Mystic Mog.


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.

A Study of Man with Cat (© 2017 ‘Her Indoors’)
 
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.

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