I am totally unreasonable. My boyfriend is a saint.

I just asked my boyfriend if he wouldn’t mind ever so much doing the washing up tonight. You, like me, may think this reasonable considering that I do practically all the housework without complaint or praise, do all the cooking bar the odd night (he’s cooked about twice since he moved in), do all the washing, remember to change the bed sheets, and even make him the odd packed lunch.

But you, like me, would be wrong.

You see it was my turn to wash up tonight, and because I asked him to take my turn after 9pm he had by that point set his mind accordingly to that befitting of a non-washing up night. Not only to have to wash up when it is actually my turn, but to do so when he had mentally prepared himself not to have to wash up is Totally Unacceptable. Even I, a completely unreasonable woman, can see that.

After all, I’m at home all day (except the days I’m travelling around the county to go to meetings) so surely it is only right that I do all the housework plus the washing up every other day including those days where I cook. I feel simply terrible. Clearly he is right. Poor lamb.

You see, I work from home. Not in the “housewives should get a salary because it is hard work and clearly not something that everyone without loads of money or a rich husband has to do on top of a full time job” sense of the phrase “working from home”, mind. Rather I work from home in the sense that I am a senior marketing professional with quite a lot of responsibility.I just lack office space.

However, that’s hardly the point. I am at home. I am woman. He leaves the house to work. He is man. Clearly I should do all the housework, every day and be eternally grateful that he doesn’t mind doing the washing up every other day (when really I should be doing it whilst simultaneously practising my pelvic floor exercises). In fact, when he washes up, I should probably suck him off to thank him.

But do I? Do I fuck.

I don’t know how he puts up with it. My boyfriend is a saint.

A hotdog, Megan Fox and an almighty row.

One would think that a trip to paradise would revitalise one. That one would come home smiling, full of tales and more in love than ever.

Clap-trap.

Don’t get me wrong, our holiday was wonderful. It was paradise. We smiled, laughed, swam, sunbathed and had lots of hot holiday sex. It was awesome. It looked like this:

But something happened on the way home. Suddenly with reality around the corner, the contrast with what should be and what was became almost too much to bear.

It began with my wanting a hotdog (on a totally unrelated note, I cannot use a gerund without thinking of Dakin propositioning Mr Irwin in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys – “my sucking you off is a gerund”). But I digress. I really wanted a hotdog but I couldn’t find one. I don’t think I was too unbearable. I simply seethed quietly to myself. My boyfriend, who clearly had forgotten everything he had ever known about me decided to say, over and over, in what can only be described as a “lady’s” voice “Do you want a hotdog? Aw, are you going to get mad if you can’t find a hotdog?” Well yes, as it happens, I was.

Then I found a hotdog in Kuala Lumpa of all places. It was a stop-over from Singapore. “Can I have ketchup?” I asked the man. He seemed to twitch but I really couldn’t be sure that he had acknowledged my very reasonable request, so I turned to my boyfriend, who by now was even more agitated by me having walked the course of the airport three times in stifling heat carrying three hefty works of female fiction which I’d bought to avoid any further conversation with him on the plane. I asked him “Is he going to give me ketchup?” “I don’t fucking know, ask him.” he tersely whispered. “Perhaps we should just spend the next two hours apart?” I suggested. He declined, and instead directly me to sit quietly and eat my hotdog in peace, while he sneakily tried to document the “hilarity” with his camera.

I think you can see the anger most in my eyes. A smile proves nothing.

And so it continued, with my boyfriend doing everything wrong for the next fourteen hours of travelling.

Things he did wrong included, among other things, choosing the wrong check-in queue behind the really slow people and watching Transformers twice on the plane for the sole reason of drooling loudly over Megan Fox to purposefully annoy me. Then to top it all off he refused to join the mile high club with me, the (albeit tanned) monster.

Finally back home we took comfort from the kittens and the day off to come. Then we went back to work and spent a week in cold war climaxing with a screaming morning row over what time my boyfriend should have left for work, which didn’t solve the problem of him missing the bus, but did make us realise that grumpiness at such a level could not be sustained.

We’re currently on best behaviour, which is working out quite well so far. This is probably because we have decided to embrace our addiction to Dexter and therefore have been watching the series back to back each evening. This severely limits the need for conversation which so far has shown a directly proportional reduction in hatred. So far, so good.