Home Front
When I first met Mr Home Front 30 years or so ago (neither of us can agree exactly how long we’ve been together), there was a brief honeymoon period when we were in total agreement about everything.
Laurel and Hardy were funnier than Chaplin. Liking Norman Wisdom should carry a custodial sentence. Galton and Simpson were preferable to Pinter. Peter Cook was the wittiest man in England. Never trust anyone who doesn’t like dogs…
It was a near-idyllic six-month period of near-insufferable mutual regard. We existed in a perpetual state of smug righteousness, relishing our good fortune at having found someone else who held the same splendid opinions.
And then the arguments started. Our rows nearly all ended with the slamming of a door. They were rarely highbrow. The greatest from the Early Period was about the Bee Gees.
Me: ‘ Spirits Having Flown! You Should Be Dancing! Jive Talkin’! The list of great songs goes on and on!’ Him: ‘Disco drivel!’ Me: ‘Rubbish – Barry and Robin are the Leiber and Stoller of pop!’
Other memorable set-tos: Joni Mitchell (Him: ‘Tampax music’); Thomas Pynchon (Me: ‘Unreadable’); Gilbert and Sullivan (Him: ‘Irritating beyond belief’); On the Buses (Me: ‘I thought you were intelligent’).
Over the years, there have been shifts in our positions. I now concede Mr HF was right about the Iraq War (‘illegal’). And On the Buses can be quite funny (as long as I don’t have to watch six episodes in a row).
But my tally of wins is greater: Saturday Night Fever is now, according to Mr HF, ‘a film with one of the all-time great soundtracks’.
And Joni Mitchell is ‘an extraordinary jazz-savvy experimentalist’ (I suspect he pinched this quote). When I played ageing Joni’s beautifully melancholic version of Both Sides Now recently, Mr HF even covertly Shazamed it to his Spotify playlist. The other day, I even heard him singing along to HMS Pinafore in the kitchen.
I now find he actually listens to what I have to say. For weeks, I was telling him to have SAGE sceptics Sunetra Gupta and Carl Heneghan on the TV politics programme he edits. Lo and behold, I tuned in on two separate occasions and there they were, via Zoom, articulating their response to the lockdown madness.
‘Did you book them because I told you to?’
‘Maybe.’ I’ve been inundating him with the names of enough anti-lockdown campaigners to stage a Busby Berkeley musical. ‘Oh, and Lord Sumption! Don’t forget him!’
‘Leave me alone! I’m brushing my teeth!’
Needless to say the Thirty Years War is not quite over. One activity still guaranteed to trigger an almighty row is the Family Walk.
The great outdoors has a destabilising effect on the Home Fronts. Our shrieks and hollers over wrong paths taken echo across the North Downs, causing deer to flee and birds to migrate early.
Mr HF once found a book on Surrey walks in an antiquarian bookshop on Charing Cross Road. It was so old, it might have last been used to guide Chaucer’s pilgrims to Canterbury. Then came the dread words: ‘I bet these walks still stand up today. Why don’t we try one?’
The trek near Peaslake started out promisingly (as they always do), but led to a field with an ominous ‘KEEP OUT’ sign. ‘Well, we’ve come this far,’ said Mr
HF. ‘Let’s risk it.’ Halfway across, we were surrounded by a herd of not-entirely-friendly-looking bulls.
When they started closing in on us, Mr HF cried, ‘Every man for himself!’
We ran for our lives, making it under the barbed wire just in time (though Mr HF tore his shirt).
Last week, for the first time in ages, we ventured with daughter Betty and dog Destry to the Devil’s Punch Bowl near Hindhead.
Mr HF insisted we follow a three-hour ‘Hidden Trail’ he’d found on the internet. Within minutes, he’d taken us the wrong way, resulting in our spending the rest of the walk milling alongside dozens of other families.
‘What’s hidden about this?!’ I grumbled. ‘Just make the most of it.’ ‘But half of Surrey’s here!’ ‘Blame the signposts, not me!’ ‘May as well be walking round Sainsbury’s…’
When our sniping reached Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? levels and children were staring, Betty taped us without our knowing and sent the recording to Fred. ‘Wish you were here,’ she said. Fred revealed all (over Skype that evening) when Betty was upstairs. ‘What a grass,’ said Mr HF. ‘Worse than Nixon,’ I said. We shook our heads at each other, united in agreement over our daughter’s appalling behaviour.
It felt quite like old times.
‘The book was last used to guide Chaucer’s pilgrims to Canterbury’