Am woken up at six o’clock in the morning by Husband on a Short Fuse pummelling my shoulder. “What’s wrong?” I ask sleepily.
“I want to know if you have remembered,” he whispers ominously. I keep my eyes shut and trawl through my pre-frontal cortex for clues about what I might have forgotten. But the combination of late-night wine and early-morning exhaustion proves deadly.
“Has it something to do with internet shopping?” I ask him in a moment of utter clarity, convinced that he found my dirty little secret at the back of the kitchen cupboard above the fridge when he was searching for the emergency bottle of Château Picard.
“Maybe,” he says cryptically, his face revealing nothing.
“If we’re going here, I don’t want recrimination, just a simple yes or no answer, because it’s easy when you’re doing two things at once to have a keyboard malfunction every now and then,” I insist.
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“I won’t say a word,” he promises. I sit up in bed and take a deep breath.
“Did you find 21 jars of custard, 15 tins of chopped tomatoes and 12 toothbrushes?” I blurt out. He opens his mouth in the shape of an expletive and I remind him that he took the omertà on this one.
“No,” he says through gritted teeth.
“Has it got something to do with parking tickets?” I bravely continue. “Because I’ve done a deal with them to pay in instalments.”
“No,” he says.
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“Give me a hint,” I insist.
“It’s something that happens once a year,” he says, finally.
“Tax returns?”
“It’s my birthday,” he says flatly.
“I know,” I lie. “I wanted to wait until everyone was up to give you your presents.” I immediately berate myself for using the plural.
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I tell him he should stay in bed while I fetch a cup of tea, in an attempt to win a bit of time.
“Don’t even think about wrapping up a jar of custard,” he warns me as I head downstairs.
In the kitchen I whirl around like a dervish, searching for potential gifts. I go to the cupboard and find, in no particular order, one space hopper, a child-size Arsenal rucksack and the candles that he gave me for Christmas.
“One good turn deserves another,” I think, as I wrap up the candles. As an afterthought, I also decide to give him the space hopper from the children. I head back upstairs, bearing gifts.
“My assistant bought me membership for the Tate,” he warns me as I come back in the bedroom. “I can’t believe you forgot, even though I reminded you last night.”
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“Well,” I point out, “Colin Firth left his Oscar in a toilet and Nick Clegg even forgot he was running the country and…”