Confused and amused...

I wanted some tights that would make me appear thinner. I found the control ones, but was a bit mystified re the sizing. They had light control – no point me having them, I really need something substantial. Medium control – maybe? But then there were “bodyshaper” – what does this mean? Are they the ones that feel like they are made of iron? If so – that is what I want. But they didn’t have any extra-large, they had medium – but to be honest, if I was ‘medium’ I wouldn’t need them!

I caught the husband doing something weird this morning! He was in the kitchen with the radio on, and he obviously didn’t know I was standing right behind him, when the song on the radio started with a bit of a fanfare type of note – he swung his left arm out, somewhat dramatically like a deranged conductor – almost hitting me in the face (which might have been funny in itself – although I am glad this didn’t happen – largely due to my evasive action!)

Now – this is the amusing bit – embarrassed, he tried to cover it up with a cough. Now, that’s never going to work, is it? It might – sort of – work with a fart, but not with a dramatic arm movement. It sort of reminded me of some programme from years ago, where Robert Lindsay played the part of an absolute git, but with some kind of unexpected arm movement problem – but I can’t think what it was called. It’s going to be a strange one to research, really – but I will have to find out as it will annoy me that I can’t remember.

Also slightly worrying as well that the husband might be developing some weird compulsion.

He has spent the morning chopping down flowers that haven’t finished flowering, thus producing a rather uniform green garden – not quite what I had planned for mid-summer, but like he said: “I don’t want to put the green bin out empty.” (Who does?!!)

And on the subject of bins, the kitchen bin battle rages on, as it has done for years. If I haven’t mentioned this before, my idea of a kitchen bin is something you put a bin liner in, you then fill this up with rubbish, then you remove it, tie it up, and pop it in the wheelie bin outside. His idea of a bin is something that you put a bin liner in, but you must not at any point fill that bin liner! If I put something “big” in it (and as you may have already guessed, my idea of big is not quite the same as his), he goes through and removes the offending item and puts it in the bin outside. We may as well just have a bin outside!

Kate had a pizza for her tea and part of the packaging was a thin polystyrene disc. It wasn’t the biggest pizza in the world, and I put this disc in the bin – it had barely dropped inside when he had the lid off and removed it! It was “too big”, apparently, nothing else would fit in the bin. Well, firstly – it’s about 2 mm thick, and the bin is as big as you can get for a kitchen bin. And anyway – say I did happen to put something in that filled the bin – surely that is when the bin gets emptied?

It all seems so simple to me, and I just don’t understand why he has to complicate it, why he feels the need to go through the rubbish and check everything I throw away, or even how he finds the time. Is it some sort of OCD? Or is it some “man” thing? Do all men do this? (Or have some got a life!!)

Still – I shouldn’t really complain. He provided the rest of the household with comedy moment of the week - and the biggest laugh since he accidentally and unknowingly got soot all over his face and then went to sleep watching TV. That was one of those occasions when I thought I would burst from trying not to laugh! There was a programme on TV last week, which I wasn’t really watching, as I was cooking the tea. Anyway, when I went back in the lounge they were explaining that the shark they’d been discussing wasn’t able to kill and eat a person, due to the size of the stuff it could swallow, then they went on to say it was vegetarian – and that it only ate plankton. Now I am not entirely sure what plankton is – whether it’s some kind of plant related thing (in which case, it probably is a vegetarian shark) but on the other hand, for all I know plankton could be some small creature. All I said was, “So, what IS plankton?”

“Well”, he explained, “they are little orgasms”.

It took a couple of seconds for my brain to process what he’d said, and I made the mistake of looking at Jenni. When you know you shouldn’t laugh, you should really make a supreme effort NOT to look at another person – because nothing is funnier than seeing someone else struggling not to laugh – except, perhaps, someone accidentally saying “orgasms”. The only way we could deal with it was to talk of mildly amusing things, to give us an excuse to laugh – but when you are trying NOT to laugh, it is difficult to talk properly without sounding strange. I still don’t know if he realised and decided not to draw attention to it by correcting himself, or if he really didn’t realise what he’d said (in which case he must have thought we had gone a bit weird), or more worryingly, does he think that is what they are called?