I have a cold, which has given me a fuzzy head, watering eyes and a determination to be very poor company. This is possibly why I find myself alone on a Friday morning, trying to remember why I came into the kitchen. Perhaps I wanted a coffee, I think. But I’m holding a coffee.
The front door opens. The dog runs in, leaps up and places two muddy paws on my chest.
“Ugh,” I say.
“Not very nice out there,” my wife says, coming in behind the dog, coat dripping with rain.
“Ugh,” I say again, because my wife missed the first one.
“Still no better, I take it,” she says.
“No,” I say.
“We’ve been invited to lunch on Sunday,” she says. “I said I would have to ask you.”
“Fine, say yes,” I say. “Who knows? I might be better by then.”
The next day, I feel worse. I wish to be excused from our regular Saturday morning double dog walk, but an opportunity does not present itself, and I end up in a wet field, with the big dog bounding ahead and the little dog getting stuck in the mud, while my wife runs through our schedule. The oldest one and his girlfriend are coming over for supper, she reminds me, and he is going to cook.
“But I’ve also been texted a list of things to buy,” she says, “so one of us has to go to the supermarket.”
“Ugh,” I say.
“Which will obviously be me,” she says. “And then we’re out for lunch tomorrow.”
At home I lie on the sofa with my coat on, trying to imagine how a person conditioned to look on the bright side might view the remaining portion of the weekend. On the upside, it looks as if I will not have to cook at all before Monday. On the other hand, I still feel terrible.
The day holds a final short straw: the solo afternoon dog walk. This takes place in a driving rain, which serves to re-establish my standing as the glass-half-empty sort. When I get home my wife is unloading shopping bags.
“I think I got everything,” she says. “Except I forgot beer.”
“Did you get wine?” I say.
“No,” she says.
I head back out into the rain with an empty shopping bag, returning 15 minutes later with a full one.
“Clank, clank,” my wife says.
The oldest one and his girlfriend arrive an hour later. We chat for a while, until he is banished to the kitchen to cook. After a few minutes I join him, taking up a spare knife. We sit opposite each other in silence for a while, dicing veg.
“If I have one regret,” I say, “it’s that I never learned to chop really fast, like a chef.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Then you could chop things as you needed them. I have to prepare everything in advance.”
He leans over to consult a bound notebook bearing the logo of Chelsea Football Club.
“What’s that?” I say.
“My recipes,” he says.
“You write out your recipes in longhand?” I say.
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“If you screenshot recipes, you spend ages trying to find them again,” he says.
“I suppose,” I say.
“This way, all the good recipes are in one place,” he says.
“If it works for you,” I say.
“The notebook is a gamechanger,” he says.
I refill our glasses from an open beer can on the table, until each is half full.
The next morning I wake to an utterly alien sensation: I feel strangely well, even bright. From under the covers I hear a throaty cough.
“I have your cold,” my wife says, weakly.
“You do?” I say. “That’s weird, because I actually feel …”
“I don’t know what to do about lunch,” she says.
“Oh yeah,” I say. “What’s the protocol?”
“I think,” she says, pausing to sneeze. “I think I’ll ring up and explain, as a courtesy. But I’m sure it’s fine.”
“I mean, it’s only a cold,” I say.
“Exactly,” she says. I go downstairs to make coffee, with the dog at my heels. When I return my wife is sitting up in bed, looking perplexed.
“What happened?” I say.
“She said, ‘Oh well, best not risk it,’ and hung up.”
“So we’re not going?” I say.
“I wasn’t prepared for this,” she says.
“What are we going to do instead?” I say.
“You’re going to walk the dog,” she says. “And I’m going back to bed.”
