I love my husband very much and I wouldn’t be without him. You know where this is going don’t you? Yes there’s a ‘but’ coming. I love my husband very much BUT he’s been away for a week, walking in the Brecon Beacons, which means I have been home alone and dare I say its been bliss.  No Macaulay Culkin episodes thankfully but a week of doing the things that need doing when I wanted to do them without having to juggle anything else. I think I might have mentioned before that my husband and I exist in perfect disharmony. Incompatibility is the glue that keeps us together. I’ll give you a few examples. Just as I am in the midst of washing the kitchen floor, chairs on table, room cleared, he decides he needs to be at the sink, which is naturally full of soapy water, to wash the paint out of half a dozen brushes. Just as I am painting the dining room wall…he has to bring in lengths of wood to dry out before he can use it to make his beds. He makes beds. He’s been in all evening but I come back from a day at sea, volunteering with the Exmouth Harbour Master, looking forward to a nice hot shower …guess who’s beaten me to it? I take a Zoom exercise class in the bedroom having told him it’s 5.30 to 6.15. He naturally forgets. Which means straight out of the shower he has to walk across camera to get his clothes doing that strange towel dance that men do.

He comes to bed after me and gets up early, way before me, then goes through that whole yawning stretching routine dragging the duvet off me and thumping across the floor. The granite unit that runs the width of the kitchen has two laptops, a tablet and a phone plugged in as well as several leads and connector plugs. Needless to say none of it is mine. He argues,

“What’s it there for if not to put things on?” He’s absolutely right of course but his wife likes it clear except for a bowl of artistically filled fruit, two lamps in perfect symmetry at either end and a houseplant. And can we mention toilets? In the best possible taste of course.  I keep loo rolls in a basket in the downstairs loo and on a dispenser in the upstairs one so that’s where I expect to see them when I use the facilities. No too easy. They are either on the window cill or balancing on a radiator. I rue the day I bought our sofas as they have large loose cushions that require plumping up after a night of sprawling all over them. This week the cushions have been plump the kitchen unit clear. There have been just 2 loads of washing rather than 4 and I have eaten what I felt like when I felt like it be it boiled eggs and cottage chees at 5 or rice n peas at 10.

I know there will be those of you thinking that I should be grateful I have someone who obviously loves the intolerant OCD creature that I am. I agree. And as I said right at the beginning I wouldn’t be without him. So when he walks through that door unshaven, hair on end and smelling like a wet dog I will throw my arms around him, one eye nevertheless on that backpack and those muddy boots strewn across my nice clean floor … and just thank the Lord he’s home safe and sound.

Read all about it in the Western Morning News