Last month I gave L a fridge magnet with a 1950s man and wife on it. The man was looking into an open refrigerator with obvious puzzlement, and the caption read something like; Another case of male refrigerator blindness. It’s my assertion that this blindness is not confined to the fridge. I feel comfortable that I am not alone in suggesting this.

M exists in such a vortex of domestic organisational despair that occasionally I can take no more. I buy him multitudinous amounts of clothes from op-shops to wear while working on the boat. He wears them once and then divests them as they are itchy and need washing. Overalls? Far too practical. Why wear them when one can have so much more fun whinging and itching? Last night he came home with a head full of fibreglass dust. I gently suggested headgear.

He whimpers that he has no socks. I buy him bulk amounts of cheap socks, which are deemed floppy, and then get him several pairs of Explorer socks in apology. In my family Explorer socks have always been held in high esteem. I think I can honestly type that both my parents probably own Explorer socks that they have had for, oooh, ten years? Seriously. They are hard wearing socks. But, as with most things (such as lifetime guarantees) M takes this as a personal challenge. He didn’t want to stomp around on the boat in shoes, but did he buy booties or soft slippers? No, he just wore the socks. They are now indiscernible clumps hardened by epoxy resin and a myriad of indefinable shed mank. All. Of. Them.

This morning M had to go to the dentist for the final bit of his root canal. I heard him begin the search through his cupboard for something non-boat to wear. Three weeks ago I did something that I had never done before and rearranged his cupboard into some semblance of order - purely so I didn’t have to cope with his ongoing angst of not being able to find anything in something that made a rubbish tip look like a well-designed flow chart. I heard the search begin and squashed myself further down in bed.

It was no use.

“Have you seen my Show Me The Monkey t-shirt?”

“Yes. I washed it.”

“It’s gone. So is my red one. Maybe I left them in New South Wales.”

Maybe I should have left you in NSW, I thought, uncharitably.

“No,” I said, “I’m pretty sure it’s somewhere.”

An exasperated sigh, as the t-shirt had not appeared as if by magic. In tones of finality. “No. It’s gone. What am I going to wear? Where are my t-shirts?”

I did one of those deep cleansing breaths that I read about in birthing books. “If you want to go and have some breakfast, I will find the Show Me The Monkey t-shirt.”

This was deemed far too patronising and I got glared at. I tried a different tack. “Look in the bucket of clean clothes, there’s a blue t-shirt in there.”

He wore the blue t-shirt. After more general unhappiness, he had breakfast and finally left, while I lay there hoping that the dentist would slip and accidentally prod the part of his brain that makes him so very unbearable. I lay there for a bit longer in case he came back. When the coast was clear, I got my camera and went to his cupboard. I touched nothing before taking this picture.

After this I went a little bit insane. I went and hauled out M’s dirty clothes basket that he had, for god knows what reason, put in the carport. I tipped it out. There were about five pairs of trousers, four shirts, five t-shirts, four jumpers, about a billion of things that had once been socks, and a couple of pairs of undies. I tipped them on to the porch and spent several long minutes stamping furiously and screaming at the sky.

I fed as many things as I could into the washing machine, which sighed as I closed its door. Then the phone rang. It was M. I told him to be very very careful what he said to me. I asked, with legitimate interest, if the denist had hurt him. I told him to be very very careful when driving home, as I wanted to be the orchestrator of his demise and didn’t want him taken out by some runaway truck. And now? I wait.