Continued from the previous post (below this one) in which I relate how I am having an affair…

It’s all over with Juan, my aging pool-boy Lothario. By Thursday it was clear that we were growing apart.

“We’re growing apart.” I said to him.

“Yes, ever since Thursday”, he agreed. “Was it my contention that most modern people are leading lives of quiet desperation?”

“No, I don’t believe that was it,” I said. “But your pie-charts and mathematical proofs on the subject were very convincing.”

“So… was it the time I showed you my champion giant-pumpkin medals from State Fairs 1979-1989? I knew I should have brought my 90’s portfolio – global warming really started to boost my poundages in the 90s.”

“No, your pumpkins are remarkable, Juan. And who’d have thought there was so much to learn about squash! No, I think, in the end, the thing that told me we could never be together was that evening under the stars, by the pool – the way you stabbed that passing pigeon with a toasting fork and a savagery in your eyes I have never before encountered. No, not even at fresher’s week in uni.”

“Didn’t you like it then, the pigeon?”

Oh Juan – he was delicious and, before we part forever, I must get the recipe for tha marinade and that 11-bean side-salad from you. But, Juan honey, it was really the bit before that when you held the pigeon’s still-beating heart aloft and cried out to the world that you were robbed of that part in the Crest Whitening Strip advert and that this is what would happen to the next visionless director who didn’t hire you.”

“Too dramatic?” said Juan, now slumped and crestfallen, even in a commercial sense.

“Not at all,” I murmered consolingly; after all, I’m not a hard-hearted housewife. “Dave just doesn’t like pigeon-blood in the swimming pool. He’d much rather see their heads impaled on the four letters of the weather vane as a warning to other pigeons that they perch round Casa Problemo at their peril.”

And so, without recrimination or rancour, we went our separate ways: Juan over the fence to Mrs. Mussolini’s swimming-pool (apparantly her filters are in a shocking state and Juan thinks he’s the man to clear them); I, back to the kitchen to rustle-up 11 more beans for a salad.

The ProblemHusband will miss Juan, I ruminated, as I donned my pinnie and checked my always flawless bouffant. He’s grown to really enjoy their discussions about Mrs. Thatcher. But how will he take to Philippe, the new sous-chef I engaged when it all went pigeon-shaped with Juan?

Philippe is much more Gallic and brooding than Juan and can be very temperamental when making sauces. We have decided to give each other a week’s trial of circling around the kitchen-island tossing our chins up contemptuously and saying “Phthoo! You French/Scotteesh kneuw neusseeng about mekking zee sauces!” If that goes well, we aim to start a torrid affair next week. (A trial period will also give him a chance to become familiar with my herb-cupboard and reduction techniques.)

I only hope that Juan never finds out that it was Philippe who finally got the part he coveted in the Crest Whitening Strips commercial. All service industry Californian males between the ages of 25 and 55 are Actors first and will fling aside their hose/spatula/personal-trainee at the first call of Hollywood, even if Hollywood got the wrong number.

They’re a hardy breed though, these seekers-of-fame, and are to be admired. They look upon repeated soul-crushing rejection and disappointment as an emotion they can use in their next walk-on part in The OC. Look carefully and you will see the background gas-station attendants and Dogwalker #s 2 and 3 in such shows, swooning and weeping all over the place. You have to love that. When life hands them lemons they make margaritas. (Although, it has to be said of some of these budding actors, when life hands them swine they will sometimes make ham.)

I am having an affair!

Just the other day I looked at my watch and saw (what’s this!) I have become a 32 year-old problemchildbride and what’s more a California housewife too. Time to get your skates on, Sam, I sighed to myself. Time to have the affair.

Most of the other housewives in the local League of Housewives have had 3 or 4 affairs by now and are starting to think me either gay or odd. Gayness would be fine with them – and actually rather a feather in their collective this-season cap for being such very tolerant zeitygeistyish housewives – so it’s sort of unfortunate I’m not gay as Oddness is social death at the Annual Housewife Stain-Removal Championships (Ojai Chapter). No clearer example of that was needed after Jenny “Odd Duck” Capon took a turn, actually jumped into a large cake and declared her wish to be taken to Vegas to become a stripper. Her daughter’s reasoned pleading that she was 73 and arthritic could not change her mind and in the end the fire-brigade had to be called to get her out of the cake. She’s never been back to meetings despite her meat-loaf being legendary in the Tri-County region. It’s very sad.

Anyway, I got the message loud and clear. It was time to either have an affair or be forced to hand in my advanced-level protective rubber gloves (“Marigolds” of course – a peerless glove) and my hard-earned Golden Pinnie to the District League. I love my Golden Pinnie dearly and I was damned if I was going to let that besom Porphyria Smith waltz off with it unearned; I know for a fact her sparkling faucets have grimy bits behind them and she doesn’t clean out her toaster crumb-tray daily as a Golden Pinnie wearer oughter. Fur-coat and no knickers type, as my granny would say. We all know them.

The ProblemHusband and I have been happy together these last 11 years and so it was only with some weariness that I changed into my sauciest leopard-skin apron, absently opened the top two buttons on my fur-trimmed nylon housecoat and gloomily sashayed out of the door to embark on my affair. Truly the burdens on a So Cal housewife are many and complex, I reflected, as I made my way towards the pool.

How wrong was I to be downcast!

The affairee is the pool-boy and his name is Juan. And not the “Wan” kind of Juan either, but the hawking, throaty, “Ccchwan” kind of Juan which is much sexier, all the housewives agree.

It was simply meant to be with Juan and I, for he is all I look for in a man. He is somewhere between Alan Rickman, Al Pacino, Jon Stewart, Andre Sakharov and Leonard Cohen. Really! He is like the long-lost second cousin that links them all. And he is 49, which is quite unusual for a pool boy, but very lucky for me, as my tastes run more ripe than green in both my seasonal fruit dishes and my men. (I also like the time to be ripe. For laundry, love, origami, anything really, just as long as it’s good and ripe. I once tried the Chinese paper arts when the time wasn’t ripe but that’s another post).

Anyway Juan is the pool-boy of my dreams and we’ve been very happy together since Monday when the affair began. We talk of politics, art and wine late into the warm, starlit nights and laugh tinklingly, as lovers do.

But sometimes we grow serious. Juan has seen many troubles in his life. He has known the shadows. He has felt the ignominy of the cursed. He has been rejected for his beliefs (Methodist), time and time again but has had a lot of walk-on parts in ads. I try to soothe his cares. I stroke his brow and whisper softly to him that Method-acting worked wonders for Brando and De Niro and tell him that these producers are just fools; souless pen-pushers for whom a solid bottom line is more affecting than a quivering bottom lip, no matter how exquisitely acted that lip might be, and even if that particular shaving-foam advert required both stiff upper and lower lips. The poor lamb’s chin is still quite hacked up with nicks from that shoot.

The Problem Husband doesn’t mind my little fling in the least as he and Juan share a passion for avocado-farming and have similar views on Mrs. Thatcher and sauerkraut. Sometimes I feel a bit left out to be honest.

Tonight, as Juan left, we stared deep into each others’ eyes and swore that next week we would start holding hands.

(Added Monday: Problem-Child-Bride is going out of town for a few days. Back next week. Toodle-pip old chaps!)

Trouble’s a-brewin’ in the Problem Household. Or rather in the Problem Garden. Or to be even more precise, under the eaves of our Problem Shed, where a family of pigeons is now nesting its second clutch of eggs of the season. Pigeon poo everywhere.

Talks are breaking down between the Problem Husband, who is hawkish on the pigeons, and me. I’m, generally speaking, more doveish on pigeons: a period of watchful waiting is what’s needed and besides, the odds are they will move on soon without any ugly interspecies strife having to occur. Why not use this opportunity to show the pigeons we can be tolerant, live and let live etc? That might just lead to its own rewards as the word spreads in the pigeon community – a fierce and proud nation – and we might start to find our car happily unpooped upon even though all the other cars in the lot are festooned with paint-corroding messages of displeasure.

“Appeasement!” cries the Problem Husband to this. “Remember Chamberlain! What a wally he turned out to be.”

“But remember too how prudence and caution served Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis.” I counter. “We cannot engage in brinksbirdship with these pigeons – the results could be devastating. We’ve seen the inches of guano just one pigeon family can produce. Think what we’d face in the event of a showdown! There are millions of them and only 4 of us and we, as a civilized people, are bound by the Picadilly Conventions” (Like the Geneva ones only with pigeons instead of prisoners).

“Harrumph!” offers the Problem Husband.

And thus have The Talks gone for the past few months, ever since Mr. and Mrs. Peck and Family moved in.

This evening, however, was a bit different. There was an emergency summit of the Group of 2 Industrious Parents as the Problem Husband had just met with an extra frustrating Sudoku and had earlier been forced to cheat at several succesive games of Solitaire. Seeking a distraction from his disappointments, he did as many troubled governments will do and deflected attention to the problem of our “undocumented immigrants”, or pigeons as the rest of us know them.

Some fancy diplomatic footwork was needed to de-escalate the rhetoric which had become preoccupied with words like “exterminator”, “water-hose” and “death, death, DEATH to the varmint!” Again, I counselled patience but I think this line of argument is losing its appeal to the PH as the bats are back now too working on their own separate poo-heap, and Mr.& Mrs. Peck have started on brood #2. But I believe the Pecks took this decision according to largely evolutionary imperatives and not, as the PH suggests, ” just to piss me off” or because they’re “looking for free housing and welfare checks from bleeding heart liberals like you.”

I could see at this point that the only way to pour oil on PH’s troubled waters was to feed him. So I made him some popcorn and soon he was snuffling contentedly again, amongst the Sunday papers. The hawk has been temporarily de-taloned, but I fear that soon it will take more than reason and heart-healthy snacks to soothe the beast that squawks for pigeon-blood within my husband’s heart.

I am ready to throw it open to the United Blogly Nations for arbitration. How have others dealt with guests who have over-stayed their welcome and showed poor bathroom etiquette?

My last post got more comments than usual. Obviously the potato stirs something in all of us. I have, therefore, attempted to unravel in verse-form, something of our recent tangled history with the spud.

Once, man yearned for the potato, through famines. My God, through wars! But recently, with carbohydrates falling out of favour and more exotic side-dishes to tempt our taste-buds, the proletarian potato has declined in popularity. But is showing signs of rising gloriously again!

Many poems have been written about the potato famine and I am not fool enough to essay the paths that wiser people than me have trodden. Instead, the scope of my poem is limited to this last troubling period where the potato has struggled to find its place at the feast, once again. I have named my poem “Vegetable Beauty” although reading it over, it could equally be called “Britney Spears” and, oddly, she seemed to pop into my mind as I was pondering potatoes. It would be easy to be cruel about that, but I know none of you will sink that low.

Vegetable Beauty

Your starchy consistency consistently pleases,
You go well with carrots, swedes, turnips and peases,
Now waxy, now floury, now mealy, now bitty,
More common than Paris but smarter than Britney.

Good boiled, baked or fried, or basted and roasted,
“The queen of the plate!” Pop culture once boasted…

BUT…

Men, testing your nature with tongue and with mind,
Have sometimes been cruel, elitist, unkind.
“How starchy!” “So bland!” Though they ate and they ate
And worried o’er waistlines, and spoke of their weight.

Some say your carbs aren’t complex “They’re too simple!
Peristalsis will halt and they’ll make my thighs dimple!”
My colon will not be sufficiently cleansed,
Too many tatties will lead to us wearing Depends*.

Your popularity has taken a shakin’,
As people go wholegrain, veggie or vegan,
They’ve forgotten your fibre, your Vitamin C,
Your love-song with Ketchup, your conveniency.

But within each breast, if we’re honest and true,
Beats a heart and a stomach that loves, above all, you!
A once guillty secret, you’ve climbed out of the larder,
In favour, in flavour, now posh, wiser, harder.

Like Madonna you’ve reinvented yourself as a russet,
(Folks forget how she once rudely grabbed at her gusset),
“What artistry, texture!” We wonder again why
We’d forgotten the delight of a simple french fry.

So move over rice and pasta and legume,
Spud’s back in town; side supremacy resumed,
A recovered staple, a comfort, a friend
I’m off for a chippy- goodbye and The End

* “Depends” – an incontinence shield sold to the elderly and unfortunate of North America.

*

Happy Independence Day, American pals!