It’s a losing battle with her indoors!
THE battle of the sexes, series six, episode 97. It has come to the attention of this bloke that, whatever we do, it’s never correct. as far as she is concerned, we can’t do right. Out shopping locally, she instructs me to, ‘Get a box of breakfast cereal, the usual, if not something else.’ OK, it’s not rocket science, hard to get wrong, but as it happens they have run out of our preferred one, so I get something else. Unpacking, she throws a wobbler. ‘why have you bought two meat pies?’ ‘You said something else, so I did — what’s the problem?’ a hot meat pie for breakfast sets you up on a cold, damp winter’s morning. she doesn’t see it that way, and I get the full verbal ear-bashing. Just what I need to start another fun-filled action packed day in paradise. what is it with the ladies in our lives: why do they go out of their way to find fault with almost everything that we do? when they make a mistake, which on occasion even they do, we bite our lips, and say: ‘all right love, I’ll clean up the mess, not a problem.’ when it’s us in the wrong, it’s: ‘You dozy plank, what’s your problem, my mother warned me about men like you!’ followed by 20 minutes of put-downs, character assassination, and veiled threats of severe retribution if it happens again. after many years of this, I am able to shrug it off — unlike the females who have the uncanny ability to resurrect long-forgotten slights and insults, said by us geezers in the heat of battle and instantly forgotten. I feel desperately sorry for newlywed blokes — they don’t know they are entering an arena far more dangerous and deadly that any Roman gladiator could ever have imagined, fraught with unspeakable dangers, horrors and pitfalls. On the rare occasions when I witness the happy couple leaving the church in the village, I stop, take off my cap and bow my head, stand to attention and say a small prayer, and think to myself: ‘That’s another good man ruined.’ Now she wants me to go round to No 2 daughter’s house and do something requiring hammers and screwdrivers. It’s not a suggestion, I am being told. Not a problem, and I get to see the grandchildren — it’s family. Oh well, at least it means that instead of getting an ear-bashing from her indoors, I will get one from our daughter, who knows even less about the secret male world of DIY. at least in the army, you have the hope of getting demobbed one day.