Spike Milligan once said, ‘Never trust a man who, if left alone in a room with a tea cosy, doesn’t try it on as a hat.’
Margret said, just the other week, ‘Why are your toe nails painted green?’
It is, I think you can see, all part of the same thing.
So, I’m sitting in a restaurant in London talking to Jake Arnott about wearing women’s underwear. (To truly grasp quite how surreal this tableau is, you really need to know the kind of books Jake Arnott writes – http://makeashorterlink.com/?L56552464.) My thesis is that if you want to know (for some reason – perhaps you’re choosing a gift) if a man is gay or not, but it feels impolite to ask outright, then merely enquire if he’s ever tried on any pieces of women’s underwear to see what they’re like. If he replies “No” then he’s *definitely* gay. No straight man in the world, who’s girlfriend has popped out – temporarily leaving unguarded both him and the black thong lying with high-visibility across the back of a nearby chair – can prevent himself looking across at the garment and thinking, ‘Hmmm….’ For a man to say he’s never tried… well – it’s like Tom Robinson used to remark: ‘I can always tell who’s gay in the audience – they’re the ones who don’t sing along with ‘Glad To Be Gay’.’ So, I express this opinion, and Jake animatedly agrees. I believe, therefore, that if both Jake *and* Mil declare something to be correct, then it can’t be a mere matter of opinion or perspective, but is, unarguably, The Truth.
That established, let’s change scene.
I’m getting undressed in the bedroom.
‘What the hell’s *that*?’ asks Margret abruptly and with alarm.
This is not something you really *ever* want to hear when getting undressed in front of a woman, so I’m briefly barged into a panic of rapid self-examination. Finding nothing more depressing than usual, I check her eye line and see that she’s looking at my feet. ‘Why are your toenails painted green?’ she asks.
I’d forgotten about this, but, relieved, I tut. ‘Tch. Because I painted them green this evening, of course.’
Instead of this being the end of the matter, Margret seems to want to keep on talking. ‘And… why?’
‘What do you mean “why”?’
‘I mean “why?”.’
She’s got herself stuck in a loop here, clearly. As everything has already been explained, there’s not a lot I can do to help her. I have to fall back on merely going over things again, adding trivial detail.
‘You went out this evening,’ I say.
‘Yes.’
‘Tch.’ (What *is* the problem here?) ‘You went out this evening… so I was left in the house on my own… and I was bored… and when I went for a pee I saw the nail varnish in the bathroom.’
‘So you thought you’d paint your toe nails?’
‘*Obviously*.’
‘Why?’
(How did we manage to get back to that?)
‘Dunno.’ I shrug. ‘It just seemed… I mean – you go out and leave me completely unsupervised, all evening, in a house with nail varnish in plain view… *What do you expect, for God’s sake*?’
You know, I’m sure Margret would tell you that she’s the level-headed one, but this just demonstrates how, sometimes, she simply has no common sense *at all*.
