By Georgia Sanders
Around eight months ago, I did one of those things that your parents/sit-coms/cheesy knock-knock jokes tell you not to do; I married a musician. Not just any musician mind – a self-employed musician who, when he’s not playing gigs, run his own rehearsal studio. It’s a job that keeps him out of the house until gone 11pm most days. It sounds quite sad when you say it out loud, so let me explain – I may work in London Dolly Parton style (9 to 5), but I’m not exactly left pining. We’re not a very co-dependent couple. I, too, am a gigging musician – as well as writing, knitting obsessively, and my ongoing master plan to drink at least one cocktail in every bar in Soho – so it works for us. And we have the added bonus of never getting sick of one another.
That’s not to say I don’t miss the bugger a lot of the time – but it works for us, for the most part (apart from the drum riser that I have been tripping over in the hallway for the past three weeks, and the fact that neither one of us ever has time to do the dishes).
The Man Cave
Mr S is building a ‘man-cave’. This idea first came about when I explained that fine, upstanding households do not have pub-size fruit machines by their front doors. The machine had been a birthday gift from his parents, and he had been more than excited for a good hour or two. He even played with it once or twice, before unlocking the front and using the remaining change to buy pizza.
I’ll admit, the thing was pretty entertaining when Mr S needed change for parking and I’d hidden the keys, forcing him to gamble for it, but for the most part we were just using it as a giant, electricity guzzling money box. And we have a money box already – it’s shaped like a TARDIS and it’s awesome. Plus, when your hallway hasn’t been decorated since 1978, a fuck-off fruit machine does not particularly help the aesthetic.
When the time came to re-decorate last October, the thing needed to get gone. And thus the dream of the ‘man-cave’ was born.
when your hallway hasn’t been decorated since 1978, a fuck-off fruit machine does not particularly help the aesthetic.
I don’t consider Mr S to be a particularly ‘man-cavey’ kind of guy. He professes to be manly and ‘ard – he has, on more than one occasion, insisted that he “could kill a man, if he needed to”. He seems to forget that I live with him, and I’ve heard him singing to our two cats when he thinks no-one can hear him.
For perspective, here is Mr S holding Keef the Cat in a Primark bag.
“I’ll build a bar!” He said for the eighth time since the start of our relationship (one for each time we’ve moved house). I smiled and nodded as he reviewed our cobwebby stock of stolen beer mats that had laid dormant since the last mention. When we first moved in he’d suggested building a bar in the corner of the living room in a spot which he has since, thankfully, filled with a beautiful piano.
“I’ll get a home gym!” he exclaimed in a bout of amnesia that clouded his memory of the home gym he had sold not six months earlier.
I’ll hand it to him, he even spent a weekend cleaning out the garage and researched plasterboard on the Wickes website. He heaved the fruit machine out there, where it joined the folded up and forgotten pool table that I’d bought him two Christmasses ago.
“I’ll build a bar!” He said for the eighth time since the start of our relationship
They were then joined by an empty fridge freezer, a deflated paddling pool, and a convertible with a leaky roof.
The man-cave still gets mentioned from time to time, but these days it’s more like a mythical legend of a place. Like Narnia, but with more dirty magazines.
Sulky Bitch 