Free Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About by Mil Millington

It's so early – I didn't think you'd had time for a shave already.'
    She thinks it's too early for me to have had a shave, everyone, yet
easily late enough for me to have butter in my ear
.
     
    Move along, now. Nothing more to see here.

86
    The pre-eminently captivating thing that Conan Doyle hit upon with Sherlock Holmes was, as you know, Holmes's ability to infer a rich world into existence using only the tiniest piece of evidence. A chipped fingernail, a certain blend of tobacco or the uneven wear on a heel would be enough for England's finest consulting detective to arrive at an irrefutable and revealing conclusion. Margret is rather like that. She too can pick up a minuscule detail and tease a many-layered story from it. In fact, the only real difference at all between Margret and Sherlock Holmes is that all of Margret's deductions are complete bollocks.
    What do you mean, you want an example? I thought we had a relationship based on trust, here?
    OK, OK.
    For example
, let's take a look at an incident that occurred just the other day…
    We are sitting around talking with some friends. The topic is 'Yet another injury Mil has sustained through doing something profoundly unwise on his mountain bike'. (I'm drawn to ill-considered mountain bike actions with almost blurring frequency.)
    'You know why this is, Mil,' my friend Mark says, grinning. 'It's your mid-life crisis.'
    Everyone laughs, but through the noise Margret adds, 'No – Mil had his mid-life crisis
last
year.' Glancing at her, I see that she means it.
     
    Now, I don't recall having a mid-life crisis last year and, you know, you'd think I would, wouldn't you?
    So, understandably, I stare at her in confusion and ask, 'What the hell are you talking about?'
    'You had it last year,' she shrugs, casually.
    'No I didn't.'
    'Yes you did.'
    'Didn't.'
    'Did.'
    'Never.' (How can I have had a mid-life crisis when I've so clearly not yet breached the adolescence barrier?') 'No. No. I so did
not
have a mid-life crisis last year.'
    'You
did
…' Margret draws a breath at this point, before sweeping on into the explanation – I wait; anxious fascination keeping me unbalanced on the front of my chair. 'You started wearing T-shirts. You never used to like T-shirts,' she says.
    And that's it, everyone. T-shirts. There's no 'Well – the
first
sign was…' here. There's no 'Looking back now, it's obvious that this was the start of the road that ended with Mil running naked through the woods, his body smeared with pork fat and his raw, feral voice howling, "I am Man and my seed is yet vital!".' No, no, no – the thing, entirely, is 'T-shirts'.
    Now, call me picky, but I think with this Margret might be extrapolating beyond the point where even a Freudian would begin to feel they were pushing it. In the total absence of any supporting evidence, her whole case appears to rest completely on wearing a T-shirt being widely acknowledged as 'a crisis', right? And I'm not
entirely
sure that it is. I've never seen a newspaper lead on a front page filled with nothing but a photo above the stark headline "Elbows!". Mad as he undoubtedly is, I can't imagine even GW Bush issuing at executive order for a Delta Force extraction team to be sent into Central America where – the CIA has reported – a US citizen has been seen wearing cap sleeves.
    "You started wearing T-shirts." Jesus. Good job I didn't buy a pair of unusual shoes or anything – Margret would probably have been straight on the phone and I'd have woken up restrained and sedated in a secure hospital.

87
    As you know, this page attracts idiots. We sit here in the gentle glow of thousands of work hours being burned away, and passing idiots are bewitched by the light. They fly towards us and peer in, only to become disorientated and upset. They attempt to enter, but succeed no further than repeatedly banging their poor, bemused little faces against the glass: trying, trying,
trying
… but never quite grasping the situation.