My wife made an
illustrative prediction of the scene she’d come home to when she finished
work yesterday evening, which was unsurprisingly spot-on.
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A Study of Man with
Cat (© 2017 ‘Her Indoors’)
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We have a running
joke between us based on the episode of The Simpsons when Bart gives a drawing
to Lisa in a sealed envelope, prophesizing the carnage they’d stumble on when
they returned home from a Sunday drive with Marge, while Homer cleaned out the
garage.
“Time to open the
envelope I gave you”, Bart says as they pull up to find Homer being repeatedly
crushed by the garage door; Lisa does so to reveal a perfect representation
of the scene with ‘THIS IS WHAT WILL HAPPEN’ scrawled across the bottom of it.
Thankfully, the
situation my wife expects to walk into is a lot less catastrophic, though it does involve a cat. Pretty much every
day, about an hour before my wife's due to get back, our cat Millie decides to
wake up from the armchair by the window, which she’s claimed as her own - and
doesn’t move from during business hours - to relocate to the sofa and, more specifically, my lap.
Her body clock is
impressively accurate, though the timing is often inconvenient, as her desire
to show affection (or steal my warmth; delete where appropriate) coincides perfectly with the moment I’d like to do some last-minute household chores, like
washing up or hiding my drugs stash. If I were being sneaky I'd use this
as an excuse to do nothing, but I wouldn’t really want to as having my wife come home to an untidy flat makes me feel back-footed and
anxious; it also affects the nature of our evening, as it’s much nicer to settle down in front of the telly and / or think about dinner, without
having to negotiate your way around the endless stream of mugs that accumulate
with alarming speed for a flat that houses two.
While my wife's drawing was reasonably accurate, there were a few discrepancies. For one, I
don’t tend to sit with my feet in first position with my hands concealed up sleeves. I don't style my hair like Rowan Atkinson in The Black
Adder and my beard isn’t pubey, but you can’t have everything.