I’m currently sitting on top of a brownie point mountain. Caroline has departed for a two-week tennis freebie in Barbados, leaving me holding the fort. I have three teenage boys to take care of and a very small dog. That means getting them up for school every morning, emptying and loading the dishwasher, walking the dog, doing quite unbelievable amounts of washing, and preparing endless meals. I don’t know how she does it!
To be fair, she doesn’t do it all, because I usually do some of it. And while she has a job, it’s only part-time, whereas I spend at least sixty hours a week doing paid work. So having to combine that with being a house husband is killing me. I fear my three sons will have to become “latchkey kids,” although that won’t be easy because only one of our front door keys works after our last visit from the local burglars (which, this being Acton, was about three weeks ago). The bastards forced the lock and I haven’t had time to mend it. At least I don’t have to drive the boys to school. Their bikes have long been stolen, but I’ve opened Lime Bike accounts for all of them so they race to school on those, screaming like banshees. They can cover the two miles in about eight minutes.
The dog is more of a burden, in fact. Mali, a three-year-old cavapoochon, is bereft without her mistress and needs constant reassurance that she hasn’t been abandoned. At night, she trots down to my shed and scratches on the door and insists on sleeping on my bed. Occasionally, I’ll wake up with a start to find her staring at me from a few inches away, perhaps anxious that I’ll disappear as well. During the day, she takes up a position on the stairs where she can see anyone approaching the front door, hoping to spot a suntanned woman with a tennis racket and a suitcase.
True, Caroline has done her best to lighten my burden. She has arranged for our cleaner to come in three days a week and she cooked a vat of chili which is now loaded into the freezer. She also ordered two recipe boxes from Gousto. For those unfamiliar with this service, a cardboard box arrives on Sunday afternoon containing recipe cards and different sets of ingredients. The recipes aren’t very demanding, but each one comes with tiny little packets of things like dried sage and toasted sesame oil, thereby conveying a spurious sense of sophistication. The finished products all taste vaguely the same — Italian-Asian fusion, if such a thing exists — but the great advantage of cooking-by-numbers is that it’s idiot-proof, which means my sons can manage it when I’m not there.
At least, that was the idea. On Tuesday night, when I was giving a talk in Brighton, they all point-blank refused to cook, claiming it was “too hard.” I kept saying “It’s idiot-proof — idiot-proof,” but it failed to cut through. They’re either such idiots they don’t know what it means, or they were feigning incompetence to get out of performing a household chore. Can’t think where they picked up that from.
The highlight of our week will be going to see QPR play Blackburn at home on Saturday, although that may not be much of a pick-me-up. We’ve just fired our manager after he failed to win eleven games on the trot. We’ve lost 3-0 at home three times in the past twelve games, a club record, and Blackburn haven’t lost in their last seven. At the time of writing, it looks like Gareth Ainsworth will be at the helm on Saturday, having done a bang-up job at Wycombe Wanderers for the past ten years. But our problem isn’t a lack of managerial talent, it’s the players. For reasons hard to fathom, too few of them want to play for the club. Our injury list is far longer than it should be at this stage in the season and some of those who are available seem to lose interest midway through matches. Given how much these popinjays are paid, with their new hairstyles each week and Day-Glo, look-at-me football boots, it’s pretty galling.
Maybe it’s time I developed a passion for tennis like my wife. Not only has it landed her this sweet trip to the Caribbean, but it provides her with hours of pleasure each week, both on and off the court. She’s in the ladies’ first team at David Lloyd Acton Park and, unlike QPR, they win occasionally. They’re also less likely to get relegated at the end of the season. Trouble is, if I spent the next ten years playing every day I’d still struggle to make the men’s fifth team. No, for the foreseeable future I’ll continue to struggle with a backbreaking work schedule interspersed with household chores, with my only respite watching the Super Hoops lose every week. Welcome to my world.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.
