It has been five months since I last retired from gainful employment. When I left London I was heading for Honduras, but despite crossing fourteen borders I have yet to escape Europe. I almost managed last week, I had a real ticket from London to Austin, Texas departing seven days ago. It was a real ticket in that it cost me money, but I never got to see it. Not just because it was a paperless ticket either. Circumstance has left me house-sitting in Leicestershire instead. Cat-sitting too, though they wail and hare out of the way if you actually try to sit on them.
I have become a hideous distortion of a housewife, but without the gin and valium that I always imagined made the day more glamorous. And I don’t have an abusive husband who comes home late for his dinner, smeared with lipstick and smelling of pub carpets. So that makes me a house-spinster. Today’s achievements are shopping, cleaning, cooking, and eating. I was going to add that I managed to use the breadmaker, but a beeping just alerted me to the fact that I have succeeded in baking a loaf of flour with a kneading handle stuck in the base.
In the last week I have been taking my house-spinster duties very seriously. I met a chum in town, and discussed diets:
chum: Yes I’m doing a de-tox at the moment.
me: Just water?
chum: No, I’m on fruit juice at the moment. I’m cutting down to just water tomorrow. It’s helping me give up smoking.
me: Just water. That’s pretty dangerous. So you can only have fruit at the moment?
chum: Yes, three juices a day.
me: Pint of Stella?
chum: Go on then.
I have talked about food at great length. I have talked about the weather at great length. I haven’t described it in an exciting or particularly inspiring way, discussing hues of sky, and swirling shapes of cloud. More of a, “Warm isn’t it?” fashion. I hear the abbreviated news many times a day on tedious radio stations. I go to the gym during off-peak hours, when a creche is provided in which other house-fraus deposit their infants. Do house spinsters ever go and kill everyone in their office with machine guns? No, of course not. They don’t have offices. But I’m pretty sure they would if they did.