As part of his midlife crisis Mr W, my boyfriend, has joined a local tennis club to relive the glory of his youth, when he once lost narrowly to someone who’d once taken two games off Andrew Castle.
It was a couple of months before he realised that he had in fact joined a gay tennis club, one that even had the distinction of having supplied most of the British tennis team for the Sydney Gay Olympics. Success breeds success, so the club became a magnet to every strong gay tennis player in London — and Mr W.
Perplexed as to how one club could contain so many young, gym-honed men, he was on the brink of jacking it in, conceding that the game really had moved on a bit far in his absence, when — during a game of doubles when one opponent addressed his partner as “darling” — the nature of the club dawned on him. Since then he has happily competed for inclusion in the fifth and even sixth team, and last Bank Holiday weekend, when most gay men I know prefer to be in Brighton or Vauxhall, he finally got a place. Thus Mr W came home and announced that he would spend Bank Holiday Monday in Surrey.
“But you have always,” I pointed out furiously, “point-blank refused to go anywhere on a Bank Holiday because of traffic.” And it’s true: he makes us spend every banking festivity in London. Periodically, he will look at a news report about the M3 and cry: “Look at them! They’ll be in traffic till midnight!”
“Right,” I said. “If you’re going to drive down to Surrey then you can drop me off at Paul and Tina’s on the way and come back for lunch there afterwards.”
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On the day, we set off in good spirits at 9am. Ninety minutes later we are mired in traffic, lost and yelling at each other. I am accusing Mr W of being pleased we’re stuck in traffic (“You’re pleased! You’re actually pleased!”), while he is attempting to articulate, by yelling and adding further emphasis, where necessary, by wrenching hard on the steering wheel. His second great rule of travel dictates that two people should be able to travel from London to, say, Venezuela without exchanging a word. So you should be able to get in a cab to the right terminal, check-in, pass through security, separate to buy newspapers (one) and bottled water (the other), rendezvous in Caf? Rouge and board simultaneously at the optimum time, all telepathically.
I follow a more affirmatory approach. So that if, say, we are waiting to find our carousel for luggage and the board finally flashes up “Two” I will say “Two!” And then Mr W will pause and raise his eyebrows, as much as to say “Obviously” or, sometimes, “Which goes without saying”. He’s like that William Hurt character in the movie of The Accidental Tourist who can’t tolerate other human beings — or travel hitches. A buzz emanates from the dashboard.
“Apparently we’ve run out of oil,” he says airily.