Saturday 2nd June 2007

Black clouds over Mangold Parva. It has been raining since the beginning of time. When will it stop?

MAJOR WORRIES

I. Glenn fighting the Taliban in Helmand Province.

2. The bookshop only took £17.37 today.

3. Up three times last night to urinate.

4. The Middle East.

5. Do my parents have an up-to-date funeral plan? I can't afford to bury them.

6. My daughter, Gracie, showing alarming Stalinist traits. Is this normal behaviour for the under-fives?

7. It is two months and nineteen days since I last made love to my wife, Daisy.

I sometimes feel that she is less keen on me than she used to be. She hasn't taken the top off my boiled egg for ages. She has still not bought a pair of wellingtons despite living in Mangold Parva for three years. She is the only mother outside the school gate wearing five-inch heels. This shows her total lack of commitment to me, and to the English countryside. In the first month of our marriage we picked blackberries together and she had a stab at making preserves. Now, four years on, the scars from the boiling jam have almost completely healed, and she is buying raspberry Bonne Maman at £3.50! It is ridiculous when you can buy the Co-op's own brand at 87p.

Yesterday I found her crying over her old briefcase. When I asked her what was wrong, she sobbed, 'I miss Dean Street.'

'Who's Dean Street?' I asked.

She slammed the briefcase down and savagely kicked out at a bag of John Innes.

'Dean Street, the place, idiot,' she said in that calm sarcastic voice I have come to dread.

But at least she was speaking to me, although she is still avoiding eye contact. Last week, whilst searching for my nostril hair clippers in my wife's handbag, I came across a Paperchase A 5 -sized notebook with a cover depicting harmless-looking monsters. On opening the notebook I was startled to find, on the first page, a note addressed to me.

ADRIAN, IF YOU HAVE FOUND MY DIARY AND YOU ARE READING THIS, DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER. THIS DIARY IS MY ONLY CONFIDANT. PLEASE RESPECT MY WISHES AND ALLOW ME SOME PRIVACY.

CLOSE THE NOTEBOOK AND REPLACE IT,

NOW!

I read on.

Dear Diary

I intend to write in you every day and I will hold nothing back. I can tell no living person how I feel. Adrian would have a nervous breakdown, my parents and sisters would say we told you not to marry him, and my friends would say we told you so. But the truth is, diary, that I am utterly miserable. I hate living in yokel-land where the populace have never heard of the White Cube Gallery or macchiato coffee and think that Russell Brand is a type of electric kettle. Do I love my husband? Have I ever loved my husband? Can I live with my husband until one or both of us are dead?

I heard the back door slam and Daisy came in from the garden. I quickly replaced the diary in her handbag and for some reason shouted, 'Daisy, when is the Queen's official birthday?'

She came into the living room and said, 'Why do you want to know? You haven't written her one of your poems, have you?'

As she bent her head to light a cigarette, I couldn't help but notice that she now has three chins. I have also noticed recently that she has tampered with our 'speak your weight' bathroom scales, so they no longer speak.

I have stopped accompanying her to the shops to buy clothes since she had a temper tantrum in the changing room at Primark, when she got stuck in a size 14 shirt and had to be cut out of it by the manageress. All the way home she was saying, 'I can't understand it, I'm only a size 12.' Even my friend Nigel, who is blind but can see shapes, said recently, 'By Christ, Daisy's piling on the pounds. She came to see me the other day and I thought it was my garden shed on the move.'

When she went into the kitchen, I was tempted to grab her diary and read on, but I daren't risk it.

After dinner (tinned tuna salad, new potatoes, beetroot salsa, own strawberries, Elmlea cream) I was washing up when Daisy came in and took a packet of chocolate digestives from out of the cupboard. Later, after I'd cleaned the kitchen surfaces and pushed the wheelie bin and the recycling boxes to the end of the drive, I went into the living room to watch Channel Four news and couldn't help but notice that Daisy had eaten three-quarters of the packet of biscuits. I should not have said anything. I should have kept my mouth firmly shut. The subsequent row was like the eruption of a volcano.

Gracie turned the volume up to full on her DVD of High School Musical 2 and demanded, 'Stop shouting or I'll call the police!'

My mother came round from next door to find out if Daisy had actually killed me. She brought the row to an end by shouting above Daisy and me, 'Daisy, you are in denial! You are obviously a size 16! Get over it! Evans, Principles and even Dawn French supply clothes for fat women.'

Daisy hurled herself into my mother's arms, and my mother indicated with an angry gesture of her head that I was to leave the room.

This morning Daisy did not stand at the door and watch me mount my bike as I left for work as usual, and when I reached the lane and turned to wave, 'She was not at the window. Physically I am at a low ebb. I rise from my bed at least three times during the night, more if I allow myself a glass of wine after Newsnight. Consequently I am exhausted, and the next morning I have to put up with my parents (with whom I share a party wall) complaining that the constant flushing of our cistern is keeping them awake.

As I was cycling into a headwind it took longer than usual to ride to the bookshop, and when I reached the environs of Leicester I was further delayed. It seemed that every major road had been dug up so that new sewage pipes could be laid. As a reluctant cesspit owner this prompted me to be almost consumed with jealous rage. Is it any wonder my wife is yearning for the metropolis? I have denied her one of life's basic necessities. I blame my father for our primitive sanitary conditions, the money we put aside for mains drainage when we built the Piggeries was frittered away on wheelchair ramps for him. Yet it was his own fault he had a stroke - the only exercise he took for years was wagging his index finger on the remote control. To add insult to injury, he still smokes thirty cigarettes a day and gorges himself on fried bread and chilli-flavoured pork scratchings.

I rue the day my parents bought two dilapidated pigsties and converted them into living units. I was grateful to have a pigsty roof over my head in the early days of my insolvency, but I have certainly paid the price.

Another worry is my failure as a father. Gracie came home from nursery school yesterday with a felt-tip drawing of 'My family'. Diary, I looked amongst the stick people for the representation of myself but failed to find me. I was deeply hurt by my absence. When I asked Gracie why she hadn't included me, pointing out that it was the tax extracted from my wages that supplied her school with the felt tips and paid her nursery teacher's salary, her brow furrowed. To avoid the usual escalation - sobs, screams, snot and recriminations - I diverted her by opening a packet of pink wafer biscuits.

When I asked my wife why she thought Gracie had left me out of the family drawing, Daisy said, 'She has obviously picked up on your emotional detachment.' When I protested, she got ridiculously overemotional and shouted, 'When you come home from work you sit and stare out of the window with your mouth open.'

I defended myself, saying, 'I never tire of the view, the trees in the distance, the light fading from the sky.'

Daisy said, 'It's not fucking Cornwall. The view from the front window is of a boggy field and a row of leylandii your father planted to 'protect his privacy'. Not that anybody comes near the place.'

http://www.penguin.com.au/lookinside/spotlight.cfm?SBN=9780718153700&Page=Extract