Saturday, March 10, 2007
Nirpal Dhaliwal - Watch Part Eleven.
Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six, Part Seven, Part Eight, Part Nine, Part Ten.
Previously on Nirpal Dhaliwal Watch. 'Nirpal Dhaliwal', played by Nirpal Dhaliwal with a squint, continues to be mean to his missus and try to shag anything in a skirt that doesn't have a restraining order because 'that's just how men are innit?'. Meanwhile, neurotic desperate housewife 'Liz Jones', played by Liz Jones and a chopping-board full of onions, tries to combat her non-existent self-esteem and chuck 'Nirpal' so she can find someone who isn't a complete shit and have loads of neurotic but perfectly dressed babies. The story contiues...
I'm afraid Nirpal isn't playing ball. He seems to think we're interested in his opinions on culture, so we get articles about V.S. Naipaul or Indian poetry. We don't want this! We want him writing about how his cock hypnotises women at thirty paces and turns them into drudges, which is what women should be because they aren't as great as him because he has a great cock! Bah!
However, we do have this amusing article in which he talks about the difficulties of monogamy...
How to stay married (and I should know)
Evening Standard (London); Feb 7, 2007; NIRPAL DHALIWAL
DR ROWAN Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, blames the "commenting classes of north London" for undermining the role of marriage in Britain. Living in Islington, I am apparently responsible for society's ills by promoting the "fluidity and changeability of relationships and the transience of marriage".
I agree with him that marriage is an important component of a stable society, and that children are better served if raised by two committed adults. But his speech to launch National Marriage Week only reiterated the usual candied sentiments that advocates of marriage spout.
Marriage is "a relationship which constantly unfolds over time", he gushed.
It is "a story to tell about yourself, a story about how I discovered and moved through time to something more like the humanity I'm capable of ".
Rather than being the Oprah Winfrey of Anglicanism, it would be more helpful if Dr Williams addressed the innate difficulty of marriage. Placing marriage on a pedestal is often why it fails. People are literally shocked by the problems posed by commitment, and poorly equipped to deal with them.
Regular readers of NDW may enjoy substituting 'people' for 'I' or 'me' in this article.
The difficulty of marriage is obvious to those who work in relationship counselling. Making a brave and desperate attempt to save their marriage, couples enter into therapy; but often the therapist helps them only to break up in a healthier, less embittered manner.
I'm not sure why Nirpal is worried here, as portrayed in his wife's articles he could probably bring his latest mistress home and she'd just sulk for a bit.
Even the profound desire to stay married isn't enough to make many marriages work.
A successful marriage requires an extraordinary range of skills: the ability to keep one another amused and intellectually stimulated, sexually captivated and emotionally reassured, while also meeting the needs posed by careers and household requirements. It is a formidable challenge. It's no surprise people fail, and it's remarkable any marriages last at all.
Well, sometimes they last because your wife is to insecure to chuck you out and why should you cut yourself off from someone who does your washing for you and gives you a bed to sleep in?
Right now, my wife is away, and the house has descended into disorder. The untidiness proves how infuriating I am for my houseproud-wife, and reveals how problematic marriage is for me.
I'm not sure how this works. Your marriage is a difficult one... so you don't do the hoovering?
My messiness would be difficult for any woman to cope with, unless she was a complete slob - in which case, I wouldn't fancy her.
And yet he doesn't seem to care about what his untidyness means to his wife, although he KNOWS she doesn't like it.
The synchronicity of personalities that a blissful marriage requires is impossible for me.
Instead of talking up the magic of marriage, we should discuss it in practical terms. Boys should know how to manage female neuroticism
Mmmmm!
and be taught techniques to keep women happy in bed (though not necessarily by the Archbishop).
And girls should learn how to manage fragile male egos and forbear their vulgar habits.
'Boys should be taught how to impose their demands on girls, girls should be taught to obey their men.'
Instead, we teach them as we were taught, to expect their marriages to be happy, though it's obvious we're expecting too much.
Meanwhile, life continues it's path of misery and despair for Ophelia Jones. Has she summoned up the courage to turn Nirpal out on his ear? What do you think? What would she have to write about and use to elicit sympathy with if she didn't have him there any more?
Liz Jones's diary ; In which I tell him he has cellulite
The Mail on Sunday (London); Feb 4, 2007; LIZ JONES
In bed last night, I told him I had been to see Daphne in New York.
'When did you go to New York?' he asked, propping himself on an elbow. 'Two weeks ago, in case you hadn't noticed.' 'How did it go?' 'OK. I went to her office. I still had the business card you had put back in your wallet.' 'Where is her office?' 'Like you don't know. I'm not going to tell you. I called her a FW in front of all her colleagues. She's really ugly, isn't she?' He just laughed and turned his back on me, before saying, 'I don't believe you.' At four in the morning, I was woken by a noise. He was sitting up in bed. 'There is a weird bleeping, and a voice saying "Fire",' he said. 'That is the fire alarm! Why haven't you checked it out?' 'I didn't even know we had a fire alarm. And it's four in the morning! I am not going to pad around the house looking for an alarm.' So there we have it, even if he thought the house might be burning around our ears (it wasn't; a battery had run low, which of course I had to change the next day), he is too lazy to do anything about it.
I am becoming angrier and angrier at him, a sort of delayed reaction to what he has done to me over the past six years. Although he has used my credit card countless times to pay for things (rarely paying me back), when I asked him to book a hotel abroad using his (hurrah! He has his own credit card at long last!), he moaned and whined and asked questions but he still hasn't done it. (He managed to order two new yoga mats over the internet, though.) On Friday night, he went out for dinner with two male friends, and I noticed on checking his emails he had actually booked a table! When has he ever done that for me?
Apart from on my last birthday, when the restaurant turned out to be a tiny sandwich bar in a cultural wasteland. I am still angry about my Christmas present. OK, he bought me earrings, but could he not have spent more than Pounds 375 on them? The pair I bought myself seven years ago cost Pounds 800.
Please bear in mind that he has never bought a sheet, or a pillow case, or a tea towel, or a bath towel, or a plate, ever.
Things he has bought for the house in six years of rent-free accommodation: A tea strainer (I don't drink tea) Two mugs (he has broken six) A large cafetiEre A Dualit toaster A potato peeler (he lost the one I had).
Anyway, I had a lovely evening on my own, with the cats, trying to get over the flu he had given me, and he came in at about 11pm. He sat down, narrowly missing Squeaky. 'The moment you opened your eyes this morning you were whining,' he said. '"Is your office messy? Blah blah blah!"' 'I was ill!' I croaked.
'You said you were making me coffee and it never materialised.' 'Nag, nag, nag,' he said, doing his naked glove-puppet impersonation. As he left the room I ran after him. 'I hate you!' I shouted.
'You are fat. Cellulite!' I yelled incongruously. 'The only reason I nag is because you never do anything to help me. You never say thank you. Why didn't you say, Lizzie, I'll change the bed, you go and see your mum. Why didn't you say thank you for borrowing my car! Why should I put up with your laziness when I get nothing from you: not love, not support, not faithfulness, not children. Nothing. I want you to get out!' He disappeared upstairs and tried to get into bed. 'Don't get in there, I've just made it and you will ruin it!' He slunk up to the next floor and I followed him. He lay on the spare bed and shut his eyes. I poked him really hard. 'Every time you call me old I will call you fat!' I shouted. 'Don't you realise how you have made me feel? I can't stand this!' He opened his eyes. 'Well, maybe we just got off on the wrong foot this morning,' he said softly.
And then, a change in tactics. Rather than take control, she decideds to try and annoy him into leaving.
LIZ JONES'S DIARY In which it gets worse and worse and worse ; 'I am tired of going to the cinema with youandyou never taking my hand. I am tired of the fact that you never look at me, or ask how I am'
The Mail on Sunday (London); Feb 11, 2007; LIZ JONES
I have been driving him away.
Mainly because I know that if I don't, we will just carry on with him at the top of the house with his 'office' door shut, me at the bottom of the house watching telly with Squeaky.
Until, of course, he meets someone else (he is off to India again in a month's time) and I stumble across a text that says, 'I need to make a graceful exit. Liz is a great gal.' Well, I don't think I could go through that again, and so I have been deliberately confrontational and demanding. We have had three rows so far this week, and as I write it is only Wednesday Argument one, Sunday evening I was exhausted, having been to visit my mum, and I asked if he wanted to snuggle down and watch ER with me.
He mumbled something. I sat down to watch the opening credits, and discovered he had disappeared. A quarter of an hour later I went in search of him, and found him in his 'office' reading a book called The Argumentative Indian. How apt. 'I thought you were going to watch ER with me?' I said. 'I hate it, it's crap.' 'Well, rather than disappear without a word, why didn't you say, "Do you mind if I go upstairs and read?" and I would have said, "Of course not.''' He then started shouting at me, calling me a 'pathetic moron' and 'needy'. I later found him in bed at 10.30pm asleep, with the door shut. I put the one remaining lamp on (of which more later) so I could read, and he took his pillows and shuffled off to the spare room.
Argument two, Monday night I was asleep in bed, and he came up late. (It seems we no longer manage to coordinate bedtime. I sometimes wonder why I have a bathroom with two sinks.) 'All right, my old mum,' he said as he folded his pillows in half, punched them and plonked down next to me. 'Why are you always demeaning me?' I asked him. He closed his eyes. 'Don't close your eyes!' I shouted. 'What, are you so exhausted from yet another day working down a mine? You haven't written a word of fiction in two years! Why haven't you opened your iPod? Every day seeing it sitting there is like a kick in the teeth. Why did you only spend Pounds 375 on my Christmas present, you mean bastard.' I think he was quite shocked, and he just lay still. 'Why won't you say something!' I yelled. 'I am tired of being ignored. I am tired of going to the cinema with you and you never taking my hand. I am tired of the fact you never look at me, or ask how I am. I want you to move out and go and live with FWD. I hope you will be very happy together.' 'I'm sorry,' is all he mumbled.
Argument three, Wednesday pm About two weeks ago, I heard a huge crash and went upstairs to find he had kicked a bedside lamp by mistake, and it was lying shattered on the floor. I told him he should replace it. By Wednesday, he said he could still not get on to the website to buy a new one (he had no problems ordering a meditation stool). And so, knowing he would never replace it, I went out and bought a new one. When I got home, I found him still in his dressing gown, his iPod unopened, clothes all over the floor. 'You are like a teenager,' I told him. He picked up a T-shirt and flicked it in my face. The fabric caught both eyes. 'Ow!' I wailed. 'You've blinded me! Get the f*** out of my house!' He disappeared into the night without a word. He might never come back. I had to do it. I couldn't let him do it to me first. Not again.
Gasp! Is this it? Is this the end of the most equally self-destructive double-act since the last national tour of Bottom ?
Don't be daft.
In which I realise he loves me
The Mail on Sunday (London); Feb 18, 2007; LIZ JONES
We were sat on the sofa watching the Bollywood star on Big Brother (something I don't normally watch because the house is so untidy) when I said to him, 'How will I know you won't sleep with anyone when you go to India?'
'Because I won't,' he said.
'But you said you wouldn't contact Daphne again, and you did. So I don't believe you.' And then, despite the fact a) it was his birthday eve, b) his gran had died earlier that week, and c) his dad was also in hospital, I couldn't let the subject drop.
'The trouble is that I can't talk to you. You are like a brick wall, a clam, a giant silent teenage flatmate.' He got up and sat at the kitchen table and opened his laptop. 'Why don't you respect me?' I continued, doing what I always do, which is to carry on and have an argument all by myself.
'Why did you think more of a woman who would sleep with someone else's husband? [He had told me that Daphne had had a long affair with a married man before.] I know you don't respect me or care about me. You don't look after the house or the things in it. Why are you always losing teaspoons? Why did you leave my car unlocked yesterday?' 'Now hang on a minute,' he said. 'I might have had other things on my mind, my gran, my dad' I shook my head. 'No, I'm not going to make excuses for you. I did that for two years while B was dying. When have you ever been sympathetic towards me?
What about that December day when I had to go and see my mum and help her into bed and she was in pain and she was crying What were you doing? F***ing Daphne!' (He denies he slept with her that day, although he admits he kissed her, but I know he saw her toes.) He scampered upstairs, saying, 'I'm going to bed.' I then watched Sex and the City, the episode in which Carrie learns that her girlfriends are more important to her than any man. I went into the bathroom and completed my elaborate cleansing routine, something I never fail to do no matter how overwrought I am.
I got into bed and finished my book, The Accidental by Ali Smith. I switched off my lamp and as I did so he wormed his way towards me and took me in his arms.
'I'm sorry,' he said. 'It must be hell being in love with me.' It seems no matter what I do, he takes it and forgives me. I think he might, in his own perverse way, actually love me after all.
Or rather that he realises he's on to a good thing with his wife so beaten down that she'll never kick him out but so pathetically eager for praise that she'll take the smallest morsel as proof that he's Casanova.
Anyway, despite the fact I bought him an iPod and an iPod hi-fi for Christmas that he still hasn't unwrapped, I have got him two nice shirts, a Smedley round-necked sweater and a lovely soft pair of burnt orange vintage tracksuit bottoms. It is now his birthday morning, and I am waiting for him to get back from yoga so that I can give him his gifts (not only do I shower him with presents, when on my last birthday I got a bunch of flowers and an email from FWD saying, 'Nirpal, are you still planning on coming to New York next week? Let me know what your plans are, OK? Love, Daphne,' I have also started pilates classes, and taken up jogging).
And then I realise that of course he prefers her to me. She just sends him emails saying, 'I Googled your book reviews the other day, well done my sweet.' She doesn't berate him for losing spoons or leaning his bike on the wall. She could give him children, too; I imagine at 37/38 she is pricking holes in her boyfriend's condom or whatever else it is that women do when they have baby hunger. On Friday night, watching my husband get into bed and squashing between his thighs the duvet that I had just ironed, I said to him, 'Sleep nicely!' I mean, I ask you, who on earth would want to be with me?
But how's this for a cliffhanger?
Liz Jones's diary ; (1)In which I start crocheting doilies(2) I have come to terms with my inevitable fate, which is why I told my husband that we need to talk
Daily Mail (London); Mar 4, 2007; LIZ JONES
On Wednesday, because I was having a really busy morning and was due to fly to New York for the fashion shows (oh, the joy; another week of the youngest and thinnest women in the world parading their tiny spherical buttocks inches from my nose), I asked my husband if he would pick up my dry cleaning. When I got home later that day, he told me it wasn't ready (there is no domestic task he does not have a perfectly reasonable get-out clause for), and so after 6pm I had to go and pick it up myself. I gave the man my docket. 'Ah yes,' he smiled, 'your son tried to collect it earlier.' You see.
Even though my best female friend Kerry and my little friend Emine and my sister Sue and just about everyone else in the universe tells me the age difference doesn't matter, that I look 'confusingly young', that my husband doesn't deserve me, that he will never find anyone as lovely and kind as me, that FWD is probably a really horrible, unintelligent, unattractive, unfunny person, it takes an objective (and soon to be worryingly down on his weekly turnover) person to actually tell you the truth. I am too old for him. And it is this unalterable fact that will cause us to break up, not the infidelity or the laziness or the ignoring. I reckon I have a year, tops, before bits of me start to fall off or seize up, and when he will have every right to start sleeping with other women again, finally falling into the arms of the most moist among them, with whom he will then start having babies (bald ones, not fur ones), leaving me alone, in a shawl, crocheting doilies and eating battenburg. He has just come in and interrupted my typing by demonstrating something called 'up rocking', a sort of preparatory dance performed before you start body popping. I told him to mind the floorboards.
I have, though, come to terms with my inevitable fate, which is why I told my husband that we need to have a talk, before I go to New York and he goes to Mumbai to take part in a literary festival. I am going to tell him that we need to separate. I will blame him, of course. That he is too much hard work, that even the cats won't miss him (he insists on picking Sweetie up and tickling her tummy, which is making her bitey and scratchy), that he no longer cooks, even though we have boxes of organic veg delivered every week and there is an island in the middle of our kitchen, that he smears the shower and doesn't pay for anything.
But it is my fault, really. I should never have lied about my age, telling him I was 36 when we met. He told me once during an argument that he felt cheated by the fact I had lied, and that when I came clean it was too late for him to back out of our wedding. But then I have always lied because I have never felt good enough. Even at primary school, I told the girls that a piebald pony in the field opposite the playground was mine. When it disappeared a few weeks later, I told them it had died, and was buried in my garden next to Penny the rabbit.
When it miraculously reappeared they wondered what on earth had happened.
And so I told more lies.
The reason I lied about my age was because I was tired of working all the time and coming home to pasta and tomato sauce in front of Frasier. I wanted a normal life, with someone to phone when I got off a plane. But I have realised that even if you want something really badly, you can't always make it happen. And it took the dry cleaning man to make me realise it just wasn't meant to be.
So, next time on NDW: Did Liz bite the bullet and break the news to Nirpal. Has Nirpal been shagging anyone else recently? Can he actually remove his head from his arse or is it stuck there for good?
Previously on Nirpal Dhaliwal Watch. 'Nirpal Dhaliwal', played by Nirpal Dhaliwal with a squint, continues to be mean to his missus and try to shag anything in a skirt that doesn't have a restraining order because 'that's just how men are innit?'. Meanwhile, neurotic desperate housewife 'Liz Jones', played by Liz Jones and a chopping-board full of onions, tries to combat her non-existent self-esteem and chuck 'Nirpal' so she can find someone who isn't a complete shit and have loads of neurotic but perfectly dressed babies. The story contiues...
I'm afraid Nirpal isn't playing ball. He seems to think we're interested in his opinions on culture, so we get articles about V.S. Naipaul or Indian poetry. We don't want this! We want him writing about how his cock hypnotises women at thirty paces and turns them into drudges, which is what women should be because they aren't as great as him because he has a great cock! Bah!
However, we do have this amusing article in which he talks about the difficulties of monogamy...
How to stay married (and I should know)
Evening Standard (London); Feb 7, 2007; NIRPAL DHALIWAL
DR ROWAN Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, blames the "commenting classes of north London" for undermining the role of marriage in Britain. Living in Islington, I am apparently responsible for society's ills by promoting the "fluidity and changeability of relationships and the transience of marriage".
I agree with him that marriage is an important component of a stable society, and that children are better served if raised by two committed adults. But his speech to launch National Marriage Week only reiterated the usual candied sentiments that advocates of marriage spout.
Marriage is "a relationship which constantly unfolds over time", he gushed.
It is "a story to tell about yourself, a story about how I discovered and moved through time to something more like the humanity I'm capable of ".
Rather than being the Oprah Winfrey of Anglicanism, it would be more helpful if Dr Williams addressed the innate difficulty of marriage. Placing marriage on a pedestal is often why it fails. People are literally shocked by the problems posed by commitment, and poorly equipped to deal with them.
Regular readers of NDW may enjoy substituting 'people' for 'I' or 'me' in this article.
The difficulty of marriage is obvious to those who work in relationship counselling. Making a brave and desperate attempt to save their marriage, couples enter into therapy; but often the therapist helps them only to break up in a healthier, less embittered manner.
I'm not sure why Nirpal is worried here, as portrayed in his wife's articles he could probably bring his latest mistress home and she'd just sulk for a bit.
Even the profound desire to stay married isn't enough to make many marriages work.
A successful marriage requires an extraordinary range of skills: the ability to keep one another amused and intellectually stimulated, sexually captivated and emotionally reassured, while also meeting the needs posed by careers and household requirements. It is a formidable challenge. It's no surprise people fail, and it's remarkable any marriages last at all.
Well, sometimes they last because your wife is to insecure to chuck you out and why should you cut yourself off from someone who does your washing for you and gives you a bed to sleep in?
Right now, my wife is away, and the house has descended into disorder. The untidiness proves how infuriating I am for my houseproud-wife, and reveals how problematic marriage is for me.
I'm not sure how this works. Your marriage is a difficult one... so you don't do the hoovering?
My messiness would be difficult for any woman to cope with, unless she was a complete slob - in which case, I wouldn't fancy her.
And yet he doesn't seem to care about what his untidyness means to his wife, although he KNOWS she doesn't like it.
The synchronicity of personalities that a blissful marriage requires is impossible for me.
Instead of talking up the magic of marriage, we should discuss it in practical terms. Boys should know how to manage female neuroticism
Mmmmm!
and be taught techniques to keep women happy in bed (though not necessarily by the Archbishop).
And girls should learn how to manage fragile male egos and forbear their vulgar habits.
'Boys should be taught how to impose their demands on girls, girls should be taught to obey their men.'
Instead, we teach them as we were taught, to expect their marriages to be happy, though it's obvious we're expecting too much.
Meanwhile, life continues it's path of misery and despair for Ophelia Jones. Has she summoned up the courage to turn Nirpal out on his ear? What do you think? What would she have to write about and use to elicit sympathy with if she didn't have him there any more?
Liz Jones's diary ; In which I tell him he has cellulite
The Mail on Sunday (London); Feb 4, 2007; LIZ JONES
In bed last night, I told him I had been to see Daphne in New York.
'When did you go to New York?' he asked, propping himself on an elbow. 'Two weeks ago, in case you hadn't noticed.' 'How did it go?' 'OK. I went to her office. I still had the business card you had put back in your wallet.' 'Where is her office?' 'Like you don't know. I'm not going to tell you. I called her a FW in front of all her colleagues. She's really ugly, isn't she?' He just laughed and turned his back on me, before saying, 'I don't believe you.' At four in the morning, I was woken by a noise. He was sitting up in bed. 'There is a weird bleeping, and a voice saying "Fire",' he said. 'That is the fire alarm! Why haven't you checked it out?' 'I didn't even know we had a fire alarm. And it's four in the morning! I am not going to pad around the house looking for an alarm.' So there we have it, even if he thought the house might be burning around our ears (it wasn't; a battery had run low, which of course I had to change the next day), he is too lazy to do anything about it.
I am becoming angrier and angrier at him, a sort of delayed reaction to what he has done to me over the past six years. Although he has used my credit card countless times to pay for things (rarely paying me back), when I asked him to book a hotel abroad using his (hurrah! He has his own credit card at long last!), he moaned and whined and asked questions but he still hasn't done it. (He managed to order two new yoga mats over the internet, though.) On Friday night, he went out for dinner with two male friends, and I noticed on checking his emails he had actually booked a table! When has he ever done that for me?
Apart from on my last birthday, when the restaurant turned out to be a tiny sandwich bar in a cultural wasteland. I am still angry about my Christmas present. OK, he bought me earrings, but could he not have spent more than Pounds 375 on them? The pair I bought myself seven years ago cost Pounds 800.
Please bear in mind that he has never bought a sheet, or a pillow case, or a tea towel, or a bath towel, or a plate, ever.
Things he has bought for the house in six years of rent-free accommodation: A tea strainer (I don't drink tea) Two mugs (he has broken six) A large cafetiEre A Dualit toaster A potato peeler (he lost the one I had).
Anyway, I had a lovely evening on my own, with the cats, trying to get over the flu he had given me, and he came in at about 11pm. He sat down, narrowly missing Squeaky. 'The moment you opened your eyes this morning you were whining,' he said. '"Is your office messy? Blah blah blah!"' 'I was ill!' I croaked.
'You said you were making me coffee and it never materialised.' 'Nag, nag, nag,' he said, doing his naked glove-puppet impersonation. As he left the room I ran after him. 'I hate you!' I shouted.
'You are fat. Cellulite!' I yelled incongruously. 'The only reason I nag is because you never do anything to help me. You never say thank you. Why didn't you say, Lizzie, I'll change the bed, you go and see your mum. Why didn't you say thank you for borrowing my car! Why should I put up with your laziness when I get nothing from you: not love, not support, not faithfulness, not children. Nothing. I want you to get out!' He disappeared upstairs and tried to get into bed. 'Don't get in there, I've just made it and you will ruin it!' He slunk up to the next floor and I followed him. He lay on the spare bed and shut his eyes. I poked him really hard. 'Every time you call me old I will call you fat!' I shouted. 'Don't you realise how you have made me feel? I can't stand this!' He opened his eyes. 'Well, maybe we just got off on the wrong foot this morning,' he said softly.
And then, a change in tactics. Rather than take control, she decideds to try and annoy him into leaving.
LIZ JONES'S DIARY In which it gets worse and worse and worse ; 'I am tired of going to the cinema with youandyou never taking my hand. I am tired of the fact that you never look at me, or ask how I am'
The Mail on Sunday (London); Feb 11, 2007; LIZ JONES
I have been driving him away.
Mainly because I know that if I don't, we will just carry on with him at the top of the house with his 'office' door shut, me at the bottom of the house watching telly with Squeaky.
Until, of course, he meets someone else (he is off to India again in a month's time) and I stumble across a text that says, 'I need to make a graceful exit. Liz is a great gal.' Well, I don't think I could go through that again, and so I have been deliberately confrontational and demanding. We have had three rows so far this week, and as I write it is only Wednesday Argument one, Sunday evening I was exhausted, having been to visit my mum, and I asked if he wanted to snuggle down and watch ER with me.
He mumbled something. I sat down to watch the opening credits, and discovered he had disappeared. A quarter of an hour later I went in search of him, and found him in his 'office' reading a book called The Argumentative Indian. How apt. 'I thought you were going to watch ER with me?' I said. 'I hate it, it's crap.' 'Well, rather than disappear without a word, why didn't you say, "Do you mind if I go upstairs and read?" and I would have said, "Of course not.''' He then started shouting at me, calling me a 'pathetic moron' and 'needy'. I later found him in bed at 10.30pm asleep, with the door shut. I put the one remaining lamp on (of which more later) so I could read, and he took his pillows and shuffled off to the spare room.
Argument two, Monday night I was asleep in bed, and he came up late. (It seems we no longer manage to coordinate bedtime. I sometimes wonder why I have a bathroom with two sinks.) 'All right, my old mum,' he said as he folded his pillows in half, punched them and plonked down next to me. 'Why are you always demeaning me?' I asked him. He closed his eyes. 'Don't close your eyes!' I shouted. 'What, are you so exhausted from yet another day working down a mine? You haven't written a word of fiction in two years! Why haven't you opened your iPod? Every day seeing it sitting there is like a kick in the teeth. Why did you only spend Pounds 375 on my Christmas present, you mean bastard.' I think he was quite shocked, and he just lay still. 'Why won't you say something!' I yelled. 'I am tired of being ignored. I am tired of going to the cinema with you and you never taking my hand. I am tired of the fact you never look at me, or ask how I am. I want you to move out and go and live with FWD. I hope you will be very happy together.' 'I'm sorry,' is all he mumbled.
Argument three, Wednesday pm About two weeks ago, I heard a huge crash and went upstairs to find he had kicked a bedside lamp by mistake, and it was lying shattered on the floor. I told him he should replace it. By Wednesday, he said he could still not get on to the website to buy a new one (he had no problems ordering a meditation stool). And so, knowing he would never replace it, I went out and bought a new one. When I got home, I found him still in his dressing gown, his iPod unopened, clothes all over the floor. 'You are like a teenager,' I told him. He picked up a T-shirt and flicked it in my face. The fabric caught both eyes. 'Ow!' I wailed. 'You've blinded me! Get the f*** out of my house!' He disappeared into the night without a word. He might never come back. I had to do it. I couldn't let him do it to me first. Not again.
Gasp! Is this it? Is this the end of the most equally self-destructive double-act since the last national tour of Bottom ?
Don't be daft.
In which I realise he loves me
The Mail on Sunday (London); Feb 18, 2007; LIZ JONES
We were sat on the sofa watching the Bollywood star on Big Brother (something I don't normally watch because the house is so untidy) when I said to him, 'How will I know you won't sleep with anyone when you go to India?'
'Because I won't,' he said.
'But you said you wouldn't contact Daphne again, and you did. So I don't believe you.' And then, despite the fact a) it was his birthday eve, b) his gran had died earlier that week, and c) his dad was also in hospital, I couldn't let the subject drop.
'The trouble is that I can't talk to you. You are like a brick wall, a clam, a giant silent teenage flatmate.' He got up and sat at the kitchen table and opened his laptop. 'Why don't you respect me?' I continued, doing what I always do, which is to carry on and have an argument all by myself.
'Why did you think more of a woman who would sleep with someone else's husband? [He had told me that Daphne had had a long affair with a married man before.] I know you don't respect me or care about me. You don't look after the house or the things in it. Why are you always losing teaspoons? Why did you leave my car unlocked yesterday?' 'Now hang on a minute,' he said. 'I might have had other things on my mind, my gran, my dad' I shook my head. 'No, I'm not going to make excuses for you. I did that for two years while B was dying. When have you ever been sympathetic towards me?
What about that December day when I had to go and see my mum and help her into bed and she was in pain and she was crying What were you doing? F***ing Daphne!' (He denies he slept with her that day, although he admits he kissed her, but I know he saw her toes.) He scampered upstairs, saying, 'I'm going to bed.' I then watched Sex and the City, the episode in which Carrie learns that her girlfriends are more important to her than any man. I went into the bathroom and completed my elaborate cleansing routine, something I never fail to do no matter how overwrought I am.
I got into bed and finished my book, The Accidental by Ali Smith. I switched off my lamp and as I did so he wormed his way towards me and took me in his arms.
'I'm sorry,' he said. 'It must be hell being in love with me.' It seems no matter what I do, he takes it and forgives me. I think he might, in his own perverse way, actually love me after all.
Or rather that he realises he's on to a good thing with his wife so beaten down that she'll never kick him out but so pathetically eager for praise that she'll take the smallest morsel as proof that he's Casanova.
Anyway, despite the fact I bought him an iPod and an iPod hi-fi for Christmas that he still hasn't unwrapped, I have got him two nice shirts, a Smedley round-necked sweater and a lovely soft pair of burnt orange vintage tracksuit bottoms. It is now his birthday morning, and I am waiting for him to get back from yoga so that I can give him his gifts (not only do I shower him with presents, when on my last birthday I got a bunch of flowers and an email from FWD saying, 'Nirpal, are you still planning on coming to New York next week? Let me know what your plans are, OK? Love, Daphne,' I have also started pilates classes, and taken up jogging).
And then I realise that of course he prefers her to me. She just sends him emails saying, 'I Googled your book reviews the other day, well done my sweet.' She doesn't berate him for losing spoons or leaning his bike on the wall. She could give him children, too; I imagine at 37/38 she is pricking holes in her boyfriend's condom or whatever else it is that women do when they have baby hunger. On Friday night, watching my husband get into bed and squashing between his thighs the duvet that I had just ironed, I said to him, 'Sleep nicely!' I mean, I ask you, who on earth would want to be with me?
But how's this for a cliffhanger?
Liz Jones's diary ; (1)In which I start crocheting doilies(2) I have come to terms with my inevitable fate, which is why I told my husband that we need to talk
Daily Mail (London); Mar 4, 2007; LIZ JONES
On Wednesday, because I was having a really busy morning and was due to fly to New York for the fashion shows (oh, the joy; another week of the youngest and thinnest women in the world parading their tiny spherical buttocks inches from my nose), I asked my husband if he would pick up my dry cleaning. When I got home later that day, he told me it wasn't ready (there is no domestic task he does not have a perfectly reasonable get-out clause for), and so after 6pm I had to go and pick it up myself. I gave the man my docket. 'Ah yes,' he smiled, 'your son tried to collect it earlier.' You see.
Even though my best female friend Kerry and my little friend Emine and my sister Sue and just about everyone else in the universe tells me the age difference doesn't matter, that I look 'confusingly young', that my husband doesn't deserve me, that he will never find anyone as lovely and kind as me, that FWD is probably a really horrible, unintelligent, unattractive, unfunny person, it takes an objective (and soon to be worryingly down on his weekly turnover) person to actually tell you the truth. I am too old for him. And it is this unalterable fact that will cause us to break up, not the infidelity or the laziness or the ignoring. I reckon I have a year, tops, before bits of me start to fall off or seize up, and when he will have every right to start sleeping with other women again, finally falling into the arms of the most moist among them, with whom he will then start having babies (bald ones, not fur ones), leaving me alone, in a shawl, crocheting doilies and eating battenburg. He has just come in and interrupted my typing by demonstrating something called 'up rocking', a sort of preparatory dance performed before you start body popping. I told him to mind the floorboards.
I have, though, come to terms with my inevitable fate, which is why I told my husband that we need to have a talk, before I go to New York and he goes to Mumbai to take part in a literary festival. I am going to tell him that we need to separate. I will blame him, of course. That he is too much hard work, that even the cats won't miss him (he insists on picking Sweetie up and tickling her tummy, which is making her bitey and scratchy), that he no longer cooks, even though we have boxes of organic veg delivered every week and there is an island in the middle of our kitchen, that he smears the shower and doesn't pay for anything.
But it is my fault, really. I should never have lied about my age, telling him I was 36 when we met. He told me once during an argument that he felt cheated by the fact I had lied, and that when I came clean it was too late for him to back out of our wedding. But then I have always lied because I have never felt good enough. Even at primary school, I told the girls that a piebald pony in the field opposite the playground was mine. When it disappeared a few weeks later, I told them it had died, and was buried in my garden next to Penny the rabbit.
When it miraculously reappeared they wondered what on earth had happened.
And so I told more lies.
The reason I lied about my age was because I was tired of working all the time and coming home to pasta and tomato sauce in front of Frasier. I wanted a normal life, with someone to phone when I got off a plane. But I have realised that even if you want something really badly, you can't always make it happen. And it took the dry cleaning man to make me realise it just wasn't meant to be.
So, next time on NDW: Did Liz bite the bullet and break the news to Nirpal. Has Nirpal been shagging anyone else recently? Can he actually remove his head from his arse or is it stuck there for good?
Labels: journalists, Liz Jones, Nirpal Dhaliwal
