Love is priceless but a good wife should be compensated
I’m quite money-orientated. I like to work, and to earn as much as possible of the stuff that enables me to buy clothes, food and keep a roof over my head. I know what comes into my account and I know what goes out. I like to save, so I can look forward to an old age that doesn’t involve re-using tea bags, strapping hot water bottles underneath my dressing gown and hoping pneumonia carries me off before the Primus stove gives out. When people say: “Oh, you can’t put a price on that!” I think: “I bet I could.”
But even I must yield before Lo, a Taiwanese mother (identified only by her surname in court papers) who, when her two sons were in their early twenties, made them sign contracts stipulating that they pay her 60 per cent of their net incomes. When they refused to honour the contracts, she sued. The elder eventually settled for TW$5 million (£125,000) but the younger argued that the contracts violated “good customs”. Lower courts agreed, but Lo took it all the way to the supreme court and won. It reckons he – a dentist – owes her TW$22.33 million. Next Christmas is going to be tricky in the Lo household.
I couldn’t go so far as to charge my son for raising him (though a token reimbursement for the vacuums ruined by negligent Lego-strewing wouldn’t go amiss). Lo had specific worries – she was divorced from their father and concerned that, in a country good on tropical beaches and Buddhist ruins but not so hot on pension provision, she would be uncared for in old age. Absent that stark need for self-preservation, the idea of billing your children seems morally wrong.
But... but... the germ of an idea was born and, as I lay in bed listening to the snores of my spouse, it took root and flourished. I couldn’t put a price on all the things I do for my son out of the pure, unconditional love I bear him. Husbands, though, I thought. Husbands. That’s different. I could do a spreadsheet. I did do a spreadsheet.
Of the dozen or so loads of laundry and ironing done each month, he should technically be doing six. I would be happy doing two of those for him out of love.
Balance: four washes. A service charges
£40 a time.
So, applying a marital-guilt discount – I’m not a monster – let’s call it £100 a month. Then there’s the cleaning: I’ll take £10 a hour for his half of the six hours a week I spend on it.
Doing another adult’s thinking for him at all times: hmm. What does that make me, apart from a mug/unwilling victim of a patriarchal culture (delete according to youth, idealism and energy levels)? Psychologist, HR director, social worker, project manager and empath. Most of those are extremely well-paid and one of them is considered so inconceivable a skill by men that they usually give it only to futuristic robots in their films and books. I’ll take £2,000 a month plus an extra £500 for the mental wear and tear that living concurrently as someone else causes. Being told what to do long after I have thought of it and often already done it; call it the Ex Cathedra Pronouncement Penalty, £50 a time. Will cap it at £150 a day otherwise this alone will bankrupt him.
We’ve been together for 13 years. I worked on through the night. When he woke up I handed him a 400 page print out.
“We need to talk,” I said. “You owe me £1,042,950.”
“Where are my shoes?” he asked. I consulted page 36. “It’s £5 if I just need to point wordlessly to something in plain sight,” I said. “And £10 if I find it in the last place you had it.”
He finds his shoes without further help. I mourn the loss of the £15, but now that I’m on an extra £80,000 a year I can afford to be generous. And the sudden prospect of half my chores falling away under pain of financial loss is more glorious than any riches. It turns out that £80,000 may be the price of freedom.
There’s nothing I love more – apart from money and freedom, obviously – than a proper cold snap. I’ve been perving over the pictures of the freezing US for the past week – Niagara Falls changed to ice, houses turned into crystal palaces, and, perhaps the most striking sight of all, the fountain in Bryant Park, New York frozen over – as the bomb cyclone hit the East Coast. Obviously, I know that it brings nothing but hardship and misery to most, but to see weather at its extremes is always breathtaking.
We are due our own cold snap – in a more minor key than the US, as is our way – this weekend and I am almost equally delighted. It cuts down your options and the pain of decisionmaking so abruptly and inarguably. You must wear all your jumpers. Just eat the heartiest food. And, of course, you don’t have to see anyone.
Some have hailed the trend for firms to offer paid leave to employees who have just taken on new pets or who are mourning the deaths of old ones as the final step towards irreversible national decline. The rest of us cling to it as a vestige of hope for civilisation.
Pets bring joy. Work, by and large, does not. It is meet and right that those sucking the joy out of life eight hours a day fund a little of its replacement during the remainder. And, as I’m sure all the companies involved have calculated – shifting their beans into carefully-apportioned piles on the big table that is my only mental image of a corporate accounts department – whatever costs they incur will be repaid tenfold in doglike gratitude and loyalty from devoted owners. A great and beautiful thing, pawternity leave.
Raw water is a craze I can really get behind. Not because the new claim that untreated, unfiltered, unsterilised water is full of goodness that modern filtration technology takes out has a scintilla of a shred of evidence to back it up, but because it is likely to kill all those stupid enough to believe it.
Those maligned filtration technologies take out the kind of contaminants that cause severe diarrhoea and fatal diseases such as typhoid and cholera. So go on: drink up, you idiots.