From Russia With Love...

The Missus is away in Russia for the launch of a vacuum cleaner. Yes. That’s right. The launch of a vacuum cleaner.

The launch is in Red Square as the vacuum is called the Revolution or some such name and some clever marketing bods have decided that the iconic site celebrating one of the most repressive and paranoid communist regimes in history would be a great place to unveil this new domestic toy.

Whatever next? A new style of gas oven first seeing the light of day at Auschwitz. Or how about the launch of an atomic-powered kettle at Hiroshima? Words sometimes fail me…

Fortunately they rarely fail the Boy and, with the Missus away and him now done with his GCSEs, he’s doing sterling work keeping up his end of the torture-the-idiot pact that he and the Missus sealed in blood long ago.

Tonight was a case in point.

I’d cycled home in time to listen to the John Taverner premiere concert on Radio 3. Now I’m hardly a classical music scholar but I like Taverner and I was planning on going to see this live at Westminster Abbey until the Missus went to Ruskieland and I ended up on Boy duty.

But I arrived home to listen to the concert live and cook tea for me and the Boy. So we’re sat at the table and I ask him if he likes the music.
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I hate classical music.’
‘What have you heard?’
‘It was so rubbish I can’t remember…’
‘You’ll find something you like eventually.’
‘I wouldn’t count on it… Anyway I have trouble hearing it at the moment…’
‘Why?’
‘Because you’re eating too loudly!’

The Missus often complains that I eat too loudly. But the nutcase I married has, on several occasions, even complained that I breathe too loudly too. Now the Boy has picked up on this theme and taunts me with it any time he can be arsed. I defend myself.

‘I don’t eat loudly…’
‘You do. It’s like an alien sound effect from a John Carpenter film.’
‘I eat at the same volume as everybody else!’
‘Look… You believe that if it’s what makes you happy but you eat with your mouth open.’
‘I only open my mouth to put food in it!’
‘Look. I know you know you do it, Mum knows you know you do it and the only person who seemingly doesn’t know it is you. And you know what that makes you?’
‘In need of help?’
‘No. It makes you an idiot!’

Patronised and insulted in the same exchange. His mother would be so proud…