There has been a pile of politics around here lately. As I type these words, my feet rest on a stack of discarded grumbles and cast-offs. As a diversion, let me tell you about how I have started wearing my wife’s clothes.
This is not the confession it may appear to be, more of a small domestic incident.
It’s Saturday morning and I need to leave for work in an hour. We haven’t been to Morrisons yet and I am pacing around downstairs, ready to go. Jeans, jumper, jacket, shoes on, car keys in hand. My wife is still upstairs, mumbling to herself about not having had a lie-in (that’s a guess, sometimes you just know) while wondering what to wear.
After searching around for something suitable, she shouts from our attic bedroom and her words come bowling downstairs like little boulders.
“Julian – are you wearing my jeans?”
In 30-plus years of marriage, I have never been asked this one before. But it turns out I am. As the owner of four pairs of Levi’s jeans, three faded and one less so, I spotted this pair in the ironing basket and took them for mine. This turns out not to be so.
My wife likes to have one pair of men’s Levi’s on the go, as she thinks they look better than those intended for women. For a comfortable fit, she buys the same size as mine.
“The women’s ones don’t look like proper Levi’s,” she tells me as I arrive upstairs.
“I’ll take them off,” I say, obliging as you like.
“Urgh!” says my wife.
I tell her I’ve only worn her jeans for a short while. This is approximate to the truth, as I’d worn them the day before while interviewing someone.
Still, I keep that to myself, remove my wife’s jeans, and dig out a faded pair that belong to me. Thinking about it as we swap jeans, the buttons on the fly had seemed a little stiff, the denim being newer than on even my ‘best’ pair of Levi’s.
My wife tells me that the men’s jeans are a nicer fit, although the top at the back does sag a little.
“Mine are quite loose at the back,” I say, all thanks to my skinny arse.
“Yes, but yours are tighter at the front,” my wife says.
Ah, I think, must be all that craft beer.
We don’t have too many clothing clashes. If my wife stuck to dresses, we wouldn’t have any. But she doesn’t, so sometimes it’s Levi’s at the double. Recently we both put on gold-coloured jumpers. That’s usually a no-no, but neither of us could be bothered to change, and we were doing nothing more social than nipping to the local bar.
Shoes sometimes run to a theme as well. We both wear Doc Martens, although mine are brown to her black. Our back-in-the-nest daughter also favours Docs so sometimes we walk out in triplicate. But I never make the jeans mistake with our daughter. I wouldn’t get one leg in those jeans.
Living with a vegetarian and a vegan…
Baked potatoes for tea, crisping in the oven. A big bowl of coleslaw made. Our daughter (the vegan) arrives home before her mother (the veggie). She tries the coleslaw, made with her in mind, nothing dairy.
“This is nice,” she says. “What’s in it?”
Oh, all vegan, just white cabbage, carrots, oil, lemon juice and Dijon mustard, oh and…
She savours the flavour…
…and honey…
“Honey!” she says with more emphasis than had been expected. “That’s not very vegan.”
She goes back into the kitchen to make a honey-free coleslaw.
What things a meat-eating, honey-loving man must remember.