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.