Mark

Mark phoned this morning. It is not at all easy to be Mark at the moment. I can appreciate this whilst still being entirely unreasonable when I am actually speaking to him. I don’t at all like the idea that he has become an unemployment statistic and is not earning any money, and whilst I am trying hard not to be upset about it (because he has got some decent severance pay and we are not at all desperate) obviously everybody knows that a real man like the chap in Fifty Shades of Grey would have walked into another job within three minutes and already be running the company.

I am trying not to think this because it is ridiculous, but Mark is not fooled as by now he is accustomed to me thinking ridiculous things and has developed antennae for them. He is being patient and encouraging (which makes me feel worse as if I were a proper wife this would be my role, so I am forced to accept the dispiriting conclusion that I am being rubbish) and not at all downcast by the whole adventure. I think he is just pleased to be away from the last place and not haunted any more by the horrible anxious worry about how long it would take until they actually went broke.

It isn’t even as if the picture is looking bleak. His previous-employer-may-they-rot-in-hell has paid some useful cash into the bank by way of an apology for their inefficient failings, and Mark has been and talked to several companies who are entirely convinced that they would like to employ him, and who are making very encouraging fiscal promises. The thing is that none of them want to start his contract until the end of March at the earliest, and it is still only February.

People who spend their working lives hoovering oil out of the depths of the North Sea tend to prefer not to do it in the middle of howling gales and tsunami waves. Not the people who are actually doing it, nobody gives a hoot what they feel like, they just give them a thick boiler suit and some oilskins and steel-toecapped wellies and tell them to get on with it. However the people who pay for the whole shebang, who insure helicopters against plummeting to icy disaster on the way there, and who have to pay millions in compensation to the aggrieved widows of people accidentally washed off  slippery platforms: those people quite reasonably prefer to keep their outgoings on this sort of misfortune down to a minimum.

Hence the entire oil suction industry has something of a seasonal break in February, when everybody and everything connected with it takes a bit of a month-long-weekend, and puts their feet up on the kitchen table and wonders what to do with their piggy bank stuffed with massive fossil-fuel generated wealth. Except people like us, who have already spent it.

By people like us, I mean people like me, with my tastes for expensive socks and expensive chocolates, and – well – expensive everything, actually.

Number One Son-In-Law also is also employed by oil-collection magnates, and he actually is in this happy position, although from his point of view the slight disadvantage of not needing to earn cash and having nothing much else to do has meant he is landed with being a single parent for Ritalin Boy whilst Number One Daughter does something extreme somewhere else for a month or two. (They came to see me the other day, which was lovely, and I can tell you I was awed into silence by the size of his tax demand, I don’t mind telling you: it isn’t often I feel like that about a man. Number One Daughter is very fortunate.)

So Mark is contemplating his best course of immediate action, whether to stay in Aberdeen and take some work with a valve-repairing company or something and then try and wriggle out of it at the end of a month which would not make him very popular: or whether to come home and re-tile the kitchen and get under my feet, which would also not make him very popular. I am not very good at him being unemployed, due to being shallow and extravagant, but I would quite like the kitchen to be tiled.

It is all very tiresome. Poor Mark. He is so very lovely. Sometimes I really, badly, wish I was a nicer person.

LATER NOTE: He has just called with a perfectly indecent proposition concerning ways in which he could be just like the chap in Fifty Shades of Grey, if I thought it might help. He had better stay where he is. It certainly didn’t involve tiling the kitchen.