Seconds Out

I got a call from herself on Sunday asking me if I could keep our six year old overnight today so that she could go to some Christmas do. This was fine with me as I don’t drop him off until about 7:30 on Mondays, and the more I see him the better as far as I am concerned. She then appended an announcement that she would be keeping him on Christmas Saturday, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day and that I could see him “after that”.

Unsurprisingly I refused to play ball with this ridiculous idea. When we were arguing I got the usual Goebbels treatment, but it is a trick I recognise easily these days. She explained that I always went to Cardiff after Boxing Day to spend time with my family, so she was in essence doing me a favour by keeping him the four days before. This was news to me (because it is incorrect), though she did assure me that was how I had arranged the holiday period for the last eight years.

“What did I do last year?” I asked, pulling an example out the air. It was scarcely a trick question, but surprise, surprise she couldn’t remember. I remembered. I especially remembered because Ben and I were in Cardiff the week before Christmas last year when Raybs shattered his knee. The circumstances of his spending the festive season in hospital and my visiting him each day possibly also eluding her capacious memory.

After half an hour’s debate, we agreed that I will take Ben down to Wales on Saturday morning to see his cousins and exchange presents and that I will bring him back on Christmas Eve, and it was explained to me – not for the first time – that all the problems in the world come from my failure to communicate. The letter that I sent her a while ago proposing this arrangement doesn’t count as communication apparently.

It’s not all that important in scheme of things but I want to record it here so that I will always remember how unreasonable she can be.

PS She has now decided in a fit of pique that I can’t have him tonight, and I am to drop him off with Raybs.