I have to say, my wife has put up with a lot in life. And certainly also since we have been married. Despite it all, she has pushed through things that would have driven lesser women to the edge. When we first moved to Italy driving here in our two cars, she drove her car with three kids in it for the three days it took us. She helped get me out of a snow drift I had slid into on the way to the ferries by talking nicely to the man with the giant snowplough who was worried about liability if he did help us, at midnight, on a deserted rural road during the biggest snow storm in UK history in I forget how many decades/centuries. I had walked away from the man, pissed off at his nonsensical concerns. And without her speaking to him I might still be in that British field with my car, as the attempts I had made to pull it out all failed. On the last day she drove 16 hours to arrive at a farm house with every light fitting cut out by the bastard that sold us the house, and snow outside that trapped us there for three days. We had no sink in the kitchen, and only one hot plate for ALL the cooking needs of three adults and 3 small children, that was hooked up to our neighbour’s building about 100 metres away via two extension cords, because with all the external wiring exposed, the electric would trip every minute in the wet weather. She was still breastfeeding at the time, and it was months before we got a functioning proper kitchen instead of a makeshift sink I put together in a style that has been described as “Mad Max chic” by friends. I will not mentioned the sandblasting incident, which has become “known” (in hushed circles) as “Sandblasgate” which was not my finest moment of DIY house-improvement. Or the year-plus-long improvements to the house which included everything from re-painting most of the interiors, fixing the boiler and some pipework multiple times, and trying to (and mostly failing) to get the field under control before I could buy a tractor, something that only came about as a result of some work I could do for friends of hers.
More recently, she has held the fort for months while I wrote a massive book that I am still doing corrections on but that should change human history once and for all. And she manages to keep up with the endless messaging on the school parents chats in a language she still struggles with. And to be fair, I don’t praise her near-enough, because I am myself a troglodyte that was raised in an atmosphere were human weakness was to be dismissed as below the dignity of anyone actually human. And even where warranted, such weakness was to be personal and limited to certain events like death of a loved one (pet or human), or righting an injustice, which was to be done with ruthless efficiency first and foremost, though a certain level of emotional expression was permitted, as long as it didn’t affect the efficiency.
Decades of martial arts after that, where showing any weakness was an invitation to receive more of a beating, probably didn’t help exactly to forge me into the most compassionate human being. Not to mention my natural state of being, which was forged in the genetics of my ancestors, which, as far back as I can find for eight centuries, roamed the Earth joining whatever dangerous exploration, war, or fight was going on at the time.
So, while my natural “toxic male” tendency is to simply assume my wife will deal with whatever marauding army, natural disaster, or other day-to-day activity that would drive most normal humans into a babbling ball of nervous wreckage, the reality is that I very much doubt any human female not born in an active war zone would find the things she puts up with daily even remotely acceptable.
And today, finally, she cracked. I guess everyone has a breaking point after all.
The Young Viking had made himself a tea, so, naturally, his five year old sister (Pink Astronaut) wants to make one, and one for her three year old sister (Aryan Girl) too.
PA: Mommy, can you help me lift this to make the tea? (Pointing to the boiling kettle).
Me: I’ll help you, darling.
PA: oh okay.
We pour the hot water in the two cups that already had teabags and sugar, then PA gets the milk. The wife is watching silently from a distance.
Wife: (anxious) Don’t put the milk in yet!
PA: Why?
Me: You have to stir the tea a bit and let the tea bag brew (waves teaspoon in the cups a bit, trying, as any father would, to shield his innocent child from what could possibly be a lecture I have had cast upon me more than once).
PA: oh okay.
A minute later, PA begins to add the milk.
Wife: That’s too soon… I… (stops talking but is now watching in meaningful silence).
Me: (sensing a disturbance in the force). Ok see now you stir it a little bit more…
PA: (watching carefully) oh okay.
30 seconds later…
Wife: (still watching)
PA: begins to fish out the first teabag with her teaspoon and throws it into the bin.
Wife: (the silence is shock… the disturbance in the force is palpable now)
PA: begins to fish out the next tea bag…
Everything turns to slow motion…
Wife: Oh for… f… what are you doing?! You know the flavour of the tea comes from the teabag right?!
PA and ME: (look worriedly at the wife’s face. The inexplicable level of seriousness is out of place…)
Wife: You need to SQUEEZE the tea bag with the tea spoon! You don’t just throw it out!
PA: But I don’t know how to squeeze the teabag. (This is true. PA would probably spill the tea, break the cup and somehow bend the stainless steel teaspoon. She has a capacity for kitchen disasters that borders on the preternatural).
Wife: Well, then, you just can’t make tea! It’s as simple as that! (rushing forth, not unlike a stampeding elephant bent on murder, except thankfully she has more of a svelte gazelle look, so it’s not as intimidating).
PA, standing on my chair, and Me: (frozen to the spot).
Wife: For crying out loud! It’s enough with all the rest of it, but this! It’s just unacceptable! (Squeezes life, possibly soul, out of teabag. There is more fast-talking, but we can’t hear words, it’s the slow-motion; it sounds like the approaching whistle of a falling bomb. You just duck, hunker down, and hope the shrapnel misses you.)
Me: (Quietly retreats towards fridge. Sorry kid, you’ll fare better on your own, my complicity could taint you!)
PA: Stands still and silently, eyes wide (she’s wise for her age, never make sudden movements near wild animals and human beings having a nervous breakdown!)
Me: (Trying to save the middle daughter…) “Uh, sounds like you might need a coffee, to recover from the…er trauma…?” (I CAN make coffee the way she likes it. Not tea. Never tea, but coffee, yes!)
Wife: Well yes! At least!
Me: (Loads up the large Moka in silence….)
She really is funny sometimes in ways that in retrospect are hilariously English, but at the time are so weirdly dissonant one has to do a double take just to realise it happened.
She also has that quintessentially English thing, which is a real thing, of “making a cup of tea.”
You know when there was the London bombings of busses? All public transport was shut down, and I was stranded across the other side of London at work, so I walked through most of the city and near where the explosions had happened, I saw literal strangers being offered tea by the normally extremely insular English. Women of all ages were coming out of homes and serving cups of tea, and often enough biscuits or scones, to everything from homeless people to police and firemen. That night on the news they showed the same scenes.
To me, a Venetian in this strange land, the scenes were surreal. Not bad or good, just… ethereal. Otherworldly.
And my wife too, it took me a while to notice, but when some horrible shit has happened, has inevitably offered to make me a cup of tea. It took me a while to realise this was not just some mild way to try to make me feel better. Which to a Venetian like me is also slightly absurd. Offer me ammunition, a glass blade for the guilty, revolution, possibly armageddon. But tea? And yet, this was, and is, probably, the highest form of care that any English Rose can conjecture. And once understood in its proper context, it really is quite something. I don’t have the knack of it. I doubt I ever will. Even when I offer to make one for her, it is a little in awkward jest, since my tea is “undrinkable”, as told to me by not only her, but one of my ex bosses in a London firm. I have to merely limit myself to burying offenders in far-away fields, or something easier and less involved than making a “proper” cup of tea. Possibly making a cup of coffee (with the 4 additional ingredients in artful blended composition she requires). But it is clear, my offering her a cup of tea, after some tragedy, could only make matters worse. In fact when I have tried, she got up, with the thousand-yard stare of shell-shocked war veterans, and made it herself, while I stood nearby, for flimsy and ineffectual moral support, as she went through the ritualistic but precise and unintelligible motions a dirty foreigner could never emulate properly, of making the proper cup of tea.
If I ever become rich I guess I’ll have to hire an English butler.
This post was originally published on my Substack. Link here
