Margret thinks I'm vain because... I use a mirror when I shave. During this argument in the bathroom - our fourth most popular location for arguments, it will delight and charm you to learn - Margret proved that shaving with a mirror could only be seen as outrageous narcissism by saying, 'None of the other men I've been with,' (my, but it's all I can do to stop myself hugging her when she begins sentences like that) 'None of the other men I've been with used a mirror to shave.'

'Ha! Difficult to check up on that, isn't it? As all the other men you've been with can now only communicate by blinking their eyes!' I said.
Much later.
When Margret had left the house.

I know from the emails I get that a fair number of you are holed up in Wyoming basements surrounded by automatic weapons, livestock and racks of cassettes filled with analysis of the Book of Revelations you've recorded off talk radio. If you have a moment, go and look in your freezer. That's how Margret stocks our freezer too. She doesn't buy one of anything. She waits until she finds it, 'Buy Two - Get One Free,' and then she buys nine. Moreover, she can't manage to suppress an indulgent smile - as though I'm a father telling my teenage daughter that her skirt might give boys all the wrong signals - when I suggest that checking to see how full the freezer is before she starts buying extra stuff for it might be a good idea. Beyond the simply obvious - they'll have terraformed Mars before our family runs out of oven chips, for example - there is another consequence of this. The sheer volume of food that needs to be crammed into the freezer means it's only possible at all because Margret employs various ruses.

The first is brute force. Basically, she just hammers things into the drawers with the heel of her shoe. Which works, but at the expense of horrifically deforming whatever she's storing. We're all used to this now, naturally. Jonathan pretty much expects his turkey dinosaurs to be a collection of misshapen body parts: they're turkey dinosaurs, as modelled on the scenes of carnage the day after the comet hit Earth. It really only becomes an issue when he has friends round, asks them if they'd like an Cornetto ice cream and is then bemused by their expression of stark horror when he returns holding something that looks like it's been trampled by horses.

...

As I've said before, the secret of a successful relationship is to become irretrievably embroiled in a bitter struggle to the death. -- Mill Millington