Clean Me Up Before You Go Go

Bargains. There are few things more delightful to M. DeFarge than a finely turned bargain. He is mesmerised by the giddy pleasure to be found in surrendering to the temptation of a bogof or a twofur. He is intoxicated with the thrill of possession of a cheap price. He is the reason why I will never want for toilet rolls, dishwasher tablets and toothpaste. All inherently valuable for modern life, but somewhat indigestible.

The dishwasher tablets are the poster children for this propensity to thrift. We have only recently finished the '3 in 1' tablets, bought in a splurge of saving four years ago. Since then, the manufacturer has waltzed all through to '10 in 1', thereafter abandoning mere numbers as an indication of superabundant cleaning power . They are now intent upon seducing us with 'max' and 'quantum' as indicators of their prowess.

I opened the last box of '3 in 1' with thinly disguised feelings of optimism. I am 60 washes away from being free to pursue ultimate washing opportunities – at least those provided by the three boxes of the '4 in 1' tablets. I am light years behind the curve of cleanliness. M. DeFarge reminds me how much we saved by buying in bulk. I remind him that I may be missing the benefit of added cleansing power.

I cannot tell how many toilet rolls we have. They loiter palely at the back of our cupboard, soft and inviting, like some monument to incontinence. We will use them all eventually. It make take a while. But as much as I mock, he may be wise beyond my ken. M. DeFarge has undoubtedly realised that our survival in post-Armageddon Derbyshire may depend on our ability to barter with toilet roll. With my burgeoning accountancy skills used to calculate our possible wealth, I reckon we could be paper millionaires.

At least the toothpaste mountain takes up less room and provides some health benefits. I am assured of this by the copious advertising claims and by M. DeFarge's insistence that we must be minty fresh at all times. This again was a bulk purchase, but the chances are that our teeth will have left our gums long before we make it to the end of the stash. I recall that toothpaste was a solution to juvenile lovebites (not from experience I hasten to add. Or rather, not of the efficacy of the intervention). Again, should the world be overridden by zombies, we could be onto a winning combo.

So my cupboards take on the appearance of a suburban survivalist compound, albeit one dedicated to the pursuit of unfettered self-cleansing. M. DeFarge has no truck with the conventions of routine shopping. He jokes that our marriage is a bulk buy. My stock answer is to agree. One with a limited sell-by date.

Wish Me Luck As You Shave Me - Goodbye!

Facial hair. A vexing subject. Not for me you understand. I acknowledge my mammalian roots and accept that they bring with them a certain hirsuteness, especially for ladies over a certain age. Not that I’m that age yet, but I’ve always been advanced for my years. Tweezers. You have to love them.

No, the facial hair that’s perplexed me adorned the physog of a colleague. He is a fresh-faced young chap who emerged post Christmas with a most fabulous collection of whiskers upon his previously hairless chinny chin chin. We had admired it since most keenly. It was a triumph of the expansionist tendency of hair. It was most unashamedly a big bushy bristly beard.

This led to hushed conversations amongst the ladies about our preferences for beards in our men folk (inequality reigns supreme as nothing has been said about the preferences our men folk have for female facial fuzz. Some things will never be raised in polite society.). Opinion was neatly split: there were those who preferred adolescent smoothness and then there were the grown-ups who preferred their chaps to at least suggest the need to scrape daily.

My own view was that I always wanted a man who had to shave more than I did. I had few ambitions going through my teenage years, but this was firmly up there, together with reaching 5’4’’ (sadly, growing hair was easier than growing taller). Given this, it is unsurprising that I admit to a penchant for a well-turned beard. The fortnight around Christmas and New Year is invariable a time of delight as M. DeFarge relinquishes his shaver and lets nature take its course. I am rarely afforded the same opportunity.

So this young man had to endure the daily terror of les femmes d’un certain age gazing at the royal progress of his mutton chops. It provided a welcome dose of excitement in our otherwise rather dull routine at work. Quite what it did for him escaped us, but he appeared to enjoy the attention. A beard makes a man instantly more noteworthy and raises him about the merely unshaven.

Other men in the team were unsure what to do with such a display in their midst. Some were clearly making their own effort to keep up with him, but such playground antics led to a plethora of five o’clock shadows and bristles in obscure corners of their faces. This outbreak of unabashed masculinity was becoming unnerving: one beard is fine, but we weren’t sure that we wanted any more.

But tragedy has struck. He arrived at work today with a trimmed down, slimmed down, shorn version. It was no longer the luxuriant display of whiskerage we had come to know and love. No longer could we gaze in wonderment at his growth. Peer pressure had got to him at last.

There's a Little Green Man in My Bed

I can proudly announce to the world that I have developed the DeFarge alien detector. I use it to identify whether or not M. DeFarge has been replaced by an alien during my absence on matters of state. Useful in a marriage such as ours, conducted at a distance from Monday to Friday – the opportunity for swapping the real with a fake is boundless. One should always be aware of alien intrusion into a marriage.

I wanted to spot those little things, visible only to a wife, that would mark him out as the real deal. If I came home on a Friday, having not clapped eyes upon him since Monday, I wanted to pucker up to him and not some interloper consisting of protozoic gunk.

And so I noted, with a hitherto unexpected keenness, his habits and behaviour (neither of which had troubled me much to date, being quiet and clean in both). From these, I have identified five traits, the absence of which will prove beyond reasonable doubt that I have married an alien.

1.Socks Appeal
He will always open his sock drawer when he is looking for his gentlemen's undergarments and vice versa. These items have been contained in the same, separate, drawers for five years. The day he opens the right one, well, he must be a multi-legged beastie from beyond the galaxy.

2.Pillow talk
He will always flip his pillows over and around before he goes to bed. No matter how tired, no matter how inebriated, he cannot sleep on pillows unless they have been moved. The night I see it, then he has turned into an evil, sulphur breathing monster from another planet.

3.Buttoned Up
M. DeFarge has been capable of dressing himself for some years now. But, the bottom button of every shirt remains stubbornly undone. He is absent-minded about such things. But the morning I see him fully fastened, then I will know that he is hiding the green scaly skin of a mutant.

4.Blurred Vision
He will always change channels when I am watching some brain rot on a Friday night (purely as relaxation for my tired intellect). My protestations go unnoticed. The evening that he tolerates my televisual viewing, then I know that he is a omni-ocular ogre.

5.Eating Sweets is Wrong
He will eschew the prospect of sweets, renouncing them as unhealthy demon spawn. But when I buy them (as aids to learning big sums), he will scoff stealthily and then express surprise at their rapid demise. The time he lets me eat a whole bag of pick and mix, then I know that he is eying me up as his next meal.

But, my main problem is that he knows these now too. So, he might just be bluffing, really be an alien and have successfully integrated into human life. Somehow, I doubt it. I'd like to think that an alien would put the toilet seat back down.