Thursday 27th November – The Trouble With Tribbles

My husband is a tidy man.  I will qualify that with the addendum; ‘for a boy.’  Nevertheless, he sorts his own laundry out, he irons, he pairs his socks.  He does not always leave trails of paperwork all over the place and mostly he is a believer in putting things back where he found them.  This is good.  This is especially good when you consider that my ex-husband would turn any room into a kind of beaver style dam made of paperwork, old keys, bits of wire and fluff. I am eternally grateful that I no longer have to live with this kind of thing.

There are however, weird blind spots in his neatness.  He does have a very annoying habit of taking his dirty socks off and just leaving them wherever he happens to be when his feet feel the need to breathe.  He also has a habit of taking his wedding ring off when he is doing chores.  It is a trifle loose and he is paranoid that it is going to fall in the bin or down the drain or some such place.  The problem is, he then fails to put it back on after the chores are done, and at least once a week we are all involved in an almighty panic when he cries: ‘Where’s my wedding ring’, like a bison bellowing to his mates across the plane about a particularly tasty bit of tumbleweed.

I can just about live with these things.  I have grown used to them.  Sometimes I don’t notice them because the children create so much detritus between them that it is almost impossible to see grown up mess underneath.  As an illustration, the butcher’s block in my kitchen was clear of all rubbish, stuff and nonsense yesterday morning.  Today it sports a hair slide, a graph that should be in someone’s math’s homework book,  the top from some leave in conditioner, three Go Go’s, a small stuffed cat that was being hotly debated over before I ripped it asunder and claimed that it was mine, and a half eaten packet of Hall’s Soothers.  There is also a mobile phone bill balanced on top of the Kitchenaid.  I am like the Canute of crap.

Such things are tolerable, because a) the children are very small and know not what they do, b) one day they will grow up and I will have my revenge, and c) they are all quite entertaining and what would I have to blog about if I gunned them all down in cold blood? I can’t even go postal anymore since they burned down the Post Office.  Not that my children did burn down the Post Office, unless they were very sneaky about it.  Apparently the hairdresser’s didn’t burn the Post Office down either.  Thus ends my career as Katy Holmes of the Yard.

Adult mess that is not mine is tolerated mainly because I am fully aware that I have annoying habits that drive him absolutely screwy, and he hasn’t gunned me down in cold blood yet, so until he snaps and we are involved in a Mr & Mrs Smith style assassination scenario, but with less glamour and more facial hair, we endure.  He hates that I:

• Steal all the bedclothes, every night, all the time.  This is despite the fact that we now have two duvets on the bed to alleviate this very problem.
• Never stack the dishwasher properly or efficiently (according to him.  It works fine for me.  But what do I know. Apparently; ‘I am only a little twerp’.)
• Never squash down the bottles for the recycling bin.

So, we are even,ish.

Then he does something which does make me think about divorce.  Not in a hardcore way.  More in an idle moment way.  The thing is, that if he did this particular thing all the time it would probably be background annoyance, much like the socks.  It is the fact that this is an intermittent habit that drives me mad.  I am not expecting it, and therefore, when it springs on me like a lion stalking a gazelle across the plain, I go a bit on the fritz.

You might want to sit down.  It’s quite shocking.

He leaves wads of used tissue lying around the house.

There. I’ve said it now.  I know that there are some things that should never be said in polite society.  Some taboos which remain rightfully in place, but I am mere flesh and blood and I can suffer no longer.

It drives me MENTAL. Mental with a capital MAD.

They are clumped on sideboards, they are rolling around the living room floor like giant tumbleweeds of snot, they are down the side of the bed, in pockets and shoes and every bloody where.  I hate them.

Also. I do not understand.  Would you leave tissue with pooh on it lying around the house casually until it goes all hard and crunchy? I think not.  Would you leave blood stained bandages idly propping open doors and hanging off light fittings?  Would you casually throw your sanitary towel behind you with nary a backward glance? No, you bloody wouldn’t.

I group snot, phlegm and mucous into this category.  Bodily stuff that is no longer in the body due to the fact that it is fucking gross, and it needs to be disposed of.  It needs to be disposed of by the person who honked it up in the first place.  That’s my feeling.  In fact, it’s more than a feeling, it’s a conviction.  And I have the courage of my convictions.

This morning he is feeling a little better on the old nose honking front, so I have only picked up half a dozen tissues.  The day before yesterday I could hardly get into our bedroom for the amount of toilet roll lying wreathed about the place.  It looked like the aftermath of a particularly vicious football match.

This is my house. It may be rather crunchy this week, but I love it.  It has pictures and ornaments and things are dusted.  I do not appreciate it when you cannot see any of these things for the layer of snot detritus hanging over the place like a pall.

I’m sure they breed as well.  They’re like bloody Tribbles those used tissues. 

For the uninitiated, the Tribbles were a particularly crap breed of alien on the original Star Trek, with William Shatner as James T. Kirk.  The ship got infested with these small balls of fluff which turned out to be alien life forms known as Tribbles.  They were harmless until they started making Tribble lurve and ended up swamping the ship and getting fur in the dashboard.  Spock was coughing up furballs and it was all going tits up until James T. was very stern and waggy of finger and told them about the STD’s of the Tribble world and they all became chaste and died out. Or something.  Anyway, here they are with a bemused James T. or Captain Slog as we used to call him.

That is the reality of my house this week.  Just superimpose Jason’s face over Captain Slog and used hankies for Tribbles and we’re about there.

Now imagine me, dressed as Lieutenant Uhuru with those wibbly things in my ears, and a giant flame thrower, just about to come through the doors and obliterate the lot of ‘em.  That’ll learn ‘em.