Desperate Husbands
For Amanda Higgs
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Dedication
Introduction
Desperate
The revolt of the appliances
The suggestible woman
Batboy Elliot
Buying time
Hairy scary
He used to be taller
Desperate Husbands
Devoted
In Germany, just don’t mention the door
Home alone
Twisted tongues
I’m a little teapot
Title fight
Brew ha-ha
Better than sex
Desirable
A message from SexyBoy
The eroticism of housework
Bo-Bo erectus
Knot trying
Symbolically clean
How to write a book
We’re all farmers now
Delusional
Snow business
The war on error
Show time
Just joking
Flaunt It
You must remember this
‘24/7’
Deranged
The Eleventh Commandment
Sixty is the new fifty
With a thong in my heart
Pigsty
Not drowning, waiving
The Cupboard
The little read books
Defeated
Count me out
The teenage boys’ guide to water conservation
Vision statement
Fat chance
An unsustainable financial proposition
Decline and fall
The real road rules
Defiant
Ten ways to argue like a man
Up the mountain
The Blokes’ Supermarket
Style counsel
Lip service
Recipe for disaster
The Christmas cheer
A night’s tale
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Richard Glover
In Bed With Jocasta
Copyright
About the publisher
A decade or so ago, I invented a game called Who’s Got the Weirdest Parents?. It’s true it didn’t receive the rush of global attention achieved by Trivial Pursuit or Su Doku, but among my small group of friends, it became mildly popular for at least a few months.
The rules were simple enough. A group of people would gather in a circle, armed with a bottle of wine or two, and take turns recounting weird stories about their parents or, in some versions, their extended family. Within minutes you’d hear stories of such total frothing insanity, you’d be left gasping for breath. How could your seemingly normal friends have clambered out of such a murky genetic pool?
Why did I invent the game? All my life I have been hopeless at games, both physical and intellectual. My earliest memory of school is of a rugby coach barking at me, ‘Go get the ball, Glover,’ and me calling back in an effete trill, ‘Can’t, sir. Might get hurt, sir.’ I had a vested interest in developing a game in which I had some chance of victory. Who’s Got the Weirdest Parents? was surely that game.
When I was a baby, growing up in New Guinea, my mother had wrapped stickytape around my head in a failed attempt to reduce the angle of my protruding ears. She only stopped when the district nurse asked about the cause of the bloodied stripe around my infant skull. Tropical heat rash? No, stickytape trauma. My father, as a young British sailor, had visited Hiroshima a few weeks after the dropping of the bomb and had long been convinced that only by drinking heavily could he keep the radioactive effects at bay.
By the time I was fifteen, their marriage was such that my mother ran off with my school English teacher. This left my fellow students so gobsmacked it took them as long as a week to realise that, in a situation like this, it was their job to taunt me mercilessly. My father, meanwhile, was so heartbroken that he left home as well—rushing back to England and leaving me the house.
I’m not complaining: it was a pleasant middle-class suburban home. It even had a pool and a chest freezer. But the truth remains—as Jocasta, my partner, sometimes puts it—‘Richard never really left home. Home left him.’
My father eventually returned home, yet this story—complete with Jocasta’s one-liner—was often enough to push me over the line to victory in Who’s Got the Weirdest Parents? But sometimes not. What was amazing was that everybody had a story. At least one of their parents, on at least one occasion, had done something truly bizarre.
One friend, for example, explained how her father, a medical practitioner, would sit in front of the TV each night with a pillow tied to his head, sucking on a hanky. It was his method of reducing the poisonous messages emanating from the TV set. Another recounted how his father would walk around the house naked, singing love songs to a mistress who may or may not have existed—no one in the family could be sure.
‘OK,’ we’d all say at that point. ‘Game over. You win.’
On some occasions, a friend might explain that they were unable to play. ‘It sounds like good fun,’ they would say, ‘but I’ll sit this one out and listen. You see, my parents where so staid, boring and normal…’
They’d just be finishing this last bit of the sentence—‘staid, boring and normal’—when they’d start to slow down, as if walking through sticky mud. The last word would come out like a slowed-down tape-recording: ‘and n-o-r-m-a-l.’ There would then be this troubled pause, followed by the words: ‘Well, unless you count the way my father…’
Out would then tumble some eye-popping tale of total barking madness, made more remarkable by the fact that the family had clearly become so completely used to it they no longer saw it as odd.
I remember in particular an old flatmate who spent five minutes apologising for his crushingly dull parents and his consequent inability to play the game, before being hit by a sudden thought.
‘Well,’ he said after a pause, ‘unless you count the way my father couldn’t bear the thought of anyone else touching or laundering his clothes. He installed a washer and a dryer, right there in the garage, so that he could come home from work, park the car, and then personally do all the laundering and drying of his work clothes before entering the house. They’d then be ready to slip on again before he drove out in the morning without anyone else having touched them.
‘Would a story like that count in the game?’
‘Yeah,’ someone would say after a stunned silence. ‘That’s generally the sort of thing we would count.’
One of the things I like about the TV show Desperate Housewives is that it acknowledges how bizarre life can get in the suburbs. I’ve only one complaint about the show. The producers should realise: it’s not only the housewives who are desperate.
None of the Desperate Housewives has a mother as insane as mine—a mother who routinely cleans her son’s appliances to death. Not one is shacked up with someone as fabulous and fierce as my partner, Jocasta—a woman whose mood changes according to whatever novel she happens to be reading.
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