Black coffee blues
No matter how we try to kid ourselves that they’re human, men are strange and alien creatures who are impossible to understand. I don’t subscribe to the men are from Mars theory now that they’ve discovered water there, if men had been from the red planet then surely they would have found beer (unless of course that’s why they moved) but men certainly don’t inhabit this reality. When it boils down to it - men talk to cars and women are too serious. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Lets face it if men and women inhabited the same reality then life just wouldn’t be fun anymore. For a start there’d be no-one to fight with except other women and then who would we practice our telepathic hate rays on?. Much better not to disrupt the natural order of things. Housework would become a drag too, can you honestly tell me that you would enjoy being with a man who without being asked would do the washing up or the hoovering. Oh yeah you might say you would but…(as the saying goes) be careful what you wish for, you just might get it, the fun is in screaming at them thus getting rid of all your pent up frustration and reinforcing your megalomania. When men do housework without being nagged then you wonder what’s wrong with them. Like the Sinclair C5 the new man was an invention that never quite caught on. Imagine too, how boring clothes buying would become without the added fun of either hiding the item in the bottom of your wardrobe and dragging it out to the tune oh of this old thing three weeks later or convincing them despite the swinging ticket you got it in the sales and it was such a bargain that the shop didn’t even have time to mark either the tag or your credit card statement. So vive la difference as the French would say.
But its not the strange vagaries of the male mind at large ( though that in itself is a scary thought) - obviously when you take on a man you’re (sort of) prepared for their little forays into the world of what they believe constitutes rational behaviour. Things like watching football instead of footballers wives (and if you’re not completely addicted to the creme de la creme of crap TV then your missing out. Where else would you get such gems of script writing as a mother saying to her son ” Look I’ve known you a long time?”) believing that socks not only walk to the washing machine on their own but climb inside, close the door and switch on the machine hang themselves out to dry and then pair up and march to the sock drawer or that there is some monster out there that is waiting to drink all the beer in the world thus necessitating that on any visit to the pub they drink as much as they can as quickly as they can.
No, its F. His behaviour’s starting to worry me. I can make allowances (because making allowances is something that women are amazingly good at - especially if we get to sigh heavily while we do it) for the fact that F spent 10 years living in LA (obviously before he met me because otherwise he would have had something better to do with is time than playing guitar and farting around in music videos with models and actresses and the like) and as result eats mayonnaise with chips, tends to say “fucking A” a lot and gets called up by people with funny names and funnier accents. I can forgive the fact that his weird and strange manner of working means that he tends to work mainly through the night (less white noise of other peoples thoughts to clog up his creative process - by which he means me saying “turn it down pleeease I’d like to play Jethro Tull - and precisely what’s wrong with Jethro Tull anyway?”.) because that gives me the advantage of having the bed all to myself and ensures that on the three days that I have to get up early he can wake me up as he crawls into bed. I can overlook the fact that as a composer he translates everything into sound and that as producer the reason that he’s gazing soulfully into my eyes on the rare occasions that we have romantic nights with the lights down low and soft music is not so much my outstanding and utter gorgeousness but the fact that he’s working out exactly what mike the strings have been recorded with.
No its not those facts that worry me. I can live with them. They’re some of the reasons. I fell so hard for him in the first place. Its…well…it’s kinda embarrassing but I guess that since no-one ever reads this blog anyway I can be honest…Oh bugger how can I put it. Well it’s perverted and I think its unnatural and maybe I should just get it out in the open. OK here goes, I’m just gonna blurt it out without looking at the screen. F has started to drink tea.
Right I said it. It wasn’t so bad. Maybe if I said it again then the enormity of my revelation will diminish in size. ( I don’t know how these kiss and tell people do it I really don’t) F has started to drink tea. Now this may not seem to bad to you. Let me add the final phrase and then you’ll understand my concern. He’s French. I don’t think its allowed. In fact I’m sure there was something in the constitution about it. Something along the lines of liberty, equality, andnotea.
They don’t. The French I mean. Drink tea. They just don’t. They drink coffee - when they’re not having un petit pasta gar (OK I can’t spell it but if you pronounce it the way I wrote it you’ll be served in any cafe in France with a drink that’ll knock your socks off) They sit and drink tiny cups of extremely strong coffee which they stir incessantly with teaspoons while they chug away on a cigarette and discuss politics. Very civilised it is too. The only country in the world where they look at you as if you’re retarded for not smoking, not drinking, not having second helpings of everything and not eating nuttella out the jar with large spoons between meals and they still live longer than the rest of us. (by the way if you wonder why I don’t ever write about politics its because I live with a Frenchman - they follow world events like we watch a soap opera. Believe me the last thing I ever want to blog about is politics because its a certainty that I’ve been woken up every morning with a rundown of all the major, minor and diminished political upheavals that have taken place in the world since I went to sleep. Well either that or all the major minor or diminished chords in a particular piece of music.)
I think I’m in denial. I mean how long has he been doing it? Has he been doing it in secret and if so how has he hidden it from me? I thought we had no secrets apart from my tendency to say that everything I buy on ebay costs a pound. Is it case of the wife (or as good as) is always the last to know? I mean I knew that he wasn’t a traditional Frenchman when I met him mainly because no traditional Frenchman would emigrate to LA in order to be a musician - normally they just join Johnny Halliday’s band when a member dies of old age. But this? In eight years the only two things we’ve never run out of are cigarettes (only ever Marlboro) and Nescafe (or to give it its street name “ness”) as apparently “proper” coffee doesn’t have enough chemicals in it. We’ve walked - yes we’ve walked, miles in the middle of the night to find gas stations and twenty-four hour stores just to buy another jar of coffee so that he could sleep secure in the knowledge that when he awoke he could have his hit (OK we’ve often bought chocolate at the same time but that’s understandable.) No matter how skint we may have been (and we have been) we have never, but never bought a different brand of instant coffee. We may have paid for it out of the penny jar but there has always been a jar of the brown and red in the cupboard. Even my mum (who turned a deaf ear to my brothers tears for white bread sandwiches to take to school) buys white sugar and Nescafe for him when we visit.
Now I know that tea is the new coffee. I know this to be true because mint-tea and I decreed it so about a week ago (so we have emailed - so will it be done) But to come home and to find the teapot still warm on the kitchen table is a blow.
Maybe I should have seen it coming. There are ayes mixed in with the yeah mans of his emails. On holiday last year, on a beach in the south of France (and they have people in France who walk along the beach selling doughnuts - how civilised is that) in the middle of a heat wave, he lay there and muttered something about missing the weather in Edinburgh. He even, and this is major, endured Christmas in Newcastle without once asking my mum if it would be OK if he closed the backdoor. In my naivete I thought that he was just getting acclimatised, OK so its taken him 7 years but I’m cough splutter mumble and I haven’t got used to her wild desire to have the north wind swirl round the kitchen.
It’s what comes next that worries me. Will he start eating ketchup on chips. How will Hellmans survive that? They’ll go bust - we go through four jars of mayo a week? Will they let him back into France the next time we go there? I can see it now - it’ll be like a scene from Midnight Express, I bet the French sniffer dogs at Marseilles airport are trained to sniff out any Assam that people are trying to smuggle into the country. More to the point and the thing that’s really worrying me is that F used to drink about 15 coffees a day. Does this new tea drinking mean that he actually might start sleeping at night? Will I have to share the double bed? Though I love him madly I don’t think I could do that, I’m used to the whole bed and I know that the real Hendrix cat who usually has his pillow would have very strong language on the subject. I need to nip this in the bud before it gets out of control. Do you think he would taste the difference if I grind up pro plus and mix them with the Tetleys?