Things my girlfriend and I have argued about (online version)

was tidying up the other day and I found a whole mass of receipts. Receipts that are years old – and for things for which it makes no sense at all to keep the receipts. I mean, for God's sake, there was one for the admission to Anglesey Sea Zoo in 1998. Never mind the fact that she'd brought this the well over one-hunded-and-fifty miles back to our house, never mind that – that's in the past – let's just focus on what you could possibly do with a credit card receipt slip dating back to 1998. Are you really going to telephone Anglesey Sea Zoo and say, 'Hello. Look, I've been thinking about it for six years now, and I've finally decided that the tank of rays you had wasn't really all that impressive. I'd like a refund, please… Yes, I do have the receipt, in fact.'? Gah.

91

When you have two languages within a single relationship there are always going to be moments of unfortunateness. Such as the fact that, after she came to live in England, it took me about ten months of pointing out her error – time and time again – until Margret finally sorted out in her head which way round the meanings of 'orgasm' and 'orgy' were. Ten months, I may add, during which she made an awful lot of friends. For my part… well – in German you often make a plural by adding 'en': ear/Ohr – ears/Ohren, republic/Republik – republics/Republiken, etc. So, it's perfectly natural, then, that I would assume the plural of 'Bus' (bus) was 'Busen'. OK, so, yes 'Busen' does mean something else entirely – that is NOT MY FAULT.

However, there are times when, far from being assaulted by language-based misunderstandings, I actually close my eyes, knit my hands and call on a succession of gods to pleeeeeease make what I just heard be, genuinely and completely, simply an Anglo-German semantic quirk.

Would you like me to give you an example, or are you impatient to go straight to the Guestbook and write, 'this is just, like, sad n stuff, like, y dont u just split up n stuff if u dont get along????????!!!!!!!!!!?!?!?!?! :-( ~~tammy~~ idaho'? Are you sure? Okey-dokey, let's do the example first, then.

I was in the kitchen the other day, making myself a cup of tea as a break from the intense and demanding effort of having worked on a script for a full forty minutes before my mind meandered away into counting the holes in the ventilation grille on the front of my computer, playing tunes by slapping the sides of my face while varying how open my mouth was and, ultimately and inevitably, wondering if Alyson Hannigan, wherever she was now, was naked. As I fished out the teabag and made one, final effort to come to a decision regarding the Alyson Hannigan thing, Margret returned home from work. She dumped various bits of her day about the place until she had only a carrier bag left. From this bag she pulled a plate of cold, cooked meat covered with cling film and moved over to put it in the fridge. Before she did so, however, she peeled back the film and folded a slice into her mouth. She offered me the plate – I took a slice too. She made to turn to the open fridge once more, but then offered me the plate again in a 'Before I put it away?' fashion. I took another slice. She then put the meat away and closed the fridge door. As I stood there chewing, she swept off towards the living room, saying – distractedly, without looking back – 'Eat it whenever you fancy. It's Pam's husband.'

Yes, you read that correctly.

92

Do you watch CSI at all? No? Well, in a nutshell, it's this: William L. Petersen does the wonderful Manhunter in 1986, has a miserable run for the next fourteen years, and then returns as the head of a Vegas-based Crime Scene Investigation unit with very watchable results. (One imagines his agent weeping tears of frustration throughout the latter part of the 80s and the whole of the 90s before leaping into the air in 2000, phoning his client at 2am and whooping, 'Bill! Bill! It's forensics, Bill! That's what we've been missing. I'm calling Jerry Bruckheimer right now.')

So anyway, in CSI you are presented with the aftermath of an incident and you have to identify the guilty party or parties. Are you up for trying this yourself? Now? OK, then.

Suppose there are three people in your house: your partner (urbane, sophisticated – think 'David Niven in a Banana Splits T-shirt') and two smallish children (blond, elusive, cunning). Your partner is sitting in the dining room reading a book, your children are in the living room playing a game called 'Scatter every single toy we possess across the floor and then go upstairs to jump on the bed'. After a few minutes, you wander into the dining room, sigh at the chaos and tidy up. You then go off to do something else. When you return to the living room a short time later you discover that the children have strewn the place with toys yet again.

You are William L. Petersen and you must apportion blame. Do you:

A) Get the children downstairs and tell them that if they haven't tidied up the living room within the next ten minutes then you're sending them to be raised on a farm in Iowa.

B) Go into the dining room, stand in front of your partner with your arms threateningly akimbo and roar, 'The children have messed up the dining room – again… and you're sitting there reading a book! '

Eh? What is it to be, William?

If you chose 'A' award yourself two points. If you chose 'B', award yourself 'insane'.

Now, the thing is – and, if you'll forgive me, I'll relate this to Margret a little here – one might easily put this kind of thing down to 'poor targeting'. One might think that the discrepancy between whoever is responsible for something and the person she's actually shouting at about it is merely the artifact of some kind of loss of footing on her mental walk from the crime to the culprit. The flaw in that notion, however, is that she always ends up shouting at me . If it were poor targeting, then – occasionally – it'd hit someone else, right? But, nope, that's not the case. If Margret had been in charge of the invasion of Iraq, every single missile would have struck me in the face. In fact, Margret is probably the only person to have attended both pro and anti-war rallies in the run up to the conflict. If you examine press photographs, you can sometimes pick her out – off to one side, holding a banner that reads 'Bomb Mil'.

The irony being, of course, that this still makes her policy less ill-considered and asinine than the one that actually advised the invasion of Iraq.

Ack – just lost the whole of the Midwest there. And I was doing so well up to that point, wasn't I?

OK, I'm off on holiday, shortly. Well, I say 'on holiday', but we're going to the west coast of Ireland, so I probably mean 'to get thoroughly soaking wet and wind-blasted'. In any case, do not expect an update until I return. You'll all just have to do some work, I'm afraid.

………

93

Everyone been productive in my absence? Yep, that's what I thought, and I'm proud of you. See? You can do it. Don't use me as a crutch – you have great reserves of indolence within if only you have the courage to tap them. Go up to your boss/supervisor/team leader/capo today and say in an unwavering voice, 'I am on a sponsored slack, and you're paying, and the charity is me.' You just need to believe in yourself. Let