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.

So I went and had a spray tan…

I’m going on holiday to Rawa Island tonight with the boyfriend. This girl lives there. Apparently it is paradise. I believe her.

Sun, lots of sun. I love the sun.

Without a doubt the people there will tanned. I am very pasty. I decided this wouldn’t do. I am vain and I like to be adored. There is not a chance I’m hanging out on a beach filled with supermodel lookalikes in the popular red and white stripped look us Brits Abroad champion.

So I went and had a spray tan. It was weird.

Firstly, there’s the uncertainty when the young blonde girl in white asks you to take off your clothes before stepping onto the apparatus whether she means now or when she has left the room. Like with doctors. It has always puzzled me that it seems outrageously rude to watch someone undress (oh perverted hedonism, Sadé would applaud) but perfectly acceptable to prod them and, as it happens, spray them with a tanning hose (it would be funny if it wasn’t true) when they are in the buff.

So I tentatively tugged at my shirt until she walked out of the room promising to return when I was ready, I.E. naked but for a thong and standing on the apparatus.

It was about that time that I noticed the apparatus was opposite the door she had just walked through in order to return to the bustling salon. The bustling salon in which people sat being beautified in full view of the door and, I concluded, in full view of my pasty white flesh when blondie returned having, of course, to open the door wide enough to walk through it.

I tactically stood with my back to the door somehow, and childishly, concluding that if I couldn’t see their scorn it would make it slightly less true (I know; I’m self-centred). Standing there, I felt a little like a prisoner of war ready for my water-boarding and wondered if my position, in the circumstances and in such close proximity to the tanning hose, was a tad submissive.

The hose was hard and cold and I felt like I couldn’t breath, especially when she did my face. I giggled and wondered if I should enter the world of S&M.

Over the following eight hours I acquired an interesting colour, the nickname David (Dickenson) and a new dish cloth having stained my linen shirt. It was the only loose black clothing I had and those are the rules. Frankly I would have preferred to ruin my cheap white t-shirt, but ho-hum.

Finally I was allowed to shower to see the results. Brown. Even. Good, I thought. Though, a bit patchy around the frontal knickers area. Lace was possibly an unwise choice, I concluded. I look a bit like I’m still wearing them, except for instead of black they are now fleshy coloured with a hint of tangerine. Nice. Am thinking either lights off or knickers of the peep-hole variety until that fads. Nothing puts me off my stride like not at all contained hysterical laughter and finger pointing at my almost rude bits.

All packed and ready to go. See you in two weeks!

I am a ball of rage. I may be chemically unbalanced.

I haven’t blogged about periods yet. What kind of neurotic female blogger am I?

Recently having come off the pill I have had a longer gap then usual between periods. That’s fine by me (apart from the fear of god that goes with the waiting). However, what is beginning to dawn on me as the abdominal pains creep in three weeks late is that I am now going to have a “normal” reaction to my “normal” bodily functions, rather than gliding through “withdrawal bleeds” with ease and a smile. My body taunts me. This is a period, darling, it patronises, none of this pill-pretend bollocks for you. Pain, heartache and pure, undiluted anger will envelop you until I am done. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.

The reasons I suspect this is going to be the case are:

1. When my boyfriend joked that he washes up more than me (lie) last night I responded by throwing a pan on the floor, shouting “Fuck you then, I’ll fucking do it, I fucking hate you, you fucking dickwad piece of shit” before storming out of the kitchen, slamming the door and sitting down in front of “Pride of Britain” to sob noisily at injured child heroes.

2. When I woke up this morning and got up to do my job (today: write an article) and vacuum the house, I was filled with the most enormous rage that I had to do my job and vacuum, facts compounded by the fact that my boyfriend was asleep. I was furious. Blind furious. I was a barely contained ball of rage and even now I cannot quite think why. I had no objection to my vacuuming or to my writing my article, or to my boyfriend sleeping in on his morning off. It was my usual time to rise. There was no issue. But did that matter? Did it fuck. I slammed the door three times, switched the bedroom lights on and off and then failed to work out how to use the new vacuum without help from a half-asleep, naked, grumpy man. If I am in abject misery then, apparently, so will everyone else be.

3. “60-minute Hour Makeover”, where deserving plebs get their house made-over made me cry yesterday. As did This Morning and the adverts.

4. I am actually scared that I might throw the cat out of the window if it gives me that puppy-eyed “I’m so hungry, Mummy” look one more time.

5. I agreed to pay the NSPCC £5 a month for the rest of my life after reading their heartfelt letter, crying quietly all the time, a bit of snot landing of their Letter of Pain, as it shall now be known.

So, there it is. I’ve had my well-earned rest from the pill, and I can happily conclude that my body still works perfectly destroying my life and that of those around me for four days of each month.

I’m going back on the pill.

Things not to say to your boyfriend part 2

"I'm not proposing or owt, but do you want to marry me?"

"I might be pregnant"

“I might be pregnant.”
“Fuck.”
“I know.”

In this conversation there are no winners. While my boyfriend contemplated the benefits of selling a kidney, I tried to convince myself that nine months without wine and menthol cigarettes was something I could cope with. What would happen after that my mind simply wouldn’t accept as a reasonable topic for deliberation.

The process of discovering whether or not you are accidently with child is one mild embarrassment followed by another, concluded with the climatic urinating on one’s own hand.

Firstly there is the running to the bathroom every five minutes to check whether or not you have indeed got your monthly visit from some obscurely named, prim and proper aunt. Looking rather like you have contracted a urinary infection to anyone spending more than 10 minutes in your company, you start to wonder if even late developing teenage girls stare so intently so often at their knickers for a sign; any sign. I swear one on occasion I mistook the stars in my weird staring eyes for my period.

Then there is the agonising self-diagnosis complete with imaginary symptoms. First, do my breasts feel tender, my nipples sensitive? Hold on, oh wise internet forum, let me just give them a squeeze. Nothing? Hold on, let me just squeeze harder…just a bit harder. Yes, definitely some tenderness.

Second, do I feel tired and moody? Am I easily upset? Shit, I thought, I’ve been pregnant for fucking years.

Third, am I lightheaded, do I have backache, and am I peeing more often that usual? More importantly, I should have asked, can any of these symptoms be explained by my lack of sleep, computer-hunched day-long stance or my desire to check for Flo every five minutes?

The results of my self-diagnosis were “inconclusive”.

I moved onto the next stage of humiliation. Judging by the many, many internet forums full of women getting unwanted AFs (Aunt Flos) who are TTC (trying to conceive) and sending each other “baby dust” (seriously), nobody could possibly know that my queuing up to buy a pregnancy test in Morrison’s was anything but a happy and joyous occasion following a sensible “planning a family” meeting with my supportive husband.

However, somehow they all knew the truth. They knew that I didn’t really need toothpaste, grapes and a packet of Pringles. They could tell what hid beneath my baked beans on the conveyer belt. They knew I was another statistic waiting for my turn on Jeremy Kyle. “I take it you want a bag?” the check-out girl sympathetically asked.

And then there is the bit where you pee on a stick. By now, having convinced myself of the inappropriateness of my potential condition, feeling like a naughty teenager, I concentrated too hard on peeing right and splashed my hand, and the results window. Then I’d lost count – did I pee for more than five seconds? Whatever the test says now, I thought, it would almost certainly be wrong. If it said negative, it would be positive, and eight months later I’d give birth to a chain-smoking, drunk in a train station loo.

So to the shops I went to buy another test, unsure of whether I was now being judged more for failing to pee correctly or failing to use contraception.

Starting to care less what the result was so long as I never had to go to Morrison’s again, I retested.

The test was negative.

A sigh of relief was enjoyed by all, for about a minute until the fear crept in: why aren’t I pregnant? What’s wrong with me?

At least this neurosis can be soothed with a full-bodied Shiraz and a long menthol fag. Oh sweet life, welcome back!

Want some porn with that coffee?

I recently took part in a photo-shoot with my clothes mainly off. I do that from time to time.

My photographer sent me the photos on a CD. He did this very quickly and shaved valuable seconds off the process by cutting out unnecessary steps like adding the “B” part of my address and completely omitting my name from the envelope.

Therefore the CD containing pictures where you sometimes could see both my face and my intimate bits in the same shot was delivered to Costa Coffee, which I live above.

I didn’t realise this and presumed the CD was lost in the post, amusing bored postal workers in an office far enough from my flat to only unnerve me very slightly.

On I went with my day-to-day life, drinking Costa Coffee, blissfully unaware of anything amiss.

Until Friday. On Friday the barista gave me an envelope with my medium latte. It was open. “This yours?” he asked innocently. I looked at it, and peeked inside. It contained a CD.

Reality dawned slowly. As I walked towards the door clutching my envelope, I thought “Oh, good, just a Royal Mail mix-up. I’m glad I have my CD.” By the time I sat down outside, I was thinking, “Golly, isn’t it nice that the barista knows I live upstairs having seen me coming and going so often.” It wasn’t until my coffee had cooled down enough to drink it that I thought, “Fuck.”

The barista has seen me naked. He recognised me. He knows what I look like down there.

I’ve recently gone off coffee despite the fact that my boyfriend suggested I save myself and him pounds every week by winking and asking for freebies. Well fair’s fair, he says.