hospital appointments were suspended, he just looked confused
“Do you have a hospital appointment?”
“No.  I’m just telling you.  Things are getting serious.  And all the schools and government offices are closed.  I’m not sure we’ll be working tomorrow.”
“We’ll be working, never fear.  Now if you’re getting up at six you should probably go to bed.”

I would in my hat.  Who in their right mind would get up at six in the morning and take off on the long trek to Dublin, in the height of the hurricane drama?  What if I couldn’t get home again?  What if I got into an accident, or the wind was too strong for the car? 
Or what if I went to work and nobody else did, and I was left sitting there for the day, all by myself, working like a fool while everyone else was at home with their films and chocolate?

His Nibs is on the late shift this week.  He didn’t have to leave our house until nine thirty.  I informed him that I would not be driving to work in the morning, that my absolute best offer was to go in his car with him.  This would get me to work at least an hour later than I should be there.  His Nibs, king of punctuality, strongly disapproved.
But I held firm. At ten past nine, despite his objections, I rang the office and confirmed that we were not expected to travel, we were to stay at home.  And I imparted the joyous tidings to my spouse, expecting him to do a happy dance.

He didn’t dance.  He didn’t even smile.  He rolled his eyes and went on about how dramatic everybody is, and hitched up the hounds to go for a walk.  When he got home, he couldn’t seem to cope with the unexpected day off.  Usually, when he has a day’s holidays, he’s booked it and relished the thoughts of it for weeks beforehand.  He was like a hen on an egg.  He couldn’t settle.
He went to the shop, to buy sandwich food, in case the electricity went off.  He collected every candle in the house for the same reason.  Sadly, we’re the kind of people who only have scented candles, and I shuddered to think what the combined smells would be like in an emergency, but I said nothing.  He went out to the garden to make sure there wasn’t anything that would be blown away, cut down some of the taller plants, and practically built a brick wall around the wheelie bins.
And then he sighed and tutted and looked bored and announced that he was going to town to buy salt for the water softener.  His various little jobs had taken the best part of the morning.  Probably because he had had absolutely no assistance from me.  It was surprising how fast I was able to adapt to the change, actually.  I went from normal Monday morning to duvet day in the blink of an eye.

By the time he decided to go to town, it was lunchtime.  The wind was building up quickly, the trees were already bending, the leaves were whipping up into floating swirls all around the garden.  I did not want my spouse, who was being grumpy, but still quite lovable, in his manly “batten down the hatches, fix things, protect my family” way, to go out in the car. I had to talk him out of it.  It’s all very well insisting that it’s all a storm in a teacup (for want of a better phrase), but hurricanes are dangerous.  Even I know that.

Poppy, the boldest dog, was his willing comrade in the bad behaviour for the rest of the day.  When Rory or Marley went outside to complete their toilet, they became alarmed at the back door, ran out, did their business as quickly as possible, and scampered back indoors, their tails between their legs.  Rory, being Rory, then insisted on being carried around and reassured and petted.  Every time.
Poppy, on the other hand, was running around and jumping and barking at the wind.  She seemed quite excited by it all.  And His Nibs seemed to quite like it as well, once it was actually happening.  He kept running in and out of the garden with her, ostensibly to let her go to the loo, but plainly to see how things were progressing.  And he kept me up to date on developments.

“It’s getting hard to walk against the wind now, love.”

“Well don’t do it then.  Come in and close the fecking door.”

“It doesn’t seem too bad now.  Will we all go for a walk?”

“Are you mental?  Look at poor little Rory, he’d be like a balloon on a string.  Sit down, for Christ’s sake.”

His next report was that our glasshouse had not made it.  “All the glass is smashed, and I think some of the frame has bent in the wind.”

“So where are you going now?”

“Out to pick up the glass, obviously.  I don’t want one of the dogs to cut their paw, do I?”

I tried to tell him that I didn’t think running around the garden in a hurricane, picking up pieces of broken glass was a good idea.  But by the time I got the words out he was gone.

Finally, he asked me to text the neighbours, to let them know that there was now a hole in their roof, where the tiles had blown off.

“They’re flying around out there.   Come out and see it.”

“What’s flying around?”

“The roof tiles, loads of them, it’s like confetti.” And he calls me dramatic.

“Love, I’m only going to tell you this once.  You are specifically and irrevocably forbidden from standing in the garden looking around like an eejit when there’s roof tiles flying around.  You’ll get planked with one.”

In the end I gave him my laptop, an item with which I am unusually stingy, to keep him quiet.  His own is broken, and there’s a new series on Netflix I was confident he’d watch, if I could get him to sit down for long enough.

It worked beautifully for a while.  But once the electricity went off, he almost lost his mind with the boredom.  He stood flicking the light switches on an off sorrowfully.  I can only assume this action is driven by the same compulsion that used to make people press the telephone’s disconnect button frantically on old films.

When I shouted at him to give it up, he went to bed.  At half past seven.  I thought he was bonkers.  But then I have a kindle, so I could read.  Soon, though, the darkness and the cold, and the general misery of not being able to have a cup of coffee or watch Netflix sent me upstairs too.

I went straight to sleep, even though the wind was still howling around the house and it was about eight o’clock in the evening.  And I slept right through to six in the morning.  I don’t think I’ve had ten straight hours sleep since I was a child, unless you count hangover sleeps that go on into the afternoon, which I don’t.

Maybe the best thing about the storm was its name.  Ophelia.  Very posh and literature-y.

If Music be the Food of Love.....

“You got joy for singing burning in your soul” – Huckleberry Grove, Ocean Colour Scene.

There’s been a big development in my life lately.  I have regained some of my youth and become a cool person.  Or at least I believe I have.  For I have finally, at long last, activated a music streaming account on my phone.  I’m delighted with myself.  I love that I don’t have to download albums, and I have a playlist for the car, made up entirely of songs I shout along to on the N7. 

I just had free Spotify for ages.  And then my sister came home for her holidays.  We were having a couple of glasses of wine one night when we ended up singing along to this playlist.  Except that every couple of minutes it started shouting adverts at us and ruining our fun.

Then both my sisters decided that since they were enjoying the music, they would share my list.  I had no idea that this was even possible, but basked in the glory of my choices, that they wanted my list for themselves. 

My list wasn’t shareable.  My sisters turned to me and asked me why I was paying a decent sized phone bill every month and not using all the facilities.  Apparently, I needed Spotify Premium.  Then they asked me whether I was still carrying a hundred CDs around in my car.  No, I confessed.  Sad to say the cd player in my car was the first sign of its advancing age.  I thought the CDs were tending to jump in the car stereo.  It turned out the stereo was actually scratching the life out of every one of them.

It then quickly came to light that my iPod is almost ten years old.  So old, in fact, that it’s a bit like a brick.  I decided, when I bought it, that I may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.  I told myself that I’d look after this iPod like it was a child, that I’d never break it or lose it, so I might as well get the best one.  I got the one that stored 160 GB of music. 

I’ve only ever owned a couple of hundred albums in my life.  So maybe three thousand songs, including all the ones that I am old enough to think of as B sides, that I never listened to.

This iPod could hold at least forty thousand songs.  I have absolutely no idea what I was thinking of. It’s not as if I have wildly eclectic musical tastes.  I have never once thought I’d love to hear some nice throat singing, or maybe a good country and western album.  I’ve liked many of the same bands since I was a teenager.  For certain, there’s some newer songs I like too (though very few newer than about five years ago, I’m sorry to say.  How old am I???)

Anyway, the point is that the iPod is now so incredibly old that you can’t even upload songs to it anymore.  Or at least I can’t.  Maybe even Apple has forgotten they ever existed.

So, my sisters asked me, am I happy to live a life without music? I objected immediately.  I have music in my life.  Didn’t I have a very dodgy Spotify account?  And sure, haven’t I my own voice?  I assured them that I sing my days away and have often been asked to desist immediately by my colleagues at work. 

They looked horrified.

“So your entire connection with music is listening to more adverts than music on Spotify and singing to yourself?”

My sisters have music playing constantly in their homes and cars.  This has engendered a love of music in their children, I’ve found, and my nieces and nephews knowing more about the music of my generation than I do.

I felt a hundred years old.

“You’re right.  What the feck is wrong with me?”

Into the phone shop, the following day, hoping to meet the girl I met the last time I was in there, who obliged me by telling me all the details of her personal life while I was conducting my business.  No sign of her of course.  Instead I spoke to a surly looking pup who looked at me askance when I asked him how to get Spotify Premium.

“Do you know your own phone number?”

He obviously thought I was a complete moron.  I tossed my head and sniffed that of course I did, and tried to look as if I was only getting sorted out now because I’d been so busy touring with some amazing band.

He checked my account, and our relationship deteriorated further when it came to light that the service is included in my bill, but I’d never used it before.  Judgement hung heavy in the air.

I got it all sorted out very quickly, in the end.  And then I lost a few days of my life, as I stared, mesmerised, at all the albums I could get, absolutely free.

It became clear very early that I was reliving my entire life through the music.  And, as in all things, His Nibs was hauled, kicking and screaming, into the project.

“What song was playing the first time we slow danced together?”

“What song was played immediately after that, here’s a hint, we both loved it, so we kept dancing, instead of running off into a corner to molest each other?”

“What song did you used to love so much that we got that poor girl to work out the notes and play it on the flute at our wedding”?

“What was the song I loved and kept playing that time we went to France?”

He didn’t know any of the answers of course.  And I didn’t tell him.  Instead, I’d play the relevant song on Spotify, and expect him to stand there grinning at me like an eejit for the duration of the song. He was miserable.  And I kept trying to make him dance around the kitchen with me.  I’m not a good dancer. 

Eventually, I walked into the kitchen one Sunday, my phone in my hand, and he yelped at me

“Don’t ask me any more questions about music, love, please.  I just don’t know.  I can’t remember what day of the week it is, never mind what song you sang on a holiday fifteen years ago.  Please, please, just leave me alone.”

So I started on my sisters.  Same game “Do you remember our favourite song when we were getting ready to go out in the early nineties?”

The great thing about siblings is that they have no fear.  They don’t worry that you’ll leave them if they aren’t nice to you.  We’ll always be sisters, it doesn’t matter how annoying I am or how much they tell me to belt up for myself.  They put me straight fairly quickly, with the information that not everybody has been in a musical coma for years, and to feck off.

But my exuberance could not be blunted.  I’ve been through my entire life in music, from my teenage years, through to about 2012, squealing with joy when I find another song I thought I’d forgotten forever.

After a couple of days I walked boldly into one of those shops that only sell technological yokes, and straight up to the counter

“A bluetooth speaker please.”

“Right.  What kind?”

“The kind that will let me play music on my phone all over the house.”

The shop assistants were two very young men.  They looked at each other and twitched their hipster beards.

“Do you want a big one or a small one?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want it loud enough to have at a party?”

“Christ no.  I don’t have parties.  Look at me.”  I couldn’t help noticing the look of relief crossing the short one’s face.

“Just a normal one.”

One of the young fellas went off and came back with a speaker at least as big as the ones that came with my last stereo.  Not what I wanted at all.  So I told him so.

“That one won’t do.  Sure it’ll take up the whole front seat.”

Poor Daniel, according to his nametag, was baffled.

“The front seat?”

“The front seat of my car.  I want to play music in the car and in the house.”

“Doesn’t your car have a USB port?”

“Hardly, it’s nearly as old as I am.”

He sighed audibly now.

“How much do you think this speaker is going to cost?”

“I don’t know.  Not a fiver, like the ones in Penney’s.  One that won’t crackle all the time.  I imagined about thirty euro?”

It’s called a KS cube.  It’s bright blue, and is about two inches square.  I’m delighted with it.

I’m hoping that I’ll soon get over my new obsession.  I might finally be able to take my headphones out for long enough for my ears to cool down.  Or maybe I’ll stop turning on the little speaker and playing some of my shameful musical secrets in rooms where His Nibs is trying to watch television.  For yes, I have now become familiar enough with the whole business to have learnt how to create a private list for myself.  Some of the songs on it would make your hair stand on end.  It's fantastic.

As Sick as a Small Hospital

“Tis Healthy to be sick sometimes”

-          Henry David Thoreau

 I have been unwell.  I was overtaken by a miserable virus last week, and God, did I share my suffering with poor His Nibs.

It was on a Saturday that I first started to feel under the weather.  I had a really bad headache, I had the cold sweats even though I was roasting, and I felt a bit staggery, sort of faint and dizzy at the same time.

His Nibs isn’t the greatest nurse in the land.  When I’m sick, he tends to assume I’m grand and that I’m just having a moan until my symptoms become so pronounced that he can’t ignore them anymore.  Then he makes me a cup of tea and hopes that will count as taking care of me, until I start making demands on his time and energy.  These demands involve everything from constant tea making, driving from one supermarket to the other, trying to find the specific items that I insist are the only thing that will aid my recovery.  And woe betide him if he brings back the wrong things.  The great “They’re not satsumas, they’re clementines” war of my last flu will long be remembered in this house.

Looking after a sick person doesn’t come easy to him.  All he wants is for me to get over my illness and stop moaning, so that he can go back to his life and be left alone, as quickly as possible.

I’m not a great patient either, to be fair.  There’s a lot of presenting me with endless treats to amuse and entertain me while I wait for the worst of my malady to pass.  And a lot of sighing and throwing these treats aside from me.

So he decided that he’d just ignore my symptoms, in the hope that I’d put up and shut up and not ruin his weekend.  I hadn’t the energy for any sort of a row or giving out.  I had to use dirty tactics to get his attention and make him my nurse.

I started by trying to be a bit classy about it all.  This involved going all Victorian.  You know the sort of thing, referring to feeling faint as swooning, and declaring that I had the vapours when I was feeling shaky and nauseous.  I even lay down with my hand to my head to signify the seriousness of my complaints.  But I got feck all satisfaction for my efforts.  He just asked me whether I was putting it all on, that I looked a bit dramatic.

This lack of sympathy didn’t please me.  But I decided that I could force a bit of empathy out of him, he isn’t an unkind man, it couldn’t be that difficult.  I took it upon myself to tell him every detail of every symptom, as it happened.  It was quite tiring, actually.

“I’m roasting.  Is the heating on?”

“No, and it’s not that warm in here.  Maybe you have a temperature?”

“I don’t know.  Feel my forehead, see if it’s hot.”

He would patiently put the back of his hand to my forehead, while picking up the mugs for another tea run with the other hand.

“Actually no, you feel quite clammy.”

“Oh God, I must have a really high temperature.”

“It’s not that clammy, love, you’re grand.  Anyway, on the television they always so “Oh my God, you’re burning up” if someone has a temperature, so you must have the opposite, since you feel cold, a low temperature."

“You don’t care about me at all, do you?”

Then a few minutes later I would remind him of how bad my headache was, or insist he stare at my outstretched hand and exclaim at how it was trembling.

But there was a limit to how dramatic I could be.  I had to rein it in a bit.  I had limited options, I couldn’t start ranting and raving and threatening to leave him.  There’s only the pair of us in the house.  If I drove him too far around the bend I’d have to do my own tea making, and would have to get dressed and venture outside to buy my own fruit and possibly chocolate.

He suggested that since I felt so awful I go to bed and go to sleep.  I refused, and announced that I would stay downstairs and keep him company, but that I’d be staying in my pyjamas.  That meant, of course, that he would have to do all the running around after dogs, and go to the shop to cater to my demands, and make tea and snacks,  but still listen to me moaning.  Eventually he stopped suggesting I go to bed, and told me to go. By mid afternoon he was trying to bribe me.  If I went to bed he’d bring me up more tea, he’d keep all the dogs downstairs and I could watch Netflix in peace and quiet.  And still I refused.  Eventually he tried to flat out send me to bed.  Only when I knew he was getting really sick of me did I go.  It was nice, actually, tea and Netflix in my cosy nest.  At least I’d put up a fight. 

But I couldn’t help thinking nostalgically of the happy Saturdays when he used to invite me to bed, not send me.

I was sick the whole week. To be honest, dare I say it, I’m still not fabulously well.  I’m wrecked all the time. But I’m back in work now.  It’s a struggle for me to stay alert for the whole working day.  Thank God this is the week that His Nibs is driving us both up and down to work.  I get my car sleep in the mornings, and again in the evenings on my way home.   And as soon as I walk in the door I’m back in my pyjamas.  Last weekend, after a week out of work, I barely got dressed, and it didn’t even cross my mind to put on makeup.  There’s a great freedom, for me, in this level of laziness.  And all the lying down and taking naps suits me down to the ground.

One of the more unusual aspects of this illness, for me, was that I had no gastric symptoms at all.  I thought of those ads, before there was any such thing as Advertising Standards, when sugar laden products like Lucozade and Mars bars were sold as health giving products for sick people.  Of course those ads relied entirely on people not knowing that glucose is just sugar.  I convinced myself that maybe there had been some truth to them, and that since I wasn’t feeling pukey I should make the most of my lying down and watching Netflix time by eating some chocolate.  That swiftly led to the onset of wild nausea.

And that’s when things got very tedious.  His Nibs was getting fed up of my ongoing moaning, I couldn’t eat anything, it’s amazing how fast lying in bed pitying yourself gets boring.   And I was genuinely sick.  It’s not like I could go out and kick up my heels once I got fed up of the whole thing.

I can finally see why His Nibs is such a disappointing caregiver.  Maybe if he was married to someone else he’d be spectacular.  I got so fed up listening to myself moaning, and sighing and carrying on that if I could have ignored myself I would have.  I ended up feeling sorrier for him than I did for myself.