This is an open letter out to everybody out there. If I kick-the-bucket, as the saying goes, my wife is most definitely to blame. Please report her to the Gendarmerie.
What other conclusion can I come to? There is a determined effort on her part to kill me off. I’m sure you’ll agree when you hear what she’s been up to.
Firstly – she’s trying to work me to death.
It was only a few weeks ago that she was threatening to get some workers in to clear the ground down below our house (or should that be ‘her’ house?), commonly known as the jungle. Now these guys generally charge about 14 euros an hour and working 8 hour days would cost me the princely sum of 112 euros per day or 560 per week, and of course, there would need to be two of them so they could talk to each other, have company during lunch etc, so that would be in excess of 1100 euros per week. Now I was quite prudent in saving for my pension but hey, I’m no Fred Goodwin!
And so, with that threat hanging over me and having read recently that if the council come and clear the ground to prevent bush fires they charge 30 euros per square metre, which would total 75,000 euros, I’m working my socks off every day to try and transform the jungle into something resembling an English rose garden – ha!
By about lunchtime, I’m absolutely knackered. I reek of smoke from the burning bush (there must be a biblical story here somewhere?), my back is killing me from all the bending down I have to do and I’ve nearly incinerated myself several times when I throw petrol onto the smouldering fire to try and relight it.
Secondly – she’s trying to get me to smoke myself to death!
I’ve never been a ‘proper’ smoker. I generally have maybe 2 or 3 a day unless I’m at a barbie or a party when I’ll maybe have a few more. And, I’m lucky in that if I don’t have any cigs, I just stop. I know I could crawl over to Tan and Angie’s and beg them for one – but I don’t – well not very often! I could drive into the village and buy some – but I don’t.
And so despite the fact that my few daily cigarettes, generally with a glass of wine or when I was on the phone to my brother, was my one daily luxury, J used to moan – sorry, nag. In fact, if nagging was an Olympic sport, J would be a triple gold medallist when it came to my smoking. But last December when the anaesthetist was ‘interviewing’ me prior to my little op, he asked if I smoked. I could see the look of delight in J’s eyes as she anticipated the rollicking I was about to get when he heard my answer, but all he said was, ‘two or three cigarettes a day – that’s homopathic’, which no doubt meant in some French literary sense that he wasn’t at all worried.
And so, I’ve managed on my two or three a day and some weeks I’ve not had any at all, like last week when J was in Cyprus. No stress, no harassment – no cigarettes were required!
So given all that, what are we going to make of J returning from her little jaunt to the eastern Med with 100 cigarettes for me? I’ve never had so many in my life. And they’re Marlboro Red – real killers, so to speak. And now she’s saying to me – ‘why don’t you go and have a sit down on the terrace darling and have a cigarette’. What’s going on?
Thirdly – chocolate poisoning.
I’m no great sweet eater. I like the occasional biscuit with my mid-afternoon cuppa but I don’t really need sweets in my life. If there’s a bar of chocolate about, not very likely with three chocolate eating locusts in the house, I’ll have a square or two, but the thought of munching my way through a whole bar, just fills me with something bordering on disgust.
So there’s definitely something evil going on when J, in addition to my little ‘gift’ of the cigarettes, plops the biggest bar of chocolate you’ve ever seen in your life, on the table and says, ‘here you are darling – a little present for you’.
Now given that if J worked in Cadbury’s they’d be bankrupt within the week on the basis of missing stock, giving me, I repeat, giving me, a huge bar of chocolate, definitely has some ulterior motive behind it.
She wants me out of the way! Watch this space.
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