Saturday, September 4, 2010

Homecoming Queen

So I'm back in the shire for a weekend that promises to be 50/50 fun and wondering why the hell anyone loves their family as much they do. Brilliant. I flaming love coming home - I love the smells, I love the people, I love being cooked for and I love the fact that there's very little different any time I venture back here. However, if anything has changed you can be sure my mother will take one of the two options -

a) If it something different about the house you will have it described 19 times before you've got there and then intensely pointed out and explained once you have arrived.
b) If it is something different about mum she will keep schtum about it until sufficient time has passed that she is allowed to point it out and then sulk that you didn't notice.

This time it would have been difficult not to notice what was different about the house as I arrived home at approximately 10 o clock to find my Dad in the front garden with a tile cutter and tried to go in the front door but then found we didn't really have a hallway floor any more. Hence; Dad with the tile cutter. By this morning he had laid all the tiles and then Mum paraded into room with the rug she intends to put over the new tiles. Have you ever seen a man die a bit inside? I have.

At present it is T-minus 6 hours to party and we still have no grout, no carpet on the stairs and no will to live from anyone left involved in the house improvements. So, why the party I hear you cry...well, my parents have somehow managed to spend 30 years married to each other. 30 years.

30 years is a bloody long time. I have not even been alive that long. For the moralists among you thinking - about bloody right; fair play, it probably is a good thing my parents have been together longer than I'm alive. Big society and all that.

But it is a little worrying that I struggled to sit through Inception without wanting to go and look at something different and here they are after 30 years, just not bored yet. They just wouldn't think about leaving each other. Bizarre. I love the idea of eternal commitment but I just worry I'll never be able to do the same. I've never stayed faithful to a boyfriend and this leads me to believe that I should either just admit that I'm not really the committed kind or I should work harder at looking for whatever it is that turns people into lobsters.

I think marriages would last a lot better if you could have a sort of 'wild card' month after the first 10 years - so the first 10 years starts as standard and then after that, one month per year is allowed to have a bit of extra dalliance in it. Fair. That way, you can expel all that curiosity that's built up without it having consequences and you'll quickly remember why you're with the one you're with. The worst thing about being cheated on is certainly the lying and the feeling like you weren't good enough for them; so if you were both in on it and understood why it was happening and that it wasn't a big deal - problem solved, no?

Maybe not. But either way congrats to the parents! 30 years is a blinding effort!

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