Mil Millington - Things my girlfriend and I have argued about (online version)

One of the many things I love about Margret is her zest. You probably won't have picked up on this, but in actual fact I am a sullen, cynical kind of character (honestly, it's true), while Margret hisses with energy and finds taut excitement in everything that passes through her field of vision. Perhaps this is why, in a Garden Centre, I just shuffle around sighing, 'Red pot, blue pot; whatever you want — can we go home now?' yet Margret only has to walk through the doors at Sainsbury's Homebase to achieve orgasm.

Anyway, this whippy outlook of hers can sometimes be a bit wearing. As an example, yesterday, her brow creased with anxiety, she said, 'I need a haircut, urgently.'

Now, I just can't imagine a world where people need a haircut urgently . Quite possibly, this explains a lot — those of you who have looked elsewhere on the site will surely have thought, 'Christ! There's a man who needs a haircut URGENTLY!' — but let's not confuse understandable alarm with imperativeness. When Margret said this, it was about eleven o'clock at night, and she really did look like she expected me to dash to the phone right away. 'Hello? Shapes? Prepare a chair, we'll be there in two minutes. Yes, it looks bad. I… Oh my God, it's frizzing! Clear!'

Tch — wear a hat until the weekend.

The quality with which I am identified most closely is probably fairness. There's an almost breathless speed about my disposition, when appropriate, to say, 'Margret, I am clearly in the wrong here. Please smash up my stuff.' However, there are times when the Shield Of Justice gleams on my arm and all of Margret's shouted accusations merely strike it and fall, lifeless, to the ground. Averted eyes and a slowly shaking head tell that I am in a place where she cannot touch me. Yes, as you ask, I am thinking of something specific.

You don't know me, right? You're aware, perhaps, that my hair's bright red, you know I've got some Web space, you have a certain suspicion that in quiet moments I speculate on what it must be like to be rubbed all over with a Nastassja Kinski — but that's it. It's not like, say, we've being going out with each other for something over sixteen years and have had two children and decorated a landing together. Given that, let me place before you a scenario: You are leaving the house to go shopping for a number of hours. Just before you go, you poke your face towards me (I, hunched and unblinking, am playing a computer game of the most frantic and intricate kind) and say, 'If it starts to rain, get the washing in off the line.'

Now, you know what's going to happen, don't you? You've never even met me, and yet you know what's going to happen. So if Margret, with whom I've lived for well over a decade and a half, doesn't bother to employ painfully basic foresight to see what's obviously going to happen … well, the shield of justice is mine, i reckon.

When I'm driving the car, Margret reaches across and operates the indicator. How annoying is that, ladies and gentlemen? At the distance from the turn that she considers to be appropriate, she'll lean over and flick the indicator lever on. Be honest now, would any one of you prefer to be in a car with someone who did that over, say, being trapped under rubble for four days with a person who writes the verses for greetings cards? It's rumoured, in fact, that certain people are working on the Being In A Car With Margret Experience so that it can be recreated in the punishment wing of Alabama jails.

That's not to say that she's a bad driver. She's a better driver than I am, certainly. But a better driver in, um, well, by the 'male' definition of better, let's say. If we were in a rally, Margret would leave me in the dust. She is never more alive than when reversing into a tight space. Gears matter to her. However, I've only had one crash, and that was indisputably not my fault (someone drove through a red light into the side of me). Margret has hit countless things. Hit them in England. Hit them in Germany. (I was in a car with Margret in Germany once, when she'd been back and forth between there and England quite frequently. She's racing along the centre of a country road. A car appears heading straight for us, and Margret shouts at me, 'Which side should I be on!?' A nice moment. If I'd been out to score points I'd have remarked that, if you're asking that question, then perhaps slowing down at all might be a thing to do also. I didn't say anything, however, as at that point I was busy finding religion.) Margret has hit stationary things — bollards, a public electricity exchange, walls — and moving things — other cars, an ambulance. ( Yes , 'honestly'.)

One time we hired a car to drive up to Scotland. Margret doesn't so much ignore speed limits as have trouble with them conceptually — 'What? There's a speed limit here too?' She drove from Birmingham to Carlisle (about 200 miles) flat out. And I mean 'flat' 'out', her foot was on the floor the whole way. The hire company obviously expected their cars to be driven by the sane, and it just couldn't cope. The temperature gauge strained against the end of the scale and Margret eventually pulled over to let it cool down for a few minutes. But the wind coming through the radiator grille due to our forward motion was the only thing that had kept it going. When she pulled over every single electrical wire in the engine melted away. Fortunately, there was rescue cover so we were picked up and given a replacement car. Margret, clearly humbled, said, 'Oh brill! This one's got a cassette player!'

So, Margret's a better driver than I am, and a better map reader too, incidentally. I get there eventually and can operate my own indicators, thanks very much… but I am, sadly, far less likely to make my fortune endorsing airbags.

Insomnia. The thing with — hold on, before I start, look at this: [4]. Guess which one of us hung that up at some point on Friday, and which one of us walked into the bedroom sometime later and said, 'Wow, that's really good. I've often thought how not at all irritating it would be to have a bunch of feathers dangling just in front of my face all night, and I've also frequently been overcome with a sudden sadness that I had no means of a casual arm wave as I slept somehow entangling itself in ribbons and a suspended hoop so as to bring a halogen lamp crashing down onto my sleeping face. Yet, I've never thought of bringing the two together — now, that's genius.'

Apparently, it needs to be hung over our bed — rather than, say, outside, on a tree, in front of somebody else's house — as it's a dreamcatcher. And there I was thinking that, once I logged off the Net, I was safe. That, in my own bed, I was beyond the sinister reach of Wacky Californians — what is it with you people? What did I ever do to you? OK, apart from that. (By the way, if you're a Wacky California who was all set to write me an email suggesting some kind of family therapy pioneered by another Wacky Californian, but who finds yourself now even more compelled to write one beginning, «In fact, the dreamcatcher is an old Native American tradition. Nokomis, the grandmother, was watching a spider…» then can I ask that you just don't, OK? In fact, as a general rule, I tend not to take advice — 'consider the source', right? — about life from people who choose to live on a massive earthquake faultline.) As an aside, Wacky Californians, there was a tiny piece in last week's Metro newspaper, which I found interesting. I emailed the editor to ask if I could put a scan of it up here but, unfortunately, he said no — as he's perfectly entitled to do, of course — but the gist was that a couple had their application to adopt refused because they don't argue enough. Maybe Margret and I should give classes or something.