My wife’s making a late-night moussaka and I am ‘helping’, ie drunkenly entertaining her with theories and stories, and prowling haphazardly around the kitchen eating bits of everything.

“MEAT MUNCHIES!” I exclaim excitedly, scavenging fingerfuls of the nice mince and tomatoes she has lovingly cooked up (I still get that ex-vegetarian forbidden-fruit transgressive buzz around meat sometimes). “RARRRR AUBERGINES!” I cry, grabbing a slice of said vegetable, which is all grilled and brown and mmmmm.

My wife frowns at me, so I repair to the fridge and get the sundried tomatoes. When she looks round, she sees me eating one straight from the jar, licking tomatoey oil of my fingers and chuckling in satisfaction.

“DUDE!” she says. “I wondered where all the tomatoes went….”

“Yeah, this is what I do when you’re out at work all day, eat sundried tomatoes out the jar. With my fingers. MMMM!’

She gives me a look which I can only describe as ‘prim’.

“You’re going feral, she says, disapprovingly.

I try to protest, but my mouth is full of tomato. Then she goes to get the nice hard St Helen’s goats cheese and says, “Look, you’ve been taking bites out of this! There are toothmarks, look!”

It’s true. That cheese is fucking great though. And I get hungry, not talking to anyone all day, having panic attacks in the park, listening to doom metal at lunchtime, proofreading in a vintage aqua petticoat - y’know, the usual working at home stuff.

Then she delivers the killer line:

“That’s single person behaviour. If you had a boyfriend you wouldn’t do that.”

Then she says, “now get out of the kitchen! Go away!”

I shamble off to listen to Mississippi Fred McDowell and discuss the differences between juju and high-life with Mr Nite, who’s visiting us for the evening. We did come to some conclusion vis a vis the high-life and the juju, but I can’t recall exactly what it was. Something about basslines.

My wife, she is firm but fair. She bought me an ashtray with the shipping forecast on it, and I spent most of Saturday designing a special self-help programme for her, which, if it works, I am patenting and making my fortune with - well, c’mon, I’m not gonna make a fortune writing about music, am I. Our looking after each other is tempered with some gentle criticism, as it should be, so at the time I’m not overly upset by her evaluation of me as an unlovable, gluttonous, feral beast with no table manners. It’s actually very funny and almost the truth.

Today though, her comments are haunting me a little, and I have kept my fingers well away from the tomato jar. I don’t think I’m feral; I’m just freelance. Is that, maybe, the same thing? I’m sure I used to feel feral as fuck when I had an office job, only it was feral in a repressed scary way, like any minute I was gonna rip my face off and expose my wolf face, thus getting me sacked from the publishing industry for all time. Now it’s more like a stoopid, happy kind of feral, like one of those scrawny but elegant fluffy stray cats that comes and sits in your kitchen randomly for a few weeks and stares at you with retarded, inbred eyes, fleas jumping off it, sure, but kind of cute. Nice feral. But even so, that comment about the cheese really rankled.

Point being, maybe we should have an editorial meeting soon, just to save me from myself and those damn tomatoes.

Posted on Wednesday, September 8th, 2004by Frances May Morgan