I shook the debris out of the long-suffering toaster, took a lung full of lingering smoke, noted that we’d had cabbage the previous evening, and watched the guinea pigs watching me from their luxury winter cage. Seeing some bills hiding behind the ornamental lighthouse, I involuntarily reviewed the household budget which was written in red ink and permanently stapled to the back of my mind. We weren’t heavily in debt by any means, but we had a steadily growing overdraft and I was having to run faster and faster on the overtime treadmill, with cramp setting in. I was happy enough with our detached house, black second hand sporty hatchback with pop up headlights, pine furniture, basic computer and weekends away. But Carol wanted a third child, foreign holidays, bulging wardrobes and state of the art gismos at every turn in the house. I counselled restraint, and she ordered store credit cards and mail order catalogues. I avoided shopping centres like the plague, and she treated them as blessed havens of modernity. This led to extra shifts and plenty of night duties, and for a while I coped well while many of my colleagues just reported sick and ordered ‘The Oxford Medical Encyclopaedia’ to research their excuses. But then the poor quality interrupted sleep began to wear me down, my chronic sinus problems got worse and I started picking up colds and stomach upsets. I contracted a chest infection and had my first time off work for three years, coughing up bottled fruit phlegm and taking antibiotic bombers, while Carol accused me of malingering and went to see one of my work mates who’d been sick for four months with a ‘backache’ of uncertain origins. I’d never really pulled clear of that, and for two weeks I’d been waiting in freezing school yards, taking the kids to Beavers, Brownies, Scottish dancing and piano lessons in a daze of vagueness, irritability and febrile distraction. One night, I’d even turned back to philosophy for guidance, only to find that postmodernists were now as certain of uncertainty as I was. In a whole life, we don’t understand a single moment.
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