Domestic battles - by Gavin Ferguson — Gavin English Teacher

In this article I want to tell you about some of the domestic battles I have with my wife.

Teflon wars

For many years my wife and I had been cooking with Teflon pots and pans. One day, she told me that Teflon wasn’t safe, and so she bought an incredibly expensive new set of ‘safe’ pots and pans.

Yes, the new pots are so heavy that you may need a small forklift truck to drain your pasta, yes, when you cook, the food sticks to the bottom of the pan like paint to a wall, but this is a small price to pay for avoiding the devastating and apocalyptic harms of Teflon, she tells me.

In the good old days, when I could lift my saucepan with just one hand, and didn’t have to set aside time in my calendar to clean it, I didn’t realise how lucky I was. It was only when my wife took all of the Teflon pots, hid them in the shed and refused to tell me which box she had hidden them in, that I realised how fundamental they were to my quality of life.

Why is there an egg in my garden?

My wife loves feeding the birds and squirrels in our garden. I happily turn a blind eye to the amount of money that flows out of our joint account every month to support the dietary needs of West London’s animal community, because it makes her happy.

However, one day when I was returning to the house, I saw a chicken egg in the middle of the artificial grass in our garden. At first I was baffled – how did it get there? I went into the house to see if my wife could help to solve the mystery. She told me that she had taken one of my eggs and put it in the garden because she had seen a hungry fox that may need it.

I was both horrified and flabbergasted, and felt that she had crossed a line. I knew that if I didn’t make a stand now, my wife could descend down a slippery slope of evermore extreme animal charity – and perhaps in the worst case scenario I would end up having to sleep in the garden and the fox would be given my side of the bed.

I raised my voice to my wife and told her how I felt.

Alas, this wasn’t the last egg to have mysteriously disappeared from our fridge.

‘Can you get me my credit card?’

*Which jacket? Which pocket? Which purse? Which credit card?*

Sometimes when my wife is sitting comfortably on the sofa or lying in bed, she’ll ask me to go and fetch her something.

‘Can you grab my credit card for me please? It’s in my purse which is in the pocket of my jacket in the cupboard’ she says. In her mind, it is crystal clear and obvious which purse in which pocket in which jacket she’s talking about. But through my eyes, the world looks different. By the time I reach the cupboard, my memory of precisely what she has asked for is beginning to fade. I open the cupboard and see a forest of women’s jackets and have no idea which one she was talking about. I could start rummaging through each pocket in each jacket until I perhaps find a purse, then only to face the uncertainty of whether this is the correct purse with the correct credit card. Instead, I take bold and decisive action in the name of efficiency and simply pick up the entire jacket that I think is most likely to contain somewhere within it the credit card that she is looking for, and give the jacket to my wife.

Instead of being grateful for being given her credit card, she gives me a bollocking for having given her the jacket!

Why do we have so many bloody cups?

There are only 2 of us living in this flat and neither of us ever consume more than one hot drink simultaneously. We sometimes have guests over, but very rarely more than 4.

Instead of having 6 cups, however, we own 29 – all of the stuffed onto the same two cupboard shelves, stacked one on top of the other, making it difficult to get one when you need to. Most disturbingly, the number of cups is still rising. I have begged my wife on numerous occasions to cull the number of cups, but instead she buys more. At Christmas she purchased two extra-large cups in the shape of Santa and a Christmas tree, and revealed them to me as if she was expecting me to be pleasantly surprised – I was not.

This is a list of key vocabulary and expressions from the article in order of how useful they are. The student must choose 6 items from the list to study in the lesson.

To refuse (to do something)

Harm

To beg

To end up (doing) something

To stick (to something)

Bloody

To be baffled

To stuff

To be pleasantly surprised

To have (someone) over

To turn a blind eye (to something)

To be flabbergasted