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Wednesday, 26 July 2017

Crazy in Love

"A strong marriage requires loving your spouse even in those moments when they're not being lovable" - Dave Willis
I don't want to make any sweeping generalisations, but the husbands of Ireland may have gone collectively bonkers over the past couple of weeks.
Not being the steadiest of souls myself, I usually try not to judge the madness of others.  I'm okay with bonkers people, as long as they leave me alone.
  I’m just saying, there’s a lot of it around.
I'm taking my evidence directly from the wives.  The witnesses, in other words.  I have no doubt that the husbands of Ireland are in the same boat as their spouses, that they think their wives are bonkers, but they're not telling me about it.  So I cannot comment on the wives behaviour.  Except my own, which I think has been impeccable.  His Nibs might have a different story, but if he does just take it as further proof of the ongoing husband madness.
It all started a few weeks ago.  I was to meet a friend for a lovely lunch.  My friend, however, announced sadly that she couldn't go, she had no time for food.  She had to do some urgent shoe shopping, for her son.  My friend is a good and attentive mother and prepared for emergencies such as the possibility of shoes becoming too tight overnight or trousers that fit yesterday suddenly flapping around above the ankle bone. 
What she wasn't prepared for was her husband melting their child's new shoe.
The boy’s mother had gone to work and left the child in the loving care of his father.
  Once the mother was out of earshot the child admitted to quite a vigorous puddle jumping session the previous day, and announced that the inside of his trainers were soaked.  The husband decided that he would dry the shoes using his wife's hairdryer.
You know the way if you're using your hairdryer to dry your hair / jeans / child's shoe, the most effective way to do so is to shake the hairdryer from left to right in front of the wet item?
This man didn't know that.  He thought that the most effective way to dry his son's shoes would be to set the hairdryer to its highest setting, jam the nozzle into the trainer, and then wander off to do something else, getting completely distracted and leaving the shoe for far too long.
The smell of burning trainer finally filled the house and the husband rushed back to the scene.
  It took him a while to peel the trainer off the hairdryer. The child was not pleased. But his father just left the trainer to cool down, then he sent the child on his way, wearing a freshly melted shoe, and phoned his wife.
My friend was not delighted to hear that her child was gone out for the day looking like a hobo.  Nor was she pleased with the mini lecture her husband gave her about how dangerous the hairdryer is, and how maybe they should get rid of it.

Another friend’s husband was horrified, recently, to discover that his very small daughter had accidentally wet her bed. His wife usually deals with these little accidents, but she was at work, and sadly the child's father panicked.
  Instead of stripping the bed and scrubbing the mattress like a rational person, he ran hysterically to the detergent cupboard, grabbed the first thing he saw, and sprayed it all over the damp mattress.  It was oven cleaner.  A substance so noxious that you're not supposed to stay in the house while it’s in use.
I can't hazard a guess at what the next husband I was told about was thinking of.  Why on earth would a man with a jot of common sense suddenly, and without invitation, remark that his wife was putting on weight?  They weren't fighting.  His wife wasn't annoying him, and he didn't appear to be purposely annoying her, if you can believe it.  He just mentioned her alleged weight gain aloud, in a friendly and conversational tone.  What can he have been thinking? We'll probably never know.  For although this wife is nicer than me and the husband lived to tell the tale, I doubt we’re allowed ever talk about it again.
His Nibs, never one to be left out, did his part to prove my point this week too.
Last Sunday, he was away all day, at a hurling match.  Nothing new there.  He was gone before I woke up, despite my strict instructions not to leave me snoozing.  Left to my own devices it’s not beyond me to sleep for so long in the morning that I can’t go to sleep at bedtime that night, and I get all messed up for the whole week.
I’m currently doing a project involving my sewing machine.  I’m not great at this type of caper.  I start with great intentions, then mess up expensive fabrics and swear and curse and spend half my time ripping stitches out, after I’ve spent hours putting them in. 
On Sunday I was so busy sewing that His Nibs couldn’t even get me to answer his phone calls until quite late in the afternoon.  When he eventually got through, he told me that he was going to spend the night in his brother’s house.  I welcomed the information, His Nibs is not usually so sociable.
Twenty minutes later he rang again to tell me he was staying in his brother’s house, he didn’t think I’d taken him seriously during the first call.  This is a complete mystery to me.
I got a third call about half an hour after that, saying that he’d changed his mind, and was on his way home.   
When he arrived home, it was already dark, and I was bent over the sewing machine in the kitchen, with my back to the door.  His Nibs came in for a chat, made coffee, and went to the living room to watch the match all over again, on television.
I’ve previously written about our badly behaved dog, Poppy.  Her behaviour is recently improved, but she still likes to try to bash the fence down when she gets the chance, in the hope of an escape. 
On Sunday night she was in the garden, and I heard the unmistakable sound of a terrier bouncing off a fence panel.  I jumped from my chair and ran to the back door to start ineffectively roaring at her to get into the house and behave herself.
You can only imagine my alarm and horror when I saw the beam of a small torch dancing around behind our garden shed.  I couldn’t believe it.  Who in their right mind would break into our back garden?
My thoughts immediately went to stories I’ve heard of dogs being stolen from gardens.  I stood on the back doorstep, my heart in my throat, and started calling to Poppy urgently. I was afraid the poor little clown would be hurt or stolen by the mystery person behind the shed.  As far as I know Poppy has no financial value, but maybe we had a very stupid thief on our hands?
The torchlight had gone out, and there was silence.
Eventually I regained my presence of mind and roared at His Nibs to drag himself from the television and join me in the garden, possibly to engage in hand to hand combat.  I hoped that when I said his name the burglar might assume that the man I was calling was much bigger than His Nibs actually is, and so might run away.
“There’s no need to shout, I’m right in front of you” His Nibs’ voice rang out from the darkness.
It was him.  He was the fecking prowler.  He’d decided to try to train Poppy to stop staging breakouts.  He had crept, ninja like, out of the house, when I was at the sewing machine.  He did not stop to tell me what he was doing, in case doing so ruined the element of surprise he was going for.
His plan was to sneak to the bottom of the garden and lie in wait.  Then when Poppy started barking and jumping at the fence he would suddenly switch on the light and start roaring at her.  He thought that this might frighten the dog into obedience.  I assume that the dog, being a dog, both heard him and smelled him before she even started barking and was not surprised at all. 
He frightened the life out of me.  I know it might seem a bit dramatic to assume we had a prowler, we’re hardly living in a crime hotspot here.  But if you saw a torchlight sweeping around your garden, would you be more likely to assume that there’s a burglar in the garden, or that a man is hiding behind his own shed, in the dark, trying to sneak up on a hyperactive dog?

Wednesday, 19 July 2017

'Til Death Do Us Part


Sexiness wears thin after a while and beauty fades, but to be married to a man who makes you laugh every day, ah, now that’s a real treat.
-          Joanne Woodward.
His Nibs and I had our wedding anniversary yesterday.  Our anniversary is always a happy day in this house, because we both take the day off work every year.  His Nibs takes the day off because I ask him to, and I take it off so that we can spend the day together and go out for a nice lunch, and so I can hit him with random memory tests of our wedding day and drive him mad.

Yesterday was a beautiful day.  We went out for a nice lunch, and sat outside to eat.  I had pasta, he had a steak sandwich.  The food is irrelevant to the story, but if I was reading this for the first time, the only thing I’d be thinking for the rest of this story is “I wonder what they had for their lunch?”  Especially if I was hungry while reading it.
Anyway, all was going well, we were happy and relaxed until I hit him with “What’s your strongest memory of our wedding day?”
I could see the hunted look come into his eyes immediately.  I knew he was thinking too fast and would give the wrong answer.
“It started raining in the afternoon.  That was great, because we didn’t have to spend hours taking photographs.  So we got to spend the time with our friends in the bar.”
“That’s your strongest memory of our wedding day?  The weather?”
He was no longer hunted looking.  He sat back in his chair and smiled.
“I remember we nearly had a row in the car on the way to the hotel, when you found out that I hadn’t written my speech.”
This is a true story.  We left the church, got into the car, and went off to take the photographs. (This was before the rain started).  And as we finished waving at our guests and drove away, His Nibs turned to me and said
“You wouldn’t have a pen, love, would you?”
“No, I don’t bring a pen to our wedding.  Why would I?  And more to the point, where would I put it?  What do you want a pen for, anyway?”
“I thought I might write my speech.”
There was a long pause.  Not the sort of pause you’re supposed to have within an hour of getting married, where you stare at each other, smiling like idiots, and words aren’t necessary.  This was very much the other sort of pause.  The unhappy sort.
“You didn't write a speech?”
“No.  I didn’t get around to it.”
“You’ve known this wedding is happening on this date for thirteen months, and you never got around to putting your speech together?”
“Well I wasn’t going to write it thirteen months ago, was I?”
“Love, seriously, have you even a first draft of a speech?”
“No.”
His Nibs didn’t look remotely frightened or shaken by my thunderous face.  Nor did he look remotely worried.  He informed me that sure, if he didn’t have a speech, what harm?  He’d do it off the cuff.
I was horrified.  I’ve never known His Nibs to make a public speech, and his making his speech completely off the top of his head was not part of our wedding plan.  But I took a deep breath and let it go.  It gave me something to worry about later.  I think that my letting that go may have set the scene for our future as a married couple.
He gave an off the cuff speech.  I was frantically writing the names of people he had to thank on a serviette and passing them to him.  He didn’t need my help though.  He gave the loveliest speech I’ve ever heard, full of love for everyone, and full of happiness.  I’ve never been prouder of him.
But when quizzed yesterday, this was not his first memory of our wedding day.  The weather was. So I continued to torment him.
Could he name any songs that were played at the reception?
What did we have for our dinner?
Did I make a speech? Did my Dad?  Could he remember anything about either?
Poor His Nibs.  Sitting there, trying to remember minute details of a day fourteen years ago, which he probably hadn’t even noticed at the time.
The difficulty His Nibs faces is that I remember the tiny details of everything.  I can’t remember what I walk up the stairs for, but I remember exactly what song was playing in the nightclub the first time His Nibs asked me to dance, twenty five years ago.  When I find a receipt in the bottom of an old handbag I say annoying things to him like “Oh look, it’s the receipt for the coffee, remember the day we went to Kilkenny and I bought deodorant and you bought socks, remember?”  I’m sure this drives him bonkers. But he smiles and nods, which is enough to keep me happy.  This memory for trivia has been a life long skill of mine.  My brother insists that I’m imagining things when I try to remind him of tiny events that happened in our childhood.
Anyway, I’ve decided that to celebrate this auspicious event, I will take this opportunity to list a few tips on marriage:
Use your tears wisely.  When His Nibs and I moved in together first, every time we started fighting or he was particularly stubborn about something that was important to me, I’d start crying.  This very quickly loses its power.  Before you know where you are, you’ll be getting ready to squeeze out a few tears so that he’ll do the washing up without your input, and he’ll mutter “here comes the waterworks” under his breath.  And that’s a day to remember.  Because that’s the day you’ll realise that you’ve lost your power.  Even when you start crying with good reason.  In my case, I really hurt my finger once when we were both trying to replace a fence panel Poppy had headbutted to death.  It was an actual injury, there was bleeding, and he decided the cut wasn’t as bad as I was making it out to be, and that I should carry on with the work and “don’t start crying”.  If he had had any respect left for the tears, he would have reacted more to my liking.
If, like us, you spend more time than you want to out of your house, because you have to work all the time to pay for the fecking thing, do not spend more than half the time you’re in the house cleaning it.  This is a waste of time.  Especially if you share said house with a husband like mine who leaves an inch of cold coffee in mugs all over the house and who seems to mess up the entire lower level of the house just trimming his beard.  Only a husband like His Nibs, who has a grin that has me for an eejit, can get away with the kind of caper.  Just accept a certain amount of dust and get on with it.
There are rows that you will have for the rest of your lives together.  His Nibs and I haven’t a minute’s luck in the mornings.  There’s unending shouting and roaring and sulking and there would be crying, if it hadn’t lost its power, as set out above, every single morning.  I can’t get up in the mornings, because I go to bed too late.  His Nibs springs out of bed far too early and is bossy and shouty and difficult.  This will never end.  And we’ve decided to accept this.  The fights we have in the mornings end as soon as we get in the car and I go back to sleep, and are not mentioned again.  They don’t count.  The sooner you both decide what your version of our morning row is, the faster you can get over it.
His Nibs says the only thing he ever forces himself to remember as a tip on marriage is “Happy Wife Happy Life.”  I think it’s a bit of a cheek for him to say this.  He couldn’t think disappearing every week to a hurling match, which he records on television while he’s gone, then coming home and watching the same match on television, then watching the highlights again that night, leads to a happy wife.  The only reason he has a happy wife is that he had the presence of mind to marry a woman lazy enough to not get hysterical about these things.  So maybe he’s an oracle of wisdom after all.
I was trying to think up of more questions for him, as our lunch ended.  He’d finished his steak sandwich, and was picking through my leftover pasta, looking for hidden bits of bacon, when he spoke again.
“I remember the wedding song.  It was great.  It was called You’re The One.  And that bit was definitely true.”  He grinned at me, and I grinned back and stopped quizzing him.
This type of talk makes me confident that we’ll make it another year.



Wednesday, 12 July 2017

Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match


My favourite hobby is matchmaking.  It's a lot easier to do it in the movies than in real life because in real life, people don't do what I tell them to do.
- Susanne Bier
Do you know what I think must be a nice job? Matchmaker.  I don’t mean being a web developer who creates apps for romance on the basis of whether you swipe left or right on your phone, nor the kind in John B. Keane’s “Sive”, where a young girl is sold to some old farmer for extremely nefarious purposes.  I mean the marriage bureau type of matchmaking.  The kind that doesn’t exist anymore.  Where you sit in an office, and someone comes in to see you, and says they’d like to meet somebody, and you ask them a list of nosey questions, and make up a file that you can read through later and judge at your leisure.  Then you take the file of another complete stranger, and with nothing to assist you except a selection of their likes and dislikes and hobbies and food preferences, you try to guess whether the two strangers should marry each other. 
It goes without saying that the reason I think this would be a nice job is that I am a nosey parker who is fascinated with people and their lives.
The ideal scenario is that you introduce two people to each other and before you know where you are you’re wearing a big hat and telling all the other wedding guests that it’s all thanks to you, and you end up being godmother to endless first-born children. 
The thing about a long-term relationship like ours is that dates become very predictable, if dates are still a thing at all.  So I must live vicariously through others, and this job would help.  A lot of my friends are settled down now.  Nobody ever tells me about bad dates anymore, which I miss.
I think that there is something to be said for going back to the days of proper dating agencies.  I’m told that if you make a date with someone on Tinder or similar apps, that you don’t get to hear the potential date’s voice before you find yourself at a table for two.  Imagine the heartbreak, if you saw a lovely ridey man, and arranged to meet him, but when you got there he sounded like Donald Duck.  Wouldn’t that be awful?  Nobody wants Donald Duck talking dirty to them.  That wouldn’t happen through this agency I have in mind.  I’d have met and interrogated the man and could warn all potential dates.  If I like the potential dates.  If they were horrible, I’m probably childish enough to set them up with Donald Duck man just for my own amusement.  So this job would give me power as well.  An unexpected bonus.
Imagine what a bad day at the office would be like at a marriage bureau.  I see myself putting on the kettle for a coffee when someone arrives to complain about the match I made for them.  The client would be invited to take a seat, and would be provided with coffee, and possibly cake, if the business is doing well.
The misfortunate client would then regale me with the tale of their bad match or hideous date.  Maybe she hates his mother, or he kicked her puppy, or she likes Black Sabbath and he likes Daniel O’Donnell.  (In my fantasy marriage bureau, nobody ever takes hard drugs or assaults their partner).  I would look sorrowful and drink my coffee while I am endlessly entertained. 
I can’t help comparing how interesting a bad day at this office would be, with a bad day in the office where I am currently employed.   I suppose it could be awkward if someone was complaining about their date being “disappointing”, if you know what I mean. (You know what I mean.  Don’t act innocent).  But I’d get over it.
You’ll note I say that I think it would be a nice job to have.  In theory, that is.  In reality, I’m afraid it’s not the job for me.  There is absolutely no evidence that I would be remotely good at this job.  In fact, all evidence is to the contrary.  I recently decided that two people I know would be an excellent match.  I based this assumption entirely on the fact that they’re both single, and they only live a short distance apart. So I thought it would be handy for them.  Of course, I took into consideration the fact that they’re both lovely people.  What could be simpler? Two lovely people, no big treks to every date.
In my defence I haven’t been on a first date in almost twenty-five years. I had utterly failed to take into account the fact that people expect a bit of chemistry in their romances.  These people, whose lives I decided to meddle in without invitation, know each other.  I’ve seen them both, in the same place, at the same time.  Not once have I noticed their eyes meet or one catch their breath at the sight of the other.  There isn’t a sign of sexual tension, not a hint of a spark between them.  But I completely ignored that.
I informed my dear friend, the female of the proposed couple, of my decision about her future.  That I had the perfect man for her.  That everlasting happiness will now doubtless be hers, because I’d found her a nice peaceful man, who only lives around the corner.
She told me to feck off for myself.  She admits that the man is perfectly pleasant and lovely, but pointed out that so is Santa Claus, and she doesn’t fancy him either.  She informed me that she’d rather travel for half the day to a date that gives her butterflies than pop around the corner for a date that gives her the snores. So that was a bad start to my potential new career.

Another problem that would probably arise very quickly is that I’m not a very patient sort of person.  If anybody reported back to me that their date did anything unreasonable, like for instance taking out a calculator when the bill came, I’d probably start roaring at them to delete the person from their contact list immediately.  I have no patience for nonsense.  Another effect of long term monogamy.  It took donkey’s years for His Nibs and I to get to a stage where we can finally live, generally speaking, in peace and harmony.  I can’t go back to a world where one person is doing things that I’m not okay with.  I’ve spent half my life trying to talk His Nibs out of that sort of behaviour.  And the other half trying to talk myself into not going completely mental when he takes no notice.   I don’t think I’d be great at counselling people to work out their problems. It’s possible that one person’s “I think we should talk about this” is my “Don’t ever try to contact me again”.  So probably not the best person to guide people to matrimony.  
And of course we have to consider that I’m completely out of touch with the dating world, and that I’d be hopeless if I was sent out into it.  In fact, if I’m honest I wasn’t very good when I was out there, when my finger should have been on the pulse of pairing up and falling in and out of love at the drop of a hat. I was young and full of fun, and still absolutely useless.  Flirting was a minefield.  I always either had no idea that I was being flirted with, or insisted on continuing to flirt with men who had made it painfully and embarrassingly obvious that they wanted me to stop.  Possibly worst of all, I never had the ability to tell men that I wanted them to stop flirting with me.  I had a tendency to over formalise the situation, and was more likely to say “Please cease and desist immediately” than “I don’t want to ruin our friendship” or even “feck off for yourself”.  A right eejit, in other words. 
His Nibs thinks I’d be a great matchmaker.  He thinks I’m a great judge of character.  It's possible that he assumes this on the basis that I like him very much.  I tried telling him that he’s wrong, I’d be hopeless.  I tried explaining what happened with the two friends of mine that I mentioned earlier, and that I might be too lazy to be a decent matchmaker.
But he has another idea.  He thinks there must be other people like us.  People who would be happy to meet up with strangers for dates, or a takeaway, without having to save up for weeks for the taxi fare, or go and get a curly blow-dry every time the phone rings.    His Nibs doesn’t accept that we’re as odd as I think we must be.  He is confident that there’s other people like us.  People who like to enjoy themselves but can’t be bothered their barneys making a big effort.  Lazy people, in other words.  A dating agency for the chronically lazy.  He thinks this might be my market.

Wednesday, 5 July 2017

The Lioness Sleeps Tonight (I hope!)

The best cure for insomnia is to get a lot of sleep
-          WC Fields
I'm only a little ashamed to say that I might be too contrary to write a blog this week.  I'm practically psychotic.  Nobody in our house is having a great week, as I seem to be determined to make everyone as miserable as I am.  I didn't go to sleep until 3:30 on Monday morning, and 2:30 on Tuesday morning.  I don't think I've ever hidden the fact that I'm a person who likes her sleep, and doesn't cope well without it. I am, as His Nibs would say, like a lion.  


Also, my hormones are at me.  They are making me contrary, which makes me impossible to talk to.  Poor His Nibs is going around the place submerged in a fog of fear and confusion.  He asked me, the other day, to pass him the salt.  Unforgivably, I instantly started shouting that I have to do everything around here, that it's not fair, that if he isn't willing to pull his weight why is he here? etc. etc. before practically throwing the salt at him.
It goes without saying that he has no idea what's going on.  He probably thinks I’ve had a complete mental breakdown. Maybe I have.

The difficulty that His Nibs finds himself in, in these circumstances, is that I'm so rude and horrible that he can't ask me what's wrong with me, without risking my roaring abuse and accusations at him.  And God forbid he ask me if I have PMT or if my hormones are at me.   A fate much worse than death.  Because even though I have, and they are, if he as much as suggests either he'll be eaten alive, the poor innocent sod.

I'd imagine one of the worst things, for him, has to be the unpredictability.
I flatter myself that I'm not the most demanding of wives.  I'm not a great fan of housework, and His Nibs is worse.  So we don't do it.  Until one of us is suddenly possessed with the need to live in a clean house again, (about once a week) or we run out of clean cornflake bowls - whichever happens first. I don't torment him about it.  Mainly because there's no point, but also because I don’t care about that kind of thing.
His Nibs and I usually have a very happy routine.  Because it's just the pair of us, we have a lot of freedom.  Not to run off with other people, you understand, or take up drug habits.  Just to do whatever we want, usually without question.  I can disappear for a nice night away in a spa hotel with my much loved friend Laura, or he can spend his time wandering off to hurling matches for endless periods of time, and nobody gives out. It all works out very well, usually.
But this week, I'd say the poor soul is afraid to even suggest he go anywhere. Or question my plans.  He's walking on eggshells, and I know I'm being a super bitch.  But I cannot stop myself.
The usual hormone swings are made much worse by the insomnia.  On Sunday, I was busy writing something, which caused me to spend the day thrown on our bed, surrounded by my laptop and various bits of paper.  His Nibs was in Croke Park at a hurling match, and in the evening gained almost
endless brownie points by arriving home with a chicken fillet burger for me under his arm.  I hadn't really had any lunch, being an undomesticated eejit, so I was delighted with him.

That night, I went to bed at my usual time.  Too late for a work night, but normal for me.  I lay down in the dark and waited patiently for sleep to overtake me.  Nothing happened.  So I moved around a bit, turned the pillow to its cool side, did a bit of kicking around trying to get comfy, all to no avail.  I tried meditative breathing, counting sheep, letting my extremities get relaxed and trying to let the feeling to spread, the whole usual routine.  Nothing was working.

I decided I'd watch some rubbish on Netflix.  Something silly, that would make me go to sleep.  Half an hour of trash television later I was more awake than I had been before I started.  I read a book for a while.  But I still wasn't sleepy.  Then His Nibs started snoring.  So I spent a happy few minutes waking him up and giving out stink to him while he blinked uncomprehendingly in the light.
By this time it was around half past one in the morning, and His Nibs was due to start his boot camp style roaring and shouting at me to get up and go to work at ten to six.  I was just starting to count down how many minutes and hours of sleep I'd get if I went to sleep immediately, when for no reason the Swiss Roll that was resting itself in the kitchen popped into my head.

I was lying in bed, His Nibs was snoring.  I couldn't sleep and there was cake in the house.  What would you do?  I stayed where I was for a while, telling myself that I'd already had a chicken burger, there was no excuse for adding fuel to the fire by adding cake to my daily calorie intake.  But nothing helped. If the cake had been performing a striptease at the end of our bed, I couldn’t have been more fascinated by it.  I couldn't stop thinking about it.  I finally decided there was no point lying there in misery when I could be downstairs, happily eating cake.

Up I got, and ate a slice of the Swiss Roll, and had a good look around in the fridge.   Happily, there was nothing in there to tempt me, so I had to settle for a glass of milk. 
"That’s it", I thought to myself.  "You've watched television, you've read a book, you've done a bit of giving out, and eaten cake.   All your favourite things.  It's time to go to sleep".
Instead, I lay in bed for a while wondering what kind of a savage gets up at half one in the morning to eat cake.  Did this mean I'm going to end up on one of those television shows where the fire brigade has to come and rip your house down to get you out?  This line of worrying went on for a while.  Then I started thinking about how unfair it is that society makes us feel so bad about eating cake, even though nobody, never mind society, even knew I had eaten it. 
I found a number of things to worry about for the next couple of hours.  What’s going to happen with the US and North Korea?  Will the cake settle on my stomach or my thighs? The usual late night worrying.  This went on until half past three in the morning, when I finally dropped off, only to be woken by a shouty His Nibs less than three hours later, and deposited in the car.  I stumbled around the office all day, moaning and looking for sympathy, and practically attacking people, until it was time to get back in the car in the evening, where I had a lovely car sleep.
Unfortunately, when we eventually got home, I was as fresh as a daisy from this nap, which kept me up until half past two on Tuesday morning, and so the whole nonsense started again.
I was psychotic with exhaustion before the hormones even kicked in.  Now I'm almost dangerous.
His Nibs is not the only one who suffers because of my mood swings.  We've been a pair for a long time.  He has fought like a tiger never to learn how to cook or to clean a bathroom, but proved a very quick learner when it comes to my bad behaviour.  He does not retaliate.  He just looks confused or offended and never shouts "Shut up you contrary old bag" at me.  If he did, of course, I'd probably burst into noisy tears and insist he doesn't love me and that we should get divorced.  No.  Instead he is kind and puts up with me until the storm passes.  Then he walks around looking innocent and relieved that he's no longer being attacked by the person he loves. 
But once the trouble is over my stupid conscience starts at me, and I look at him and think things like "I can't believe I called him a controlling pig and said I was leaving him,  just because he made me tea instead of coffee."
So then I have to go overboard being nice, and making meals and doing the housework without his assistance.  And it's all just a complete pain.  It takes me at least as long to make up for the bad behaviour as the time I'm actually unreasonable.