TOM JACKSON
I reckon the worst phrase in the English
language is, “I like you... as a friend.”
That’s the number one arrangement of words
you don’t want to hear, in my experience.
And, having been as an adolescent both
entertaining and engaging (IMHO) and
yet grossly overweight, my experience is
tragically extensive.
Obviously, “May God have mercy upon
your soul,” runs it close.
As regards welcome information, it is
equally uncontentious surely that, “Cook from
frozen,” is hard to beat. “Microwave in two
minutes,” is arguably even better.
Get in! Result! Me tea’ll be ready in no
time etc.
Having set those parameters, everything
in between is up for grabs. My wife and I share
a mutual aversion to “With respect...” because
its use so often presages something brutally
disrespectful. “With respect” comes from
the same people who brought you, “I’m not
a racist, but...” which means someone is about
to say something racist, and, “I don’t mean to
be rude, but...” which means someone is about
to say something offensive.
You get that last one a lot in Yorkshire,
I’ve noticed.
As for specific phrases I use that Nicola
doesn’t like, there’s quite a long list. She
particularly objects to “I’m tired,” “Oooo,
me back,” and my Frankie Howerd tribute,
“Oooh er missus,” which I employ not to
signal sexual innuendo but as another
indicator of fatigue. Neither does she like,
“I’m doing my best here, Nicola,” or, “I’ll try
to, Nicola,” because both presuppose failure
at whatever task is at hand. And she doesn’t
like me calling her bossy, even though she
admits she is and has no intention of not
being, because she says it’s sexist. Which
I guess is true, because bossy is only ever
applied to women, not men.
Nicola went away for a couple of days
recently to see her friend Karen in Cheshire.
When she came back, within 60 seconds
of re-entering the house, she reached for
a familiar form of words I have come to
dread: “It was the one thing I asked you to
do...” I dread it because, naturally, it only gets
wheeled out when I haven’t done whatever
the one thing was.
It’s almost always inaccurate, by the way,
because it’s a rare day that Nicola has asked
me to do just the one thing. It’d be more
precise if she said, “That’s the one thingof the 17 things I asked you to do that you
haven’t done and therefore the one I’m
choosing to emphasise.”
I’m not claiming I do loads, or even my
share, of domestic tasks. But I don’t just do,
or not do, one thing. On any given day I not
only make the bed if I’m last out of it, but
first refluff the duvet as well. I take the empty
mugs down to the kitchen, restock the loo roll,
chop wood, buy coal, clear out the fire and ash
bucket, empty the dishwasher, sweep the back
deck, put the milk bottles out, do the bins
(rubbish, recycling and garden), clear the
gutters and, for a year or so now, I’ve cooked
twice a week.
I’m also first reserve on the cat litter if Sam
is away. And at this time of year I take a lead
role in switching on the “sidies” (a range of
lamps in the living room) at about 5.30pm and
off again when we go to bed about 11pm. That
sounds trivial but there are a lot of lamps and
a lot of bending down, which affords several
excellent opportunities to say, “Ooo me back,”
as you might imagine.
But what I don’t do is water the plants.
Nicola maintains an impressive display of
alpines and succulents on the window sill. As
we know, they’re pretty drought resistant, so if,
say, someone was charged with watering them
while, say, his wife who usually does the job
was away for, say, two days in, say, Cheshire, it
wouldn’t matter too much if he clean forgot.
But if he also forgot to water that spider plant
over there on the shelf, then that would be
more serious. The damn thing might even
drop down dead.
“It was the one thing I asked you to do,”
said Nicola, spotting the corpse instantly and
consigning it to the bin, making no attempt
at revival whatsoever, my other labours set at
naught in the face of her grief.
Personally, I find it unlikely, not to mention
unlucky, if that spider plant had been in
perfect health when Nicola left to catch the
train for Crewe at midday on the Sunday and
yet had managed definitively to snuff it, all life
and hope vanished, by the time she got back at
8.30pm on the Tuesday. I think maybe it was
on the way out anyway.
But, to quote Eric Bana’s Norm “Hoot”
Hooton in the peerless Black Hawk Down,
“You know what I think? I think it don’t
matter what I think.” That spider plant is
on my record for ever. n[email protected]‘I fear many of
my wife’s phrases,
but this is the
worst one...’
Beta male
Robert Crampton
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