Why oh wi-fi is my fella so annoying?
REGULAR readers (aka people who have applied for Cat Of The Week, and my mum, sporadically) might have noticed I was off last Thursday. I went on holiday – and actually, it turned out to be a pretty lifechanging trip.
Away from the hustle and bustle of normal life you often have important epiphanies... for example, last week I realised my marriage is only being held together by wi-fi.
We arrived in Majorca the day after a massive storm. As a result, the place we were staying at had no telly, no phone reception and no internet access. We were totally marooned on holiday in medieval times – it was like an endurance vacation, a bloody, barbaric test of anyone’s relationship.
All in all, the dream scenario everyone hopes for when booking a relaxing break.
Our son, Albie, conked out at 7pm every night, the lightweight, so then the only thing my husband and I had to entertain us was each other. It was brutal.
We had a row about whether a weird sentence he blurted out was, as he claimed, a popular and well known saying, or, as I insisted, utter nonsense... and without Google, there was no resolving it.
We couldn’t make plans in advance because with no access to our apps, the only way we could tell what the weather was going to be like was by – ugh – waiting for it to happen and then looking out of the window.
And with no telly to save us, or films to be downloaded, we were forced to not only talk to but also look at each other, constantly.
As I gave my husband my undivided attention, for the first time in about four years, I noticed funny little quirks that were apparently easy to miss when distracted by the busyness of real life.
The first thing that struck me about him was he is undoubtedly the most annoying man ever to have walked the earth.
Exhibit A: He cannot drive past a signpost without reading the names of the places out loud in a Spanish accent.
Bear in mind, we were pretty much going along the same road at least twice a day for seven days. By Wednesday, it was impossible to understand how I lived in a world where his pronunciation of Alcudia wasn’t a legally acceptable justification for murder.
Exhibit B: Every time we sat down to eat, before we had taken a single bite, he wanted to discuss what we were going to have for our next meal.
So at breakfast he wanted to know what we’d have for lunch, at lunch what the options were for dinner, and at dinner – lucky, lucky me – he needed an overview of what we’d eat over the course of the entire next day.
Exhibit C: He was in a constant state of anxiety about whether he’d brought the right number of shorts.
Obviously just this fact alone would have been OK – what was unbearable was that he constantly wanted to discuss it, and was seeking reassurance. reassurance.
So it started before we left, with him trying to tell me how many pairs of shorts he was planning to pack, despite extremely loud and clear evidence that I was in no way interested in this information.
Then throughout the holiday there were relentless, unwelcome updates on how he was working through his supply, and his plan about how the rest of the week would pan out.
And then, as our return flight took off, a final, wistful, “Never did get round to the blue ones...”
Now, back home again, my husband doesn’t seem that bad any more. It does have quite a lot to do with our glorious, unlimited supply of fibre optic broadband – but that’s not all of it.
He does have some really good qualities that balance out the infuriating ones.
Namely, he’s so forgetful he hasn’t Googled that saying to find out who was right about it, so he has no idea that I wasn’t.
He was in a state of anxiety about his shorts