Sunday, 24th March 2007
It’s my own fault for having been so brilliantly imaginative in the first place.
For our Wedding Anniversary (7 years), I bought Wife a Victorian sculpture of an owl for the garden of our new house. Nothing as magnificent as the huge thing in the picture above: it’s perhaps two feet high, weather-beaten and mottled with mould and moss, but (she agreed) exceptionally handsome and testament to the astounding levels of creativity, thoughtfulness and wit which made her love me so much all those years ago.
Where’s the problem, you’re thinking?
The problem is that tomorrow is my wife’s birthday. AND I DON’T KNOW IF I CAN FOLLOW THE OWL IN A SUITABLE MANNER. “Who could?” would be anyone’s normal response – but I am fretting already. The thought of seeing my beautiful wife’s face, hatched with disappointment – or even, frank disgust – on her birthday is almost too much to bear.
Oh sure! I’ve got her “stuff” – the box-sets, the little something from Whistles, an iPod and a CTU-branded T-Shirt (she being a huge “24” fan, but more of that another time) – but where’s the killer blow? “Hamlet” without the Prince is what is looming: and it will take a LOT of Ferero Rocher to help me out of this one.
I was idly toying with buying her an obscenely expensive bracelet from Hermes. But the fact is, her wrists are so childishly small (I will point out at this stage that she turns 35 tomorrow, just to get any troubling thoughts out of your mind) that most bracelets simple slide off her – and this isn’t the sort of thing that I could laughingly dismiss as “No big deal” if it tumbled onto Chiswick High Road. I would go into the sort of routine that made Euripides such a draw, and that’s not cool.
I think the vague promise of an “event” will have to be made: that way, I can postpone the disappointment for a few weeks until we’re embarked on whatever ill-arranged outing I had planned…
