Tales From The Bunker THE HONEYMOONERS…

People keep asking me what it’s like being married. Do I feel any different? Has our life been transformed into the apogee of matrimonial nirvana?

Well, frankly, no.

Don’t misunderstand me: I am not seeking an early divorce. P and I are still happy to be together. But the fact is that we’ve been living together since 1993, so it was unlikely that anything about our daily lives would have changed much as a result of saying a few words in front of a badly-dressed registrar. In fact, I was so nervous on the Big Day that the actual vows I made slid past in a blur and I have barely any memory of them – I basically missed the most important part of the entire thing because I was too busy feeling self-conscious and wondering precisely how hideously overweight I looked from the back. What can I say? I’m vain and superficial…

 

THE BATHOS OF COVID

 

One thing that has happened since the wedding is that we’ve both had Covid. No, before you ask, it wasn’t as a result of the mixing of guests at the ceremony. We got it about three weeks later. Neither of us was very ill. In fact, it was a bit of an anti-climax – after almost two years of paranoia about this deadly disease, worrying about whether either or both of us would end up in hospital (I am pre-diabetic and fat; P has asthma and another serious health condition), it seemed almost disappointing to just get a bit of a sore throat, an occasional sneeze and a half-hearted cough. We did have to self-isolate, however.

The wedding vows must have had some impact on me, as I remember being very attentive to P’s needs during the first few days of his Covid infection (he got it first). I’m afraid I’m not a natural nurse. I’m more of a natural patient – and I don’t mean the courageous, stoical, make-jokes-in-the-face-of-personal-tragedy ones either. No, I’m one of those whiny, anxious, self-pitying kinds of patient that every medical professional must hate. In our house, it’s me who gets man-flu and P who is the nurturer. But on this occasion the instruction about ‘in sickness and in health’ must have sunk in!

The worst thing about our Covid infection has been the aftermath. We were both excessively tired for weeks afterwards and have only begun to emerge from this fug very recently. I have had definite problems concentrating and remembering things (over and above those caused by my being 58), and I’ve had what I will euphemistically refer to as an ‘upset tummy’ on and off ever since I tested positive (though it might be due to excessive consumption of the sort of food a pre-diabetic person should never eat, over Christmas and then continuing into the New Year because I needed something to cheer me up as I had Covid…). I have also had the ‘phantom smells’ reported by others, though not consistently or continuously. We went to a French restaurant with my sister and her partner last week and the whole place smelt like sewage to me – I kept wondering whether the toilets were backing up, but my companions reassured me that all they could smell were pleasant foody smells, and it did wear off, fortunately!

MILLIE MAKES HER MARK!

We both have birthdays in the weeks after New Year, so they were rather muted this year. However, they did give my mother-in-law the opportunity to indulge in what is clearly going to be a long-running joke: writing ‘To The New Mrs B- from The Old Mrs –‘ on my birthday card (she did this on my Christmas card too).

Speaking of which, the mother-in-law (whom I think I will refer to as Millie from now on – M for Mother, I for In, L for Law), was rushed into hospital on the evening of the first day of P’s isolation after she developed severe abdominal pain. Well, I say ‘rushed’ – in fact, she waited, with a neighbour who is in her seventies, more than three hours for an ambulance from the hospital which is literally ten minutes away from her house.

You can imagine how worrying this was for P who couldn’t drive over. She was then kept in A & E for eighteen hours until they found her a proper bed in a surgical ward. It turned out she had gallstones and they kept her in for four days for observation, but decided not to operate.  Despite this trauma, Millie actually appeared, afterwards, to have enjoyed her stay in hospital, and at least it meant P didn’t have to worry about not being able to visit her during his Covid incarceration, as he knew she was being looked after.

On one of his phone calls to her, she told him cheerfully that she’d just had a ‘lovely lunch’, though she had to ask the nurse what it had actually been:

MILLIE:  ‘I think it was chicken, wasn’t it?’

NURSE: ‘You had a cheese omelette, love.’

Millie has never eaten an omelette or had cooked cheese in her life – if we had offered her such a thing at any time, she would have spurned our offer as if it was toasted turd laced with belladonna. But in the hospital, she ate and enjoyed an NHS cheese omelette (though she thought she was eating chicken).

She had several culinary adventures while in hospital:

MILLIE [describing her experience to her elderly neighbour]:  ‘Ooh, I had something foreign, you know.’

NEIGHBOUR:   ‘Really? You, eating foreign food?  What was it?’

MILLIE:   ‘Oo, now let me think. What did they say it was called?  Hang on, give me a minute. Oh, yes, an egg mayonnaise sandwich.’

She must be the only person who feels like a four-day sojourn in a provincial hospital is like a weekend away in a spa, and who misses hospital food once she’s left!

She rang me this morning to tell me that she’d received ‘two letters for P’ but she couldn’t tell me who they from ‘on the phone’. She clearly suspects our landline is bugged. Probably all those journalists trying to find out where she buys her overalls. She’s paranoid about ‘criminals’ somehow finding out her business and exploiting her data. She hates it, for example, when I put a sender’s address on anything I send her through the post, though I’m not sure what she thinks criminals would be able to do with my address, which they could easily find out from the envelopes of any letter sent to my house.  Anyway, her phone call this morning made me wonder whether she and P were both members of a spy-ring or secret society.

She added, in her charmingly random way, that a police drug raid at a house further down her cul-de-sac this morning had broken up her morning pleasantly, and that she had really enjoyed the trifle I made for her at Christmas and wanted another asap.

Clearly, getting married has made my membership of the family official.